WESTMINSTER, Md. — Almost a century after serving as a distillery for rye whiskey, the building in downtown Westminster serves the downtrodden, and Access Carroll Integrated Health Care receives a lot of the credit.
“Access Carroll, which has been operating in Westminster for several decades, does a great job at helping Carroll County residents,” said Westminster Mayor Mona Becker.
But Access Carroll’s bid to create a program to house homeless patients for continuing treatment after being released from a hospital in Baltimore has backfired.
“The clients that would travel to Westminster are coming from Sinai Hospital,” said Becker. “They’re not Carroll County residents. They’re not Westminster residents, and they would be placed in a voluntary program that they could leave at any time.”
Access Carroll would expand its footprint in the old Distillery Building by almost eight thousand square feet to house a new 18-bed unit providing medical care to the disenfranchised.
Some local merchants fear an influx of people with behavioral, mental, or addiction problems could be bad for business.
“Crime is not a major problem here in Westminster,” said Public Safety Committee Chairman Tony Chiavacci. “It’s continually gone down for probably the past 15 years or more. We don’t need to bring this in and turn that trend around.”
Carroll County State’s Attorney Haven Shoemaker also is opposed to what he deems to be importing the homeless, and he says county commissioners rushed to sign a lease with the healthcare provider at the first sign of opposition to the project.
“In this particular case, I think Access Carroll is wrong. I don’t blame them,” said Shoemaker. “They had a seven-million-dollar carrot dangled in front of them by LifeBridge, who made a shrewd business decision because they’re paying like $6,000 a day per patient to care for these folks at Sinai or whatever.”
Access Carroll did not respond to our requests for comment, but we're told the estimated cost to house each patient would be just $248 per day at the distillery, notwithstanding any impact it may have on the area surrounding it.
