Riverside County drug rehab center reopens after state-ordered shutdown

The Arlington Recovery Community and Sobering Center is now fully back in business.

The residential treatment wing of the Riverside County-owned facility reopened Monday, April 3, almost four months after state officials shut it down in the wake of a patient’s death last summer.

The sobering center wing, which offers short-term detox, never closed. But county officials fired MFI Recovery Inc., the Riverside company hired to manage the facility, and replaced it with the Bloomington-based Cedar House Life Change Center.

“Together, we aim to provide a safe and supportive environment to help individuals overcome addiction and achieve long-term recovery,” Robert Youssef, a spokesperson for the county’s behavioral health department, said via email.

Cedar House CEO Jamie Lamb said her nonprofit organization is eager to run the facility.

“We have much to offer and we know we’re saving lives,” Lamb said. “This is just one more opportunity for us to do that and we’re very excited about it.”

MFI did not respond to a phone call seeking comment.

The facility on Riverside’s County Farm Road — 54 residential treatment beds and 15 sobering center beds — opened in 2021 at a cost of $28 million. It offers an alternative to jail or the emergency room for people encountered by first responders who show signs of mental illness and addiction.

Melissa Bauman, 24, who had a history of using methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl, died in the residential treatment wing in July 2022 — two days after checking into the facility following a relapse.

Bauman’s mother, Karri Ryder, is suing the county and MFI for $10 million, alleging MFI’s staff failed to perform required bed checks on her daughter, who died of a fentanyl overdose. Police investigated, but no one was criminally charged in Bauman’s death.

A California Department of Health Care Services inspection after Bauman died found “deficiencies,” Youssef said in December. The state shut down the residential treatment wing Dec. 8 and the county fired MFI the same day.

State records show MFI’s license to run the facility was revoked Feb. 28. According to state records, state officials made an unannounced visit to the facility in 2022 following an “unusual incident/death report” and found 25 violations, including falsified records, a failure to do face-to-face detox checks and determined that MFI “acted beyond the conditions of its license.”

Lamb said Cedar House had to complete a 300-page licensing application and undergo a state inspection, among other steps, before it could take over the facility.

“We’ve put some strong supervisory staff in place that know Cedar House, that know our programs,” she said. “They know the quality and the control that we like to keep.”

Cedar House will do bed checks at “30 minutes or less intervals” and “my staff are well-versed in what we’re prepared to handle and what we’re not and they know to call 911 if it’s necessary,” Lamb said.

“Honestly, these types of things (like patient deaths) happen in these types of facilities and we do everything we can to curtail that and prevent that,” she said. “But just the close watch observation is what enables us to keep that from happening … These clients will not be leaving the facility intermittently. So smuggling something in will not” be an issue.