Henrico County's 60-Bed Treatment Center Slips to Fall 2027 Opening

Henrico County posted video this week of construction well underway on its Eastern Government Center campus, where a 60-bed detoxification and residential treatment center is now targeted to open in fall 2027 — roughly a year later than the county originally projected, and it is being built on a decision made six years ago to spend the money on treatment instead of a third jail.

A jail expansion that became a hospital

The idea dates to 2018 and 2019, when the county was absorbing some of the heaviest opioid losses in Virginia. "What we didn't know at the time, although we knew the impact, was that Henrico County was the fourth most impacted community in Virginia by opioids and by the advent of the fentanyl crisis," Michael Feinmel, the county's deputy manager for public safety, told WWBT in April.

The crisis landed on institutions that were never designed for it. "The jail was becoming a de facto hospital and treating people," Feinmel said. "So our concept at the time was, let's build something for residents of our community to come to and be able to detox and stabilize."

In 2020, a Henrico Recovery Roundtable of substance-use experts, elected officials, judges and others recommended building a treatment facility rather than a third county jail, according to WRIC. The county later entered a public-private partnership with Pyramid Healthcare, an Altoona, Pennsylvania-based operator that runs detox, residential and outpatient programs in seven states.

What the building will hold

The 31,479-square-foot center at 3808 Nine Mile Road will have ten beds set aside for withdrawal management — the medical detoxification stage — and 50 beds for inpatient treatment stays of up to 30 days. Pyramid will provide withdrawal management and ASAM Level 3.5 residential services, the level of care that describes clinically managed, high-intensity residential treatment for people who need 24-hour structure but not hospital-level medical care.

Patients who need more time will be transferred to one of Pyramid's longer-term facilities in Radford, Newport News or King George, and county residents get priority for admission, according to the county. Henrico keeps ownership of the land.

Who pays for it

Henrico's board of supervisors committed nearly $11 million. Pyramid is building the center and will operate it under a 30-year lease at no additional cost to the county — an arrangement Feinmel described as unusual in its structure. "We're doing something that hasn't been done anywhere else in the country, in this sort of partnership," he said.

That structure is the reason the project has survived a delay that would otherwise have stalled it. Ground was broken in summer 2025, and the facility was initially expected to be serving patients by summer 2026. By April of this year officials had shifted the estimate to late spring or early summer 2027; the county's video message this month put the target at fall 2027.

Why detox beds are the bottleneck

Withdrawal management is the narrowest gate in the addiction treatment system. Without a medical detox bed, someone who wants to stop using opioids often has nowhere to go except an emergency department, and the gap between a crisis and the start of treatment is where many people are lost. Yakima County, Washington, opened its first inpatient medical detox unit in September for exactly that reason, and rural and suburban communities across the country have started building the service from scratch. From a completed detoxification stay, the next steps are residential treatment and ongoing medication — the county's own substance use program offers buprenorphine and naltrexone for opioid and alcohol use disorders.

Virginia has been directing settlement money toward the same continuum: the state awarded $35 million in opioid abatement grants to localities and organizations in June, with a share going to community programs in Henrico and its neighbors.

Building for the next supply shift

Even as overdose deaths fall statewide and nationally, Feinmel said the county is not planning on a world where the need disappears. "We already are seeing substances that naloxone does not reduce or reverse overdoses from," he said in April, a reference to the synthetic opioids now appearing in the drug supply that standard overdose reversal medication may not fully counter. "Henrico's doing better. The state's doing better. The country's doing better. We're saving lives, but we have to be one step ahead of what's coming next."

For residents of Virginia's fourth-hardest-hit county, the concrete version of that argument is a 60-bed building on Nine Mile Road that will not accept its first patient for another year.