Samaritan House adding new residence hall

Greenbriar Lane facility of the nonprofit will house 16 drug addiction patients

Dignitaries and Samaritan House officials at the groundbreaking Tuesday of a new residence hall to house 16 more patients. (/Phil Davis / HANDOUT )

Representatives of Samaritan House in Annapolis gathered last week with local officials to launch construction of a new 16-bed residence hall that advocates say will double the nonprofit’s capacity to treat drug addiction by next summer.

The new facility on Greenbriar Lane will supplement Samaritan House’s existing facility and provide low-intensity residential treatment for an additional 16 patients.

Executive Director Michael Goldfaden said the new facility was the result of six years of fundraising as well as grants received from the city, county and state.

Goldfaden said he and board member Kirk Noonan were brainstorming about six years ago when they first came up with the idea, which they refer to as a “campus of recovery.”

“Back then, we typically had 15 to 20 people on the waiting list,” he said, adding that Samaritan House still sees a substantial waiting list today. The addition 16 beds, he said, will “at least solve that problem, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.”

There was a significant amount of public funding that went into the $2 million building.

Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley said the city awarded the center a $47,000 community block grant while Anne Arundel County Executive Steve Schuh said the county gave a $250,000 grant.

Samaritan House spokeswoman Lea Hurt said the center also received $750,000 from the state Department of Health toward construction.

Goldfaden said the new residence hall operation will mirror their current facility, with 24-hour staffing meant to accommodate clinically managed treatment for stays of up to a year. The center does not offer detoxification services nor medically assisted treatment.

It will begin accepting Medicaid eligible patients in January 2019 as Maryland Medicaid plans to phase in coverage of low-intensity residential addiction treatment.

Schuh said nearly one in 20 adults in the county suffer from opioid addiction.

He said there are rays of hope in the overall overdose rate falling slightly compared to last year, but overdose fatalities continue to rise; the county is on pace to beat last year’s record for most deaths because of opioids.

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