ATLANTA – Lawmakers want to establish new post-treatment centers for people in recovery and create a new law-enforcement task force as part of the state’s response to the rise in opioid overdoses.

The Senate, which released its version of the budget Wednesday, added $4 million to next year’s proposed budget for a grant program that would fund what are called recovery centers, as well as $3.6 million for a task force within the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The state’s proposed budget is about $26 billion.

But lawmakers did not increase funding for adult treatment services, which were cut during the economic downturn.

Sen. Renee Unterman, R-Buford, who chairs the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, said lawmakers are counting on Congress to come through on a plan to spend billions on the country’s opioid crisis.

Unterman said new state programs – such as the recovery center grant program – will be in place to receive that federal funding. She said lawmakers were working to “set the foundation.”

Advocates, though, have expressed dismay with the pace of progress under the Gold Dome.

Nearly 1,400 people in Georgia died from an opioid overdose in 2016, according to the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention. That’s about a 16 percent increase from two years earlier.

Neil Campbell, executive director of the Georgia Council on Substance Abuse, which pushes for more funding for prevention and treatment services, said lawmakers should be moving with a sense of urgency right now.

“It’s not enough, and it doesn’t make us whole,” Campbell said, referring to state funding for treatment services that was slashed during the recession.

“Our hair should be on fire,” she added, noting that four people die each day from opioid abuse.

Unterman has sponsored a measure that would establish a commission that would look at Medicaid waivers as an option for increasing treatment services for substance abuse, among other issues. That bill still sits in a House committee with less than two weeks left in the session.

In the meantime, Unterman said she was especially proud of the $500,000 added to the budget for peer recovery programs based in hospital neonatal intensive care units.

The money would replicate a program used at a hospital in Gainesville where people in recovery work with new mothers struggling with addiction while caring for a baby born addicted to the substance used by the mother.

“You bring in former addicts who have gone through this to teach them, ‘Yes, there is a brighter day. Yes, your baby can go home and not be addicted. Yes, you can take care of your baby,’” Unterman said.

“Most of these babies end up in foster care, and it’s an increased cost for the state, so you want to keep the mother and baby together,” she said.

The largest additional opioid-related expenditure in the proposed budget for next year is $6 million for two behavioral crisis centers. The centers, which would not focus exclusively on substance abuse, would be built in an urban area and in a rural community.

The funding increase for the GBI task force would pay for 15 new agents, a supervisor and a scientist.

Some other smaller ticket items related to opioid abuse, such as about $800,000 focused on prevention programs for children, are also in the proposed budget.