Lamont: Southbury Training School, costing more than $500,000 per resident, to remain open

At one time, the Southbury Training School served nearly 2,000 developmentally disabled residents with 24-hour care in an institutional setting.

Today, the population has dropped to just 127 as many of the longtime elderly residents have died in recent years.

With many fixed costs remaining on a sprawling campus as the census steadily drops, the state is now spending $530,000 per resident per year, according to state statistics. The $66 million annual cost translates into $1,453 per day per resident for 365 days per year.

Southbury ranks among the state’s most expensive programs with a worker-to-resident ratio of more than 4 to 1 as 556 state employees work on the campus for 127 residents who have round-the-clock care. Many of the residents are medically fragile and have had the same caregivers for years.

Citing the elderly population, Gov. Ned Lamont told the Courant that he is not making any quick moves on the future of the facility.

“I know that moving those residents is really tough for them — for the families — so I think nothing is going to change for the foreseeable future,” Lamont said in an interview.

Regarding the high costs of running the campus, Lamont said, “There’s some overhead, but these are folks in need. These are folks who spend most of their lives there, and you don’t want to uproot them.”

Southbury is a relic of the past as intellectually and developmentally disabled citizens largely switched to group homes decades ago. The costs at Southbury are three times higher than those at group homes, advocates say.

But those still remaining at Southbury — along with their families and guardians — have wanted to remain in their longtime homes on the campus.

The residents range in age from 58 to 95 years old — with the average age at 73. The longest-serving resident has been there for 81 years, and the average length of stay is 60 years, according to state statistics. The newest resident has been there 39 years, and many residents are essentially in the only home they have ever known.

The per diem costs are high due to expensive benefits for state employees and major costs for everything from snow removal to lawn-mowing on a property that is larger than most college campuses. When the school opened, the grounds had 125 buildings on 1,600 acres, which is twice the size of New York’s Central Park and more than four times the size of Yale University’s 373-acre central campus in New Haven.

As the population has dropped, the state has downsized Southbury to 400 acres and 20 primary buildings that are used on a fulltime basis for services. The state agriculture department oversees 400 acres and about 800 acres remain as open space.

House Republican leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford agrees with Lamont that the medically fragile residents should not be moved in the short term.

“The problem is the cost that we’re continuing to bear,” Candelora said in an interview. “There are the necessary essentials that have to be provided so long as even one person is in that facility. In the short run, there was always the belief that we would be impacted with a high cost as we’re transitioning to close it.”

History

As institutional facilities have closed nationwide in favor of the decades-old newer model for group homes, Southbury has become a rare entity of continuous operation since it was built in the late 1930s to resemble a New England prep school. Under a federal court order and later a state law that is designed to provide the best care, Southbury has not been permitted to accept any new residents since 1986. The facility had 1,111 residents at that point.

For decades, advocates for the disabled have called for closing the training school. Gov. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. pushed for the shutdown at the same time that he shuttered the Mansfield Training School in 1993. Weicker declared at the time that he would not stop until Southbury “is closed and has a plaque on it.”

At the closing ceremony for Mansfield, Weicker said, “Nothing that has happened during the course of my being governor is more important than this day. Nothing.”

But Weicker did not seek reelection in 1994, and the next governor, John G. Rowland, went in the opposite direction and poured millions into the Southbury campus to keep it open. As a volunteer at the campus in his high school days, Rowland strongly favored keeping the facility running and later allocated millions in state money that was matched even further by additional millions in federal money.

New England states such as Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Rhode Island long ago closed their institutions in a longtime trend toward deinstitutionalization. But many of the Southbury residents’ family members have pushed through the years to keep the school open.

Questions have been raised for years regarding the level of care at the institution. A scathing federal report in 1994 showed that one resident ate at least 78 cigarette butts in a six-month period and that others drank bleach, ate plastic and ingested feathers from a feather-duster. Officials say that conditions have improved dramatically since then.

New fire chief

The training school made headlines last week when Shelly L. Carter was named as the first Black female fire chief in New England for the state Department of Developmental Services, which operates from the training school.

A former Hartford firefighter, Carter will oversee a team of six firefighters that will work with local departments as she also oversees 850 group homes statewide that include about 815 nonprofit homes and about 35 run by state employees.

Lamont hailed Carter in a pinning ceremony at the state Capitol, saying, “You can see how you lead by example … what that means for the firefighter school, what that means for every young girl — regardless of background, you can do this too. It’s one thing to be the very first. It’s even better to be the very first of many. And thanks to you, you’ll be the very first of many.”

The future

Predicting the future of Southbury has been difficult in the past — as state officials cannot forecast the longevity of the elderly residents. In 2013, an internal memo at the state Department of Developmental Services stated that only 69 residents would be living there by 2021. Today, there are still 127.

Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat, agrees with Lamont that moving the elderly residents to different sites would be difficult and disruptive for them.

“That’s been the sticking point all along,” Looney said in an interview. “That’s why it has remained open all these years. That’s a challenge.”

The campus has essentially been “downsized by attrition” in a process that has taken years and will continue, Looney said.

Sen. Cathy Osten, a Sprague Democrat who co-chairs the budget-writing committee, scrutinizes the $25 billion annual state budget on a line-by-line basis and says the state needs to create a long-term plan for the campus.

“Every year, that’s one of the top questions I ask — how many people are left at Southbury, and where do we stand?” Osten said in an interview. “What are the plans for the site itself? That’s another thing that I try to keep an eye on — what are we doing with these sites that we’re closing down? Are we maintaining them?”

The biggest player for employees on the campus is District 1199 of the New England Healthcare Employees Union, which has about 500 workers on the site. Rob Baril, the union’s president, said there have been “no discussions” with the union about potentially closing down the campus in the future.

Former state Rep. John Hampton, a Simsbury Democrat who co-chaired the legislature’s IDD caucus before not seeking reelection last year, said it is time “to get rid of the antiquated system that is Southbury. It’s a throwback.”

Win Evarts, executive director of The ARC Connecticut, predicted that the costs at Southbury will only increase in future years.

“Closing an institution can take years, even if you’ve got a good plan,” Evarts said. “It just takes that amount of time. At the end of the day, people are going to be scratching their heads if we get to $800,000 per person, and that could happen, unfortunately, pretty quickly given the aging population.”

Christopher Keating can be reached at ckeating@courant.com