Keenon Mikell, who leads the health and wellness program at First Step Recovery Homes, approaches the nonprofit’s gym on Market Street in McKeesport. (Photo by Ryan Loew/PublicSource)
As a city tries to demolish its way to rebirth, a veteran team of addiction recovery workers struggles to avoid fiscal collapse.
by Rich Lord, PublicSource
When the call came to share, Aaron Bunting leapt to the podium. After an adult life fueled by cocaine and then almost ended in an opioid overdose, he was still fired up from an entirely different kind of weekend, which he called “the most fun in my life.”
He spent it at a Narcotics Anonymous convention in Erie. On this November morning, he was back at First Step Recovery Homes in McKeesport, where he spent most of the prior two months. “I want to get my life together for the first time in my life and have my family be proud of me,” he said.
Seven other First Step residents sat at a table in the wood-paneled clinical office, with its space heater, popcorn maker and an old bank vault door. “This is a whole new experience for me,” said Bunting. “These people legit are like my family.”
His First Step family is facing a crisis.
The recovery organization is struggling to pay the bills, to make payroll and to salvage its relationship with city government. First Step CEO Keith Giles believes that the city – armed with $27.3 million in American Rescue Plan Act [ARPA] funding – should help to stabilize the financially struggling program.
First Step’s request for funding, though, has run smack into one of the city’s highest priorities: the demolition of derelict buildings to make way for new development. McKeesport Mayor Michael Cherepko said he can’t help First Step because the organization owes the city reimbursement for costs incurred demolishing a building it owned.
“I am fiscally responsible for the tax dollars in the City of McKeesport,” Cherepko told Giles in the first of two testy encounters before city council. “I am not going to take our tax money,” he continued, “… to fulfill the obligations that you failed to meet.”
In effect, city redevelopment and individual recovery – which would ideally reinforce each other – are instead colliding.
Pinched by the pandemic
An overdue $69 electricity bill was Giles’ latest worry.
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