Explanation
BACKGROUND: The City of Columbus has been awarded the Law Enforcement Diversion Program Grant Award from the State of Ohio Attorney General’s Office for the 2017 fiscal year. This program provides funding to support increased treatment, new tools for law enforcement, and expanding prevention to combat the opioid epidemic. The Columbus Division of Police (CPD) seeks to address the opioid epidemic in Ohio by providing necessary assistance and/or referrals to treatment options, recovery support, counseling, and mental health treatment services. The FY17 Law Enforcement Diversion Program Grant Award will provide funds for the CPD to develop a more formalized method and approach for the enforcement of drug offenses in partnership with the Columbus Division of Fire’s (CFD) Rapid Response Emergency Addiction Crisis Team (RREACT). The project’s broad goal is to reduce the number of narcotics-associated police calls for service within the City of Columbus areas experiencing the highest rate of overdose calls, from data collected by CPD and CFD. This project involves partnering a CPD Crisis Intervention Trained (CIT) law enforcement officer with a CFD RREACT team to assist with follow up on overdose individuals identified by the CFD RREACT team. The project objectives are to get said individuals into treatment at target rate of 60% and to gather necessary intelligence for pre-emptive narcotics enforcement and future overdose prevention. Therefore, the Public Safety Director is required to sign a grant award on behalf of the City.
Emergency Designation: Emergency legislation is necessary to make the funds available as soon as possible for the grant award, effective as of October 1, 2017.
FISCAL IMPACT: All appropriated funds will be reimbursed by the grant award.
The grant appropriation will be activated upon receipt of a fully-executed agreement.
Title
To authorize and direct the Public Safety Director of the City of Columbus to accept a gra...
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