COFAR blog

Opponents of Intermediate-Facility-Level care in Massachusetts have repeatedly denigrated the Fernald Developmental Center during the past two years as part of a campaign to encourage the shutdowns of that facility and three other state-run developmental centers in Massachusetts for people with severe intellectual disabilities.

Our review shows a pattern in the tactics used by the opponents, which have included repeatedly publicizing inflated figures on Fernald’s per-person cost and falsely characterizing the care at Fernald and other developmental centers as outmoded or obsolete.  The ironic purpose of the campaign has been to close the centers as fast as possible without conducting any meaningful cost studies.

The organizations most directly involved in the campaign against Fernald include the Association of Developmental Disabilities Providers and the Arc of Massachusetts.  Joining them last year was the Governor’s Commission on Mental Retardation, which the Fernald League noted had previously been reconstituted  by the Patrick administration to lobby on behalf of the developmental center closures.

The record appears to show that the efforts to spread misinformation about Fernald have been effective in bottling up cost studies, which would have actually pertained to the three other developmental centers marked for closure.  The misinformation has also been damaging to the reputations of guardians and families of the Fernald residents.

Fernald and five other developmental centers are the only sources in Massachusetts of ICF-level care, which must meet federal standards for staffing and supervision.  The Patrick administration has targeted the Fernald, Monson, Templeton, and Glavin centers for closure, starting with Fernald, by Fiscal Year 2013.  Fernald, which was scheduled to be shut last July, has remained open pending the outcomes of administrative and court appeals filed by the guardians of 14 remaining residents.

For at least the past two years, the ADDP and the Arc have focused during state budget debates in the Legislature on the alleged cost of maintaining Fernald.   Our review shows that during this year’s budget debate in April and May, leaders of those organizations repeatedly made inaccurate claims about Fernald’s per-person cost of operation that were as much as 70 percent higher than the most recent projection by the Department of Developmental Services.

That same month, the Governor’s Commission on Intellectual Disability cited a  $1.3 million cost per month at Fernald in calling for rejection of that same cost study.   This number was unsupported as well in the Commission’s letter.

(By the way, the only publication  listed on the Governor’s Commission publications page on its website is the administration’s 2009 developmental center closure plan, which the Commission didn’t even write — the document was written by DDS.)

Meanwhile, as the ADDP and the Governor’s Commission were citing those unsupported cost claims for Fernald in 2010, Sarkissian of the Arc of Massachusetts was claiming erroneously that Fernald and the other developmental centers were providing inferior care to community-based facilities.  In an op-ed article in The Waltham Tribune,  Sarkissian variously termed Fernald and the other developmental centers “decrepit,” “archaic,” “outdated,” “Dickensian,” and “inferior.”

In the op-ed piece, Sarkissian raised issues from the 1960s and earlier about sexual abuse, military experiments, and other issues at Fernald that have not been current for a half century or more.

Last week, I wrote to Blumenthal, asking him to publicly disavow the inflated cost figures for Fernald that he and his organization cited this year.  He declined to do so, saying the cost figures had been provided by DDS.  The question we still can’t answer  is whether DDS itself knowingly publicized inaccurate figures on Fernald’s cost.