Police in Red Oak, Tuesday, said a local woman was arrested that day on a theft charge. 31-year old Becki Le Hauge, of Red Oak, was charged with felony Theft in the 2nd degree. Hauge was transported to the Montgomery County Law Enforcement Center and held on a $5,000 cash bond.

The Iowa Department of Public Health has won a three-year grant of nearly eight million dollars for a program to help people overcome substance abuse. Kevin Gabbert is the project director for what’s called Access to Recovery or A-T-R. “Because every person in the recovery is different, a key component to our program is choice,” Gabbert explains. “And so with A-T-R, the individual receiving the service chooses what services they want to be involved in from a variety of our providers.”

Gabbert says providing support services to those in recovery can be key to helping them succeed. “Basic things like transportation — so gas cards and bus passes. Child care so an individual can go to treatment services in the evening or go to a 12-step meeting. Some of those basic things that might have been barriers otherwise if they had not had access to A-T-R,” Gabbert says.

The program has been running since 2010, but its grant money was running out. “There was a new grant application process that was initiated in 2014. We applied and were one of six grantees out of 30 applicants,” Gabbert says. Gabbert says they’ve seen success with the percentage of individuals not using alcohol or drugs six months after admission increasing from over 73 percent (73.3) to over 82 percent (82.3) from 2010 to this year. He says they expect to serve seven-thousand people with the new grant.

Individuals can come to us from a variety of different referral sources. It could be from the Department of Corrections, it could be from a primary care provider, it could be from the Department of Human Services, the list just goes on and on,” Gabbert says. “Individuals can just walk into one of our care coordination providers which we have across the state.”

For more information about Access to Recovery, visit the Iowa Department of Public Health’s website.

(Radio Iowa)