Phillips

With heroin on the rise locally, Marshall County Supervisors voted to seek a grant to fund overtime hours for deputies who are investigating drug hot spots and overdoses.

At its regular meeting, the board voted to approve the application and acceptance of a federal CAMP Grant award for the Methamphetamine Drug Hot Spots Grant Program.

Marshall County Sheriff Joel Phillips said the county has received the grant for a couple of years, and has traditionally used it to fund overtime hours for deputies investigating methamphetamine hot spots.

Included in the grant this year is funding for heroin investigations and overdoses.

Phillips said heroin is becoming more prevalent in the Marshall County area.

“I think it’s been kind of that hidden investigation, a portion of that because a lot of times these overdoses we don’t know about until afterwards,” Phillips said. “So we’re finding out some of those unexpected deaths were predicated and classified as a suicide, have had those heroin overdoses.”

He said an agency in Des Moines has been reviewing those deaths to identify the source.

While Phillips said heroin has been more prevalent in the past few years in large college towns such as Ames and Iowa City, Marshall County is not immune to the problem.

“It’s becoming more of a problem here in Iowa,” Phillips said. “It’s something that you don’t know where this stuff is coming from, so they’re trying to identify those sources to be able to target those organizations that are distributing all of the heroin and all of the fentanyl. It is becoming a problem.”

Phillips said this year’s grant of $6,000 is about $1,500 lower than in past years.

He said funding for the grant has been cut across the board for local agencies throughout Iowa.

Additional funding options and adjustments are available if the county reaches the max amount, he said.

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Contact Trevor Babcock at 641-753-6611 or tbabcock@timesrepublican.com.