Southtown Star

October 19, 2008

Grassroots effort brewing to save health care facilities

BY KRISTEN SCHORSCH

Staff writer

Everywhere Barbara Foster goes, she's talking.

At church, at the beauty salon, in her neighbor's yard - she's chatting up a storm trying to save decades-old health care services and hundreds of jobs in the Southland, including her own.

"Oh my God," Foster said with a laugh. "When I get to talking, people listen."

That's the point, said Foster, who has spent her 34-year career tending to residents and patients at a pair of state-run health care facilities in Tinley Park slated to close.

She's part of a growing grassroots effort to prevent the state from shuttering the Howe Developmental Center and the Tinley Park Mental Health Center, which lost millions in federal Medicaid funding last year after providing substandard care and lax recordkeeping.

Fliers are being posted.

Calls are being made.

Keep a lookout for a few pickets, too.

"We're trying to get everybody on board for this battle that's coming," said Louis Volpi, president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 1591 and a 23-year Howe worker.

Everybody includes families, advocates, small-town mayors and state legislators - everyone who has a stake in the future of Howe and the mental health center, which share a sprawling 295-acre campus along 183rd Street at Harlem Avenue.

Public hearings on the closures are set to begin next month. Organizers say they're slowly building an army to once again prevail.

Four years ago, dozens of lawmakers decried Gov. Rod Blagojevich's plan to close the Tinley Park Mental Health Center, which he said would help ease a $1.7 billion state deficit.

The state was going to sell the land to the highest bidder, and Tinley Park officials had big plans for the prime site near bustling Interstate 80.

But several local lawmakers wanted no part of it.

Cook and Will county boards, 10 Southland mayors and even then-state Sen. Barack Obama cried out against the closure. Patients would become homeless, they said. Crime would spike, overcrowding state prisons even more. No other community health center or hospital was prepared to absorb patients from southern Cook, Will, Grundy and Kankakee counties, they said.

During the next year, the state took a beating for its plan. Blagojevich pumped millions into the mental health center to keep it alive as state officials formed a task force to dive more in-depth into the center's fate. Nurses at the Tinley Park center said staff levels were dangerously low, and a new law required the state to get the nod from a bipartisan commission before it could close any state-owned or -leased facility.

The task force decided a psychiatric hospital should stay in the Tinley Park area before the mental health center was closed and sold. The state Department of Human Services said the hospital would close, but officials didn't have a timeline, a target date for when the state would transfer services or put the mental health center up for sale.

The issue quietly fell off the radar - until last month.

On Sept. 5, state officials once again announced they plan to close the state-run mental health center. But this time, officials said they aim to build a new psychiatric hospital, which contracted doctors would manage and state workers would staff. They also threw in the closure of the Howe Developmental Center, another state-operated facility, where residents have lived in a cluster of homes since the early 1970s.

The announcement was a joy for advocates who for years have called on the state to close Howe and the mental health center, both of which were stripped of their federal dollars last year; Howe for providing substandard care and the mental health center for lax recordkeeping. The mental health center has since been recertified.

But the announcement was brutally jarring for many whose children have lived in or used the facilities for decades.

"I don't know what we're going to do now," said Dorothy Mikrut, whose son has lived at Howe on and off since 1985.

The gloves are off

Louis Volpi, of AFSCME, blames the problems at Howe on top management and state officials who he says haven't held anyone accountable for the center's decline. One by one, new directors came and went, Volpi said.

"I still say it's about this land," he said. "(The state) just wants to close us down and get us out of Tinley Park. We're going to say 'no,' and we're going to fight and I mean to the last."

Realtors don't know exactly how much the land is worth, but the property is in a region experiencing explosive growth. The state first has to offer the land to another state agency, then local government gets dibs, according to Central Management Services, which handles the state's real estate.

Tinley Park has asked a consulting firm that drew up redevelopment plans two years ago for the mental health center site to dust them off for an update, Trustee Patrick Rea said.

Plans then called for a variety of homes, parks, commercial space and maybe a school. Tinley Park might have a hard time convincing businesses to move in thanks to the 9 percent Cook County sales tax rate that took effect July 1, Rea said. Will County, which has a 7 percent sales tax rate, is just across 183rd Street.

Since Lilia Teninty became director of the state division of developmental disabilities about a year ago, she said several people have been removed from their positions, from managers to supervisors, to help fix problems at Howe. Equip for Equality, a federally-mandated watchdog group for people with disabilities statewide that has called for Howe to close, has investigated the deaths of 25 people at the facility in the last three years.

Closing Howe is not about money, Teninty said.

"It's unfortunate to think that's what people are tying it to," Teninty said. "We are concerned about the quality of care of everyone we serve. Clearly the center was run for a full year without Medicaid match and today runs without Medicaid match. We took resources from other state-operated facilities to run (Howe). ... It's just gotten to a point where we recognize we need to move on."

Howe residents will follow the nationwide trend of moving into community-based homes, or they can move into other state institutions. It's up to residents and their guardians. Mental health patients - the center provides acute care to patients for a week or two - can stay in fewer beds at the Tinley Park center or move into new units at Madden Mental Health Center in Maywood or Chicago-Read Mental Health Center on the city's Northwest Side.

State officials intend to close Howe and consolidate the mental health center into one building by July 1, 2009.

A long road ahead

State Rep. Al Riley, (D-Olympia Fields), an urban planner by trade, said the state should have shovels in the ground now if its wants to open a psychiatric hospital in 2011.

The state would have needed to pick a site, which it hasn't done yet, make sure the land is zoned for a hospital and hosted public meetings to let residents know a psychiatric hospital was going to be built in their back yard, Riley said.

"The people just want you to deal the cards up straight," said Riley, whose district includes parts of Matteson, Tinley Park and Oak Forest, among other communities.

The state's hasty decision to close the Tinley Park health campus only will breed mistrust, Riley said.

"I think there should have been hearings about the feasibility of doing this beforehand instead of the Draconian, 'We're going to cut it," Riley said. "How you manage what you do determines whether or not people are going to think the fix is in."

Tanya Anderson, chief of clinical services for the state division of mental health, said the state is looking everywhere for buildable property and is consulting construction and finance experts to make sure the project is done right. Officials are concentrating on land in Will and Grundy counties because the areas are booming, Anderson said.

"We're really concerned about being able to provide the best care that we can for our patients," Anderson said. "We know we can't provide the best care in our current facility."

The 50-year-old mental health center has shared bathrooms, lacks wireless Internet capabilities and has terrible line of sight, meaning staff members can't always see patients at risk of hurting themselves if they hide in a corner, Anderson said.

Country Club Hills Mayor Dwight Welch said his position hasn't changed in four years. In 2004, he was one of 10 Southland mayors who accused Blagojevich of putting a "quick fix" sale ahead of long-term health care services in the southwest suburbs. He said he's still worried the impact of the shuttered health facilities will ripple throughout Cook County through job loss and a further strained economy.

"Unless we find alternative means of taking care of the needs for the mentally indigent and handicapped, you just can't say 'We're going to close," Welch said. "All that does is there will be more people on the street."

Homewood Mayor Rich Hofeld, who joined Welch four years ago to fight the mental health center closure, said his concerns about location haven't changed.

"Four years ago, I thought there should be services for residents as well as the families of the residents so they wouldn't have to travel to (Chicago) Read or others so far out of the area," Hofeld said. "To me, that is just wrong."

The state plans to redraw the boundaries for Tinley Park, Madden and Chicago-Read mental health centers so patients still could seek care at a facility near their homes, Anderson said. DHS also plans to buy bed days from hospitals in case the health centers don't have enough space, Anderson said.

Before her stint in the state Senate, Maggie Crotty spent years working in the classroom, in storefronts and on fundraising for people with disabilities. She's fought to increase their rights and strongly believes services for people with disabilities and mental illnesses need to remain in the Southland.

So when the public hearings begin, Crotty (D-Oak Forest) will be there.

"The thing I always relate to is how would I want to be treated," Crotty said.

Kristen Schorsch can be reached at kschorsch@southtownstar.com or (708) 633-5992. Kristen also blogs about Tinley Park at blogs.southtownstar.com.