An $18 million investment is bringing expanded residential addiction recovery services to San Antonio.

Lifetime Recovery, a nonprofit addiction recovery center, celebrated a major renovation and expansion of its 18-acre residential treatment campus on Thursday evening.

The $18 million investment has been underway for six years. It involved several new buildings, bringing the total number of beds to 154, and major renovations to the buildings, some of which are over 95 years old.

Beds for women were also added for the first time, making it a co-ed facility.

The campus, located in the South Side on 10290 Southton Road, was renamed the Red McCombs Recovery Center after the late Texas billionaire Red McCombs, who founded the Red McCombs Automotive Group in San Antonio and helped bring the San Antonio Spurs to the national stage in the 1970s. 

McCombs also struggled with alcohol in his 40s. At the peak of his addiction, he was in an alcohol-induced coma that nearly took his life.

The Red McCombs Recovery Center opened its newly expanded residential treatment facility on Southton Road on Thursday. Credit: Vincent Reyna for the San Antonio Report

“It was always important to him and actually a personal triumph, that anyone seeking help for an addiction should be able to find a place for help,” said Marsha McCombs Shields, his daughter, owner of the McCombs Recovery Center and president of the McCombs Foundation. “He would have been immensely proud to have his name on a recovery center.”

The site of the campus was originally home to a county juvenile detention facility built in 1930. Renovations were badly needed on the aging buildings, according to Lifetime Recovery CEO and President David Phipps. “This was barrack style … it wasn’t sustainable, and it was just a nasty, nasty old building,” Phipps said. 

A $1.5 million welcome center is also underway.

Bexar County owns the land and has provided it free of charge since Lifetime Recovery took over the site in 1969. The county contributed $8 million to the expansion with private donors contributing the rest, Phipps said.

The recovery program is open to underinsured and uninsured residents struggling with addiction, who typically stay at the campus for 45 to 90 days. Lifetime Recovery also operates an outpatient addiction recovery center in Balcones Heights.

Norma Greenfield-Laborde, director of the Bexar County Office of Criminal Justice, said that the county jail has diverted over 800 people into Lifetime Recovery within the past several years.

“Those are 800 people or more that would just be sitting in jail with issues, problems, hopelessness, a sense of ‘Where do I move from here?’” Greenfield-Laborde said. “Some of the best results that I have seen in the past 13 years that I’ve been working with the county have come out of Lifetime.”

Tommy Calvert, Bexar County Commissioner for Precinct 4, speaks before the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Red McCombs Recovery Center. Credit: Vincent Reyna for the San Antonio Report

County commissioners Rebeca Clay-Flores and Tommy Calvert celebrated the investment on Thursday.

“This is such a great facility, but is it only for men?” Clay-Flores recalled asking when she first joined the commissioners court. “For those of you who have experienced it yourselves or with family members, you know that behavioral health issues or substance abuse issues is like trying to escape your own mind … no matter how far away you run, you can’t escape your own self. That’s why programs like this are so important.”

Because of the renovations and expansion, now the residential center can house both men and women clients.

“We are rewriting a new chapter in how we treat substance use disorders,” Calvert said. “It is wonderful to have so many colleagues from the judiciary here, because there was a time when we said, ‘lock them up and throw away the key,’ and didn’t deal with the root causes of the issues.”

“While others have doubled down on punishment, we’ll double down on possibility,” Calvert added.