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Bexar County commissioners on Thursday cut the ribbon on an expanded mental health and substance abuse treatment center that has 265 beds.
The Applewhite Recovery Center could help ease crowding at the county jail, county officials said.
The center, named for the South Side road it sits on, has been expanded to treat more men and women who need help to get their lives back on track.
Those men and women might otherwise find themselves in the perpetually crowded county jail—so crowded in fact, Bexar County is now paying Burnet and Kerr Counties to house dozens of local inmates.
County Facilities Manager—Dan Curry—said compared to new jail beds, the bed space at the recovery center is less expensive for the county to build.
The project was valued at $20 million.
"It's a fraction of the cost to build a hardened jail style capacity bed and that's what we're doing. We're providing a bit of an alternative to incarceration," Curry said.
Judges have the option of sentencing eligible low-level offenders to treatment at the center instead of the 5,000-bed jail.
While there have been calls to build a bigger county jail here, Curry said those come with billion-dollar price tags.
"Dallas County recently did a presentation where they talked about the need for a new jail in 2032. And that was going to be 7,500-beds and it was going to be in the order of $3 billion dollars to build," he said.
The tens-of-millions of dollars the county spends every year on overtime and staffing the crowded jail pales in comparison to those billion-dollar figures.
