SAVE has plan for Turkey Hill homes. Rumors, neighborhood concerns stir controversy.

In Reality Check stories, BND journalists dig deeper into questions over facts, consequences and accountability. Story idea? newsroom@bnd.com.

A plan by St. Clair Associated Vocational Enterprises, better known as SAVE, to repurpose a residential area between Belleville and Freeburg has led to rumors and controversy.

For 40 years, the nonprofit organization used a loop of about 20 small homes on its 54-acre Turkey Hill property to house adults with developmental disabilities, ranging from low cognitive skills to Down syndrome. The residential program was discontinued in April due to state policy changes to encourage more community integration. That eliminated fees that SAVE received from the Illinois Department of Human Services.

Now SAVE is negotiating an agreement to lease 15 of 17 remaining homes to the Comprehensive Behavioral Health Center of St. Clair County, which recently obtained a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to provide low-income housing to people with behavioral disabilities, according to SAVE Executive Director Paul Wibbenmeyer and Comprehensive Executive Director Joe Harper.

“It will supply some ongoing income (to SAVE),” Wibbenmeyer said, noting that the organization continues to operate its vocational day program for adults with developmental disabilities.

“The homes will be put to a use that isn’t very different from what we’ve done in the past. We served a population that had challenges. The people that the HUD grant is designed to assist have challenges of their own.”

Terms of the agreement, including rental rate and expiration date, still are being negotiated, Wibbenmeyer said.

Agency inherited Call for Help grant

The Comprehensive Behavioral Health Center is a nonprofit agency, based in East St. Louis, which contracts with the Illinois Department of Human Services and receives grants and funding from other sources. Its roots go back to a 1957 collaboration between a group of private citizens and the St. Clair County Mental Health Association.

Behavioral-health issues include mental illness, substance abuse and other life challenges, according to Harper. The agency provides services such as crisis intervention, therapy and counseling, psychiatric evaluations, drug treatment, teen-parenting classes and transition from homelessness.

Comprehensive inherited the HUD grant when it acquired the former Call for Help property near Illinois 161 and 157, Harper said. That social-service agency closed in September. Its programs included a transitional-living center for homeless women, some with children.

The $537,000 HUD grant, which was modified to fit with Comprehensive’s mission, requires the agency to provide housing to low-income people with behavioral disabilities, Harper said.

“These are people who are already in our community,” he said. “We’re attempting to help them by giving them a stable place to live so they can become contributing members of the community.”

Ginger Miller, who lives next to the SAVE site, said the lease agreement with Comprehensive could bring violence, drugs and other social problems to the Turkey Hill area. She expressed these concerns during a visit to Wibbenmeyer’s office recently.

“(The discussion) did not reassure me,” Miller said. “What I worry about more than anything are drive-by shootings or people getting into fights, and then you have gunfire going off.

“I know the Freeburg police don’t have the manpower to patrol it regularly, and our county police are already stretched thin.”

Watchdog group to hold meeting

Freeburg resident Frank Heiligenstein also is questioning the SAVE plan. He put the topic on the agenda for the quarterly meeting of Citizens Federation of St. Clair County, a tax-oriented watchdog group he founded in the 1970s. It’s set for 1:16 p.m. Wednesday at Freeburg Area Library.

Heiligenstein formerly served as a St. Clair County Board member for more than 40 years. He said a subdivision of people with troubled pasts could have a negative effect on Freeburg and its schools. (The SAVE property has a Belleville mailing address, but it’s in Freeburg school districts.)

Heiligenstein announced the watchdog group meeting in The Freeburg Tribune newspaper. He described one topic as “the relocation of migrants from Chicago to the Turkey Hill SAVE site,” referring to an early rumor that had been going around town.

Heiligenstein said he later talked to St. Clair County Board Chairman Mark Kern and learned about the Comprehensive lease agreement.

“We might have been better off with migrants coming in because they aspire to go to work someplace,” Heiligenstein said. “We have several facilities out here besides Eckert’s that use migrants, legally and illegally. Some of them have to use them to sustain their operations.”

Wibbenmeyer said Heiligenstein’s statement in the newspaper was false, and it shouldn’t have been published. Harper said he has received multiple phone calls from people who had heard rumors and read incorrect information on social media about Comprehensive’s plan.

Homes built as military housing

SAVE Road, which leads to the organization’s 54 acres, is off Jefferson Road, west of Illinois 15, between Belleville and Freeburg. The site served as a U.S. Air Force radar base in the 1950s and ‘60s. The loop of small frame homes was built to house military personnel and their families.

Today, about a dozen other buildings serve as SAVE offices, warehouses and assembly and packaging plants, where adults with developmental disabilities get vocational training and work for wages.

The organization formerly operated an electronics-recycling facility, but that closed about a decade ago.

Miller asked if people moving into the SAVE residential area will have vehicles, noting that there’s no public transportation. Harper said some residents will have them, and Comprehensive is looking into options for providing transportation, such as a shuttle bus.

Miller also asked about security at the site.

“They are going to have a staff person from Comprehensive on the premises 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Wibbenmeyer told the BND. “During some hours, there will be more than one person.”

Plans call for one of the 15 leased homes to be used as a Comprehensive office.

Greg Frerking, superintendent of Freeburg Community High School District 77, said he had heard rumors about SAVE’s plan for the residential area, but he doesn’t have an opinion on it. He noted that the district serves students with a variety of disabilities, including physical, mental and behavioral.

“We educate kids,” Frerking said. “That’s what we do. And we do a very good job of it. And that’s what I anticipate we will do with (kids living at the SAVE site) if they’re in our district.”