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02/21/2024 04:53 PMThe Guilford Board of Selectmen (BOS) plans to host an informational meeting to discuss residents’ concerns about a clinic planned for 439 Boston Post Road in Guilford that will treat people recovering from opioid use disorder. APT Foundation officials have said the clinic will provide treatment to APT Foundation clients, including more than 50 people in Guilford and several hundred people on the shoreline from Branford to New London, who currently have to travel to New Haven or New London for treatment, some of them having to take trips daily.
Town officials announced during a regularly scheduled BOS meeting that they will host the informational meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m. at the Nathanael B. Greene Community Center, 32 Church Street, Guilford. Town officials said APT officials will attend the meeting to answer questions and that if there is not time to answer all the questions that evening, another meeting would be scheduled.
At the same BOS meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 20, board members also decided not to take action as requested by a petition submitted to the board by people opposed to the clinic’s location.
Also during the meeting, the selectmen approved minutes of budget workshops; received the regular monthly report from Guilford Finance Director Maryjane Malavasi; discussed a bid for town’s annual fireworks display; set a location for early voting during the presidential preference primary in April; took action to allow employees to open a Roth 457 Retirement account through voluntary payroll deduction; set a public hearing form March 4 on ordinances related to affordable housing; and took other action as outlined on the agenda posted on the town of Guilford website: (www.guilfordct.gov/agenda_center/board_of_selectmen.php). The minutes of the meeting will also be posted on that website.
‘Not Lawfully Authorized’
The petition relating to the APT Foundation Clinic, submitted to the BOS by Guilford resident Dave Holman and signed by 67 residents, requested that the board call a special town meeting to discuss and vote on suspending all renovations to 439 Boston Post Road, “until public hearings on the APT Foundation addiction clinic have been conducted and evaluated; impact studies regarding the effect this clinic will have on property values, crime, safety, traffic, the environment, commercial business, the tax base, the police and fire budgets, have been conducted and evaluated; until comprehensive background checks into the APT Foundation and the effect its clinics have had on other communities have been completed and evaluated; and until modifications to the existing Guilford zoning ordinances have been made, to clarify “medical use,” and established minimum distances that addiction services must be located from residences, schools, and daycare centers.”
First Selectman Matt Hoey said the Guilford selectmen asked Peter C. Barrett, Guilford town counsel, to review the submitted petition and to provide board members with an opinion. Barrett wrote, “There is no general right for a petition for a Town Meeting nor for any general obligation for the BOS to call one once petitioned…Connecticut case law confirms that a town may by charter delineate the circumstances requiring Town Meeting involvement in matters of local interest and that a board of selectman is not required to act on a petition that does not fall within one of those stated circumstances.”
Barrett also wrote, “The action requested by the current petition is for the Town Meeting to mandate a suspension of renovation work at a privately owned property until several itemized conditions have been met. This is not an action that the Town Meeting is lawfully authorized to take pursuant to our charter.”
Concerns Discussed
At every Board of Selectmen meeting there is an opportunity, both at the beginning and end, for people to make public comments on agenda items for up to three minutes. At the end of the meeting, several people spoke out about the planned clinic, several expressing their concern, and one person speaking in favor of it.
The person who spoke in favor of the clinic said having a location in Guilford would make it easier for people suffering from opioid use disorder to adhere to their treatment plan if treatment was provided nearer to where they live. APT Foundation provides prescription medications for opioid use disorder. The two most often-prescribed forms of medications for opioid use disorder are methadone and buprenorphine, according to APT’s website (aptfoundation.org).
Those who spoke against the clinic expressed a variety of concerns, including one mother who said she was worried because her child attends a daycare center on Boston Street down the street and around the corner from the planned clinic’s location. Others, both at the BOS meeting and at an earlier informal meeting hosted by opponents of the clinic’s location, expressed concern about whether the clinic would attract criminals and drug dealers to what is currently a thriving commercial area right off of the highway that includes gas stations and convenience stores, motels, medical buildings, a grocery store, and nearby homes and residential areas. One person speaking in opposition referred to the clinic, designed to treat people with opioid use disorder, as a “meth clinic” and said flatly, “I don’t want it in my backyard.”
Hoey said he has discussed the APT clinic with the town’s police chief and that the police department does not at this time anticipate any significant impacts based on conversations the chief has had with the North Haven police department. North Haven has an APT Foundation clinic located in that town.
“The police chief said he’s more concerned about Target,” Hoey added.
Target has announced plans to open a new store in the Shoreline Plaza, also on Boston Post Road in Guilford (www.zip06.com/news/20230718/target-poised-to-fill-former-walmart-space). Hoey added that the town’s police commission continues to discuss the issue of the clinic, its possible impacts on the town, and any security needs it might require going forward if any evolve.
After the BOS meeting ended, Holman questioned the timing of the informational meeting planned and the overall process of APT coming to Guilford.
“They [the BOS] wouldn’t even go on the record by taking a vote on our petition,” Holman said. “It is the height of irresponsibility and shows a total lack of respect for the residents and property owners in Guilford.”
He said opponents of the clinic’s location plan to attend the informational meeting on Feb. 27.
“We are planning to ask the hard questions that Hoey and the Board of Selectmen will not answer,” he says, adding that his group also will be circulating a petition to ask for an adjourned referendum to enact an “urgency ordinance" to prohibit the operation a clinic like the one being planned within 500 feet of any residential area or any individual residence or within 1,000 feet of any school or daycare facility. Another petition the group plans to circulate requests that town officials “immediately engage in discussions with the APT Foundation to relocate the medical addiction clinic approved for 439 Boston Post road to a more suitable location in Guilford. Specifically, you must insist that this APT addiction clinic be relocated...”
Earlier Meetings, Coverage
The informal meeting held earlier in February, hosted by Cort Wrotnowski and the Greater Education Council of Connecticut (www.greatereducationcouncilofct.org) and opponents of the clinic’s current planned location, can be viewed on the GCTV YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/@GCTVGuilford. The video’s title is “Guilford Residents React to Methadone Clinic Approved without Public Notice or Public Input.” Portions of that meeting also aired on a segment of Fox and Friends First and Fox News: www.foxnews.com/media/connecticut-town-outraged-methadone-clinic-slated-open-near-daycare-travesty.
The Guilford Planning and Zoning meeting, where a site plan for the clinic was considered and approved in January, is also available on the GCTV YouTube channel with the title of “Planning and Zoning January 3, 2024.” The agenda, which was posted in advance of the January meeting, along with minutes, and video of that meeting also are on the Guilford town website: www.guilfordct.gov/agenda_center/planning_and_zoning_commission.php.
A story about plans for the clinic was printed in the Guilford Courier and posted on zip06.com in August 2023: www.zip06.com/news/20230912/addiction-mental-health-facility-to-open-on-boston-post-road. Several letters to the editor, relating to the clinic, also have been posted on zip06.com, and printed in the Guilford Courier, and can be viewed by searching for “APT Guilford” in the zip06.com search field.
One study, published in 2016, and focused on neighborhoods in and around Baltimore, says, “Despite conventional wisdom that outpatient drug treatment centers such as methadone clinics bring violent crime into the neighborhoods where they sit, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests there may actually be less serious crime near clinics than other community businesses.” More information about that study is available here: publichealth.jhu.edu/2016/violent-crime-lower-near-drug-treatment-centers-than-other-commercial-areas
Other news stories suggest that the need for the services provided by such clinics is so strong that the number of clients attracted can create problems with parking and other issues: www.middletownct.gov/DocumentCenter/View/18320/SE2020-5-Can-a-methadone-clinic-benefit-a-community_-_-North-Central-News?bidId=.