Stakeholders in the South End and other neighborhoods are struggling to pick up where a needle reimbursement program left off after the city was unable to find funding to replace initial American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) investment.

The Community Syringe Redemption Program (CSRP) closed shop at the end of June, ending both the main factor keeping needles off the city’s streets and a critical income source for the Bostonians who need it most.

The Newmarket Business Improvement District (BID) is operating its own street cleaning service, but it isn’t anywhere near the scale of the CSRP and is more about offering Boston’s unhoused gainful employment with a path toward recovery than cleaning up every stray needle.

The CSRP began operations in early 2021.

Co-founder and President Allie Hunter says it was initially a pilot funded by its founders and philanthropic donations, proving successful enough that the city took over funding the original site and dedicated money from the ARPA to start two more.

“The program was uniquely effective because it not just reduced street litter but engaged individuals in a low barrier way to earn money. It’s that combination that resulted in such a large number of participants and collected syringes,” said Hunter.

The program averaged 28,000 needles collected per week at a cost of around $400,000 to $450,000 annually per site. Some weeks saw as many as 10k needles collected per day, with the program cleaning up 5,210,000 needles over its three years of operation.

This year, however, ARPA funding ran dry, sending many of the city’s drug treatment and mitigation services over a budgetary cliff. The city put out a request for proposals to run the needle buyback program on a smaller budget with more of a focus on recovery pathways, which the CSRP did offer to fill.

Boston officials, however, eventually closed that request without awarding anybody the contract. A spokesperson for the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) cited “dynamic budgetary and operational considerations” as the reason the city declined to renew a needle buyback program.

“While funding for the CSRP ended in June, the city and BPHC are continuing peer based syringe cleanup efforts that focus on providing meaningful employment and workforce development opportunities for people experiencing substance use disorder,” said Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, the executive director of the BHPC, in a statement.

That’s a reference to the Back To Work cleaning program, an initiative by the Newmarket BID offering anyone willing to work a stable wage along with a path toward housing and recovery.

City government paid to expand the program in July to cover the South End, Andrew Square, Nubian Square and Ramsay Park. For the four months funding lasts, a handful of workers will go out each day for around three hours to pick up litter, including used needles.

Like the CSRP it has a relatively low entry threshold, requiring only that its 30-40 employees not be under the influence during work hours, show up to execute their job, and eventually begin taking steps toward recovery and stability.

Hourly employment also offers a professional work history the needle buyback didn’t.

Around 50 of the Back To Work program’s 140 total participants have already moved on to normal jobs in the community.

The tradeoff, however, is in the program’s scale. It doesn’t have nearly the budget or reach of the CSRP, picking up on average 1,000 needles per day.

Sue Sullivan, executive director of the Newmarket BID, says anyone hoping the BID can replace the CSRP is misguided.

“That’s not something we do. We’re a business improvement district and it’s just outside of our mission. We’re a $3.5 million BID. We do some street cleanup, but we could never match that size,” she said.

It’s not guaranteed at this point that the city will even continue to fund the BID’s expanded coverage beyond its initial four-month pilot. Hunter says she’d like to continue the CSRP in some form, but even for her there’s no clear path toward that.

“I hope that there’s still a possibility that the city will see the value in finding a way to fund it, but I’m not sure what that would look like or if and when that might happen,” she said.