Cash-strapped local addiction agencies, including Confide in Rockville Centre, struggle to stay afloat

It has happened again, and the timing couldn’t be worse. Despite battling on the front lines of a continuing heroin epidemic and an unprecedented spate of drunken driving arrests on Long Island, Nassau County’s neighborhood drug counseling agencies are still waiting to receive state funds — the “January advance” — that they say Nassau County received in mid-December and has yet to disperse. The delay could force many agencies to lay off staff, turn away people who desperately need treatment and even shut their doors.

“When you’re into the second week of February without an estimated time that the money will arrive, it’s difficult to function,” said Art Rosenthal, executive director of the Confide Drug and Alcohol Counseling Center on North Village Avenue. “We haven’t been able to make payroll, pay our rent or other bills.”

Rosenthal recently hosted a meeting with others in the same predicament — Claudia Rotondo, executive director of the Baldwin Council Against Drug Abuse, and Sal LaFemina, executive director of Community Counseling Services of West Nassau in Franklin Square — on behalf of members of the Nassau Alliance for Addiction Services.

Rosenthal explained that the purpose of the January advance is to give nonprofit agencies, which are required to provide care to everyone, operating funds to cover them until the reimbursement process kicks in.

Rosenthal said that he and his colleagues have heard from “reliable sources” that the county received the advance from New York state, but due to “an impossible number of unpredictables … within the county’s departments,” the payments have been delayed. “We hear it’s in the comptroller’s office,” he said. “It’s in the county. There is a multi-step process where the contracts have to be read and signed and the legalese has to be evaluated.”

Jostyn Hernandez, a spokesman for County Comptroller George Maragos, confirmed Rosenthal’s description. “There is a process with all of these contracts, they go through different departments and when it gets to us in the comptroller’s office, we do a thorough review to make sure that they are providing the services that they state,” Hernandez said.