URBANA — The Champaign County judge who administers drug court wants to use a recently awarded federal grant to hire another coordinator, get an assist from a street-level police officer and pay for different kinds of drug tests.

"The coordinator is going to do a whole lot of things that are taking up my time, Mike Carey's time or the counselor's time. There are things that are not getting done because we don't have the time," Judge Jeff Ford said.

Champaign County launched its program to help convicts whose crimes are linked to drug addiction in 1999. Since then, about 170 people have been helped to make the long-term changes necessary to return to being productive citizens.

Ford has overseen the program since its inception and has been instrumental in setting up a statewide association of drug court professionals.

Champaign County drug court officials learned on Sept. 20 that the program will receive $200,000 over the next two years, beginning Oct. 1, to pay for a coordinator, a quarter-time police officer to help with compliance checks, and possibly more tests to detect synthetic drug abuse.

The money from the Office of Justice Programs within the Department of Justice will be funneled through the Champaign County Mental Health Board.

Mental Health Board Director Peter Tracy said the board applied for the money several months ago. Prairie Center staff wrote the bulk of the grant application, he said.

Advertising for the new coordinator should begin next week, Ford said.

That person must have a love for number-crunching and the ability to use a computer.

"We want to update and maintain our software system. We're collecting data on who (drug court clients) are, their drug of choice, their criminal history, if they succeed or fail," Ford said of the new coordinator's duties. "This type of stuff will give us an idea of what strategies work for different populations."

Drug court had a coordinator from 2006 to 2008 thanks to a previous grant. But, as if often the case with federal money, there was no local money to replace it when the previous grant ran out, so the coordinator went away.

Ford is hoping the new coordinator can "find other streams of revenue" to keep the position going after the grant money is gone.

The information he or she collects will be forwarded to the state association of drug court professionals, which has persuaded the University of Illinois at Springfield to compile them.

"The state of Illinois is the only state that doesn't have a statewide drug coordinator," Ford said, stressing the need for collecting the data.

Chris Ray, the former drug court coordinator, said statistics maintenance is important.

"Everything you do these days is asking for outcome measures," said Ray, a Prairie Center employee.

Ray said — and others affiliated with drug court agree — that having a part-time sheriff's deputy to help with compliance checks and sharing of information would be a huge help.

"That would be good," said Mike Carey, the probation officer who oversees drug court clients, "to have someone we can send out to do checks and when drug court people abscond, go look for them. Right now we (probation officers) do not have that ability."

Ford has proposed that about $17,600 of the grant pay for a deputy to devote 10 hours a week to drug court work, including doing drug screens and just gathering information by virtue of being on the street.

Ford also wants to see part of the grant money earmarked for tests to detect synthetic drugs.

"When someone gets clean, you see certain behavioral changes. If someone who is clean isn't making behavioral changes, alarms go off. One of the first thoughts is they are using something and we have to figure out what," Ford said.

The problem with synthetic drugs, however, according to Carey, is that many are not illegal and therefore there are not tests to detect them.

"It is a huge problem. There are numbers of our clients who are using this stuff. The problem is there are not tests out there to test for the new stuff and they know it," Carey said.