(Cleveland)- The recently expanded Appalachian Regional Drug Enforcement Office (ARDEO) has a new home in White County and they held an open house Tuesday for law enforcement and local elected officials to see.
The ARDEO office, until recently was located in the city of Cleveland, but with the expanding of the counties they serve there was a need to expand their facilities and capabilities, that’s where White County came in by providing a location for the offices and providing almost $100,000 to renovate a couple of buildings at the old Outdoor Therapeutic property (now known as Yonah Preserve) north of Cleveland.
ARDEO has a dual purpose, to respond to general requests for assistance from local law enforcement, as well as having responsibility for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation drug enforcement effort.
Mitchell Posey is the Special Agent in Charge of the operation here. He calls the new facility a tremendous move that will allow the task force to expand and do a better job. “We can have in house training, whereas in the other facility we were in we didn’t have room to do it. So we’re able to train, not only our in-house agents, but work with other sheriffs offices and police departments in the area to train,” says Posey.
White County Sheriff Neal Walden who is chairman of the Appalachian Regional Drug Enforcement Board was a key figure in getting White County to provide this facility. Walden says, “It’s going to benefit North Georgia tremendously through drug enforcement, information sharing, arrest and getting some of these folks sent off to prison, hopefully, where they’ll stay a few days anyway.”
Walden says the drug enforcement arrests have increased since they added additional counties because it gives the task force more manpower.
White County Commission Chairman Travis Turner says there was an investment by the county, but “spending $100,000 approximately and pulling off the amount of drugs the drug task force has already been hitting in Northeast Georgia, we are already seeing dividends of that investment already.”
During the open house activities, eight ARDEO agents were sworn in as GBI agents so they will now have that additional authority as they serve.
The Appalachian Regional Drug Enforcement Office is a multi-agency unit that consists of the following Sheriff’s Offices: White County, Lumpkin County, Towns County, Banks County, Habersham County, Stephens County, and Rabun County, along with the Georgia National Guard Counter Drug Task Force, the Department of Public Safety, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
