SACRAMENTO — The Sonoma Developmental Center, which provides housing and medical care for nearly 500 severely disabled clients and is Sonoma Valley's largest employer, would be downsized dramatically under a state task force's recommendations unveiled Friday in Sacramento.
The state's four remaining developmental centers, which collectively serve 1,383 residents, would no longer operate as around-the-clock care facilities under the recommendations. Instead, the state would focus its attention and resources on smaller, crisis-intervention facilities, with longer-term care provided in partnership with regional centers and other community-based programs.
"The DC's will not operate in the future the way they operate today. How they will change and how we get there is the next lift," Diana Dooley, secretary of California's Health and Human Services Agency, told task force members Friday.
Dooley after the meeting said she could not predict how many clients would remain at the Sonoma center or the level of care that would be provided there. She also could not say what would happen to the 1,200 people who are employed at the center, other than that they could possibly find jobs elsewhere with the state. She listed state hospitals and the Department of Corrections as possible transfer options.
"The only constant is change. Change occurs in a variety of places. Some jobs are eliminated and other jobs are created," Dooley said after Friday's meeting.
Neither Dooley nor the task force offered a timeline for instituting the changes at developmental centers. State health officials said the recommendations could be part of Gov. Jerry Brown's January budget.
The recommendations are sure to fuel more anxiety among advocates of the Sonoma Developmental Center, which has been a community fixture since 1891. The concerns go beyond patient care and jobs, to what would happen to the infrastructure and land were the state to abandon the facility, which is situated on nearly 1,000 acres between two parks.
Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin, who attended Friday's meeting, said she believes that whatever changes take place at the Sonoma center will occur over a long period, given the number of people who reside there. But she said the task force's 40-page report left her even more concerned for the center's long-term future.
"There didn't seem to be a recognition of the large number of residents still living on the site and the serious, physically challenging conditions that they have," she said prior to addressing the panel.
Gorin told the group that the Board of Supervisors' top legislative priority at the moment is maintaining services at the Sonoma center.
The future of California's developmental centers has been in doubt for years as institutionalized care has fallen out of favor. Funding is a major issue, as the cost to treat patients in developmental centers has soared, from an average of $162,000 per resident in 2001 to more than $400,000 today. Advocates of the centers argue that's because the facilities treat the most difficult cases.
The number of people residing at developmental centers has fallen from 6,544 residents in 1992 to 1,383. The decline has been accelerated by a moratorium on admitting new clients.
The task force was formed in June following media reports detailing graphic examples of abuse at the state's developmental centers and the failure of law enforcement to properly investigate the crimes. The Sonoma center has given up federal funding for 112 seriously disabled patients amid investigations into problems at the troubled facility.
But many people who have loved ones living at one of the centers have lobbied to keep them open, saying they provide a better level of care than what can be found in community-based programs. Nearly half of the residents currently residing in a developmental center have been there more than 30 years, and 18 percent are over the age of 61, according to the task force report.
"I would prefer it stay the way it is and that the moratorium be lifted. That's what our families want, that's what I would like. But it's not going to happen," said Kathleen Miller, president of Sonoma's Parent Hospital Association. Her son, Dan Smith, is a resident of the facility.
Miller, who is a member of the task force, has consistently raised concerns about the level of care offered to people like her son in community programs and whether they could survive outside an institutional setting.
Half of the 1,484 people residing in developmental centers in July of this year were unable to walk, while 67 percent had profound intellectual disabilities. Seven percent had been convicted of sex offenses, and four percent on assault-related felony charge, according to the task force report.
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