ELLENVILLE – After having a special meeting with the Wawarsing Planning Board last week, the folks at Samaritan Village are preparing to break ground on an addition to their therapeutic community: a dorm specializing in providing rehabilitative services for female veterans.

"There was an RFP that went out, a request for funding, and the governor wanted to put a hundred beds to service women veterans in the upstate area. So five programs kind of bid out [and] due to us being on the forefront of veteran services….we were number one in being picked for winning the award," says Tom Palega, Program Director of Samaritan Village's Ellenville campus on Briggs Highway.

Progress on the expansion was briefly held up after the town's regular planning board meeting in July, when disagreements over Samaritan Village's Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan, or SWPPP (pronounced 'swip'), kept the board from approving their expansion application. The hurdle would have kept the application from going before the Ulster County Planning Board for another month, and would have disrupted plans to bring guests from the governor's office in Albany to Ellenville for a ceremonial groundbreaking on the new expansion.

The forthcoming $5 million project is the proverbial icing on the cake for Samaritan Village's Ellenville campus, which is just now finishing up a $23 million renovation that began three years ago. The renovations on the 30-year-old facility included new buildings for administration, dining, two dormitories, and a brand-new gym, which is still under construction. All in all, not bad for the place's thirty year anniversary.

The new expansion will be the first in-patient program for women military veterans in the United States, and will offer 25 beds for rehabilitative services to servicewomen who are suffering from ailments ranging from substance abuse to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Furthermore, the expansion program will also allow Samaritan Village to hire 15 new staff members from the local community, adding to the 40-plus staff members they have working in the existing facility.

"We can contribute to hiring people in these tough times that we're going through," adds Palega.

While it's not yet etched in stone, Palega says that, in addition to local dignitaries such as State Senator John Bonacic, there's a chance that Governor David Paterson will also be on hand in late-September for the groundbreaking on the new facility, a ceremony which also coincides with a ribbon-cutting on the renovation project which is expected to be finished by that time.

Funded by the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services, Samaritan Village has 11 facilities throughout New York, most of them based in and around New York City. The organization provides substance abuse rehabilitation, homeless services, senior services, and veteran services throughout the state. About 30 years ago, the state-run not-for-profit moved its upstate rehabilitation operations from Fallsburg to Ellenville, where it has become the largest Samaritan campus in the entire program.

A typical stay in Samaritan Village can run from nine months to a year, and creates a structured healing environment that offers its clients a reward and responsibility program. Totally self-sufficient, the 228 clients served by Samaritan run the facility's various departments themselves, such as manning the check-in desk, working the kitchen in the dining hall, helping out with maintenance, or overseeing their peers. While receiving treatment, the facility offers their clients opportunities to continue their educations through GED and vocational classes, all as part of an effort to help bring them back into their communities and prosper. And the further along in the program that clients progress, the more responsibilities and privileges they get. And they can get pretty high up there — just ask Palega himself, a former client of Samaritan Village in the late '60s. He previously worked at the Ellenville campus for fifteen years, then worked in the city for another ten. Now working as the Ellenville facility's program director for the last five consecutive years as a Certified Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor, Palega is happy to be giving back to the Ellenville-Wawarsing area through the facility by providing jobs or the community service the clients provide.

"It's a blessed opportunity for me because I know everybody in town," says Palega. "I'm pretty familiar with all of the business people in town, and they're my neighbors, so I'm part of this community and just happen to be privileged and working in a place that can afford people opportunities if they run into problems."