Recommendation to close Maple Lane raises serious question

October 15, 2009

The governor’s budget office released a report yesterday detailing recommendations regarding the closure of correctional facilities to save money.

The report was authorized by the operating budget adopted in April, and we knew then to expect it would contain bad news for the 20th Legislative District. Our district is home to two correctional facilities for juveniles, Green Hill School in Chehalis and Maple Lane School in southern Thurston County, and they are – under the legislation – the only such facilities the state’s consultant could consider. That doesn’t make the recommendation to close Maple Lane any less of a disappointment now that it’s in black-and-white.

The roles Green Hill and Maple Lane have in our state’s juvenile rehabilitation system can’t be handled by any other facility. Beyond that, they employ security guards, teachers, counselors, doctors and administrators, many of whom reside in the 20th District. The thought of those jobs disappearing, on top of the other blows our economy has sustained in recent years, is sobering.

The placement of a bull’s-eye on Maple Lane stings even more because the study commissioned by the Democrat-controlled Legislature was destined to be unfair from its conception in the Senate Ways and Means Committee. Published reports suggest the chairman of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee did not want another juvenile rehabilitation facility, Naselle Youth Camp in coastal Washington -- in a legislative district next to his, and next to ours, represented by fellow Democrats  –considered in the study for closure.

I am left asking the same questions I did in the spring, when the language that spared Naselle Youth Camp from consideration was included in the budget. Was someone afraid Naselle would come out the loser if all three juvenile facilities were included in the study – as happened during a similar exercise several years before?

I have to assume someone knew the answer. So the deck was stacked – by removing the Naselle card – to make sure it would be either Maple Lane or Green Hill on the short list for closure. I doubt that’s the sort of reform the governor had in mind earlier this year when she addressed the people of our state.

The recommendation to close Maple Lane raises an even more serious question. If the Legislature goes along, where do the Maple Lane students go? These students are medically fragile, with 30 to 40 students on suicide watch at any given time. Many are on strict prescription-medicine plans that keep them functioning. To put mentally-ill people in the same facility as the sort of criminals at Green Hill would be a mistake at best and a disaster at worst.

During my years of service on the Senate Transportation Committee, which wields a fair amount of economic development clout through its support of highway projects, I’ve always taken the view that we need to do what’s best for the state as a whole. The recommendation to close Maple Lane doesn’t appear to me to be in the taxpayers’ best interests, especially if it is the result of a process skewed by the whim of the majority party controlling the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

On page 25 of the report by Christopher Murray & Associates, the state’s hired consultants, is a summary of the work authorized by the Legislature. In the final paragraph, the conclusion section, appears the most telling sentence in the whole report:

“It is our conclusion that the data do not support closure of either Green Hill or Maple Lane.”

When presented with this choice the consultant ultimately, after evaluating all the evidence and needs of the system, concluded closing either one was a bad idea.   I hope Governor Gregoire and my colleagues in the Legislature take that conclusion to heart when it is time to decide what to do with the findings. Until then I can only wonder if the outcome would have been different had it been a fair fight.

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