COMBAT-funded drug court is on “temporary” hiatus

Jackson County Prosecutor Jim Kanatzar confirmed today that, due to a budgetary shortfall, the county’s drug court has stopped accepting new clients.

Kanatzar says he made the call to stop accepting new drug court clients in August. “We have a temporary — and I stress the term ‘temporary’ — slowdown of drug court clients until we get through our budget proposals,” Kanatzar says. “We want to make sure we just don’t overwhelm the system or exceed our capabilities financially … I fully expect that we will start letting clients back into drug court before the end of the year.”

The county-wide, anti-drug sales tax was projected to collect $21,105,000 in 2009. According to this chart, drug court expected to collect six percent of that, or $1,266,900.

But, as Jackson County spokesman Jeph BurroughsScanlon points out, sales tax revenues were down this year as a result of the lagging economy. “The year is three-quarters over, but I don’t think we’ve collected three-quarters of that $21 million,” BurroughsScanlon says. When the projected revenues are higher than the revenues actually collected in sales tax, budgets go out the window.

Jackson County’s drug court, which began operating in 1993, is often

lauded as the crown jewel of programs funded by COMBAT. It is

“geared toward helping people begin their sobriety, find employment or

enroll as full-time students and become productive members of society,”

according to the county’s Web site.

Clients receive inpatient and/or outpatient substance abuse treatment,

mental

health and job counseling, drug testing, supervision and case

management. Kanatzar says the court has graduated 1,600 people with a

90th-percentile success rate — “that is, keeping people out of the [prison] system.”