Spokane Treatment & Recovery Services plans to build a 64-bed, 42,000-square-foot integrated behavioral health treatment facility and medical clinic on East Nora Avenue, in Spokane Valley, and will hire up to 100 new employees to staff the facility.

Executive director Blake Redding says the organization bought three parcels—on the 13100 and 13200 blocks of east Nora, just south of Interstate 90—last spring for the new facility after receiving $4 million in grants from the Washington state Department of Commerce. Redding estimates the facility will cost between $8.5 million and $10 million to build. 

“My dream facility was a fully integrated health care facility that treats the whole person—we’re talking about behavioral health treatment, psychiatric medication, assisted treatment, as well as primary care,” Redding says. “They’re getting everything taken care of under one roof.”

Half of the 64 beds will be devoted to withdrawal management, while the rest will be for patients in need of crisis stabilization services.

“The biggest function of these beds is for hospital diversion, hospital step-down, and jail and emergency department diversion,” Redding says. “These are beds committed to treating behavioral health (patients who) would normally have to go to the emergency department or to other services not prepared or able to treat behavioral health.”

An outpatient clinic will provide behavioral health treatment and administer addiction treatment medications such as Suboxone. Redding says the clinic also will offer medication management, life skills, and community reintegration services.

“We’re trying to get everything in this building that’s going to help someone to be successful and not have to return to inpatient services,” Redding says.

The facility also will have a clinic to provide primary health care services.

Spokane-based Indigo Diggs Architecture is providing design services for the project. Chris Morlan, owner and principal of Indigo, says the building will have three separate wings. One wing will host inpatient services and another will offer outpatient services; those wings will share a commercial kitchen and dining facilities. The clinic will occupy the third, street-facing wing, Morlan says.

Redding says the organization’s withdrawal management program, currently located at 312 W. 8th, will relocate to the Spokane Valley facility.

STARS had 82 total employees, according to the Journal’s October 2019 list of social service nonprofits. 

The organization will hire between 50 and 100 new employees to staff the facility, Redding says.

“There will be job descriptions for pretty much anybody who wants to work in health care,” Redding says. “The majority will be working in the in-patient units, because those will function 24/7, 365 days a year.”

Redding says the organization is working to obtain a conditional-use permit from the city of Spokane Valley to allow Spokane-based contracting company Leone & Keeble Inc. to begin work on the site, which currently is vacant.

Construction is expected to wrap up by mid-2021.

The planned facility is referred to as the STARS integrated health care facility, but is likely to be renamed by the time construction begins.