One casualty of my recent focus (bordering on obsession) to the baseball playoff picture was a visit I made Tuesday last to a community forum held at the Holly Center. For those of you not from Salisbury, the Holly Center is a facility that houses severely to profoundly mentally retarded individuals. I suppose this was a case of rank having its privileges – the sole reason I was invited is because I’m soon to be a politician. In fact, out of perhaps 50 to 75 that attended this breakfast I’d have to say at least half were political candidates, and the reason for the breakfast (to put it bluntly) was to justify the Holly Center’s very existence. In their word, they wanted these elected officials to “confront” the state’s bureaucracy.
The actual sponsor of this gettogether was Holly Community, which is a group dedicated to serving what I’d call the ancilliary needs of the Holly Center population and benefit their quality of life. The overriding goals of Holly Community are to improve the lives of those who reside at Holly Center, provide options for private caregivers, and utilize the facility as a whole more fully; in essence making it a “one-stop shop” for individuals in need of their services.
At this continental breakfast, we were given a Powerpoint presentation that included a short history of the Holly Center facility. The site along Snow Hill Road was deeded to the state back in 1969, and 6 years later the Holly Center opened. As originally built there were nine residential cottages and buildings for recreation, education, administration, and an infirmary. Basically it was built to be its own little community with a target population of 225. The population has never gotten to that point though, at its peak in 1991 there were 205 residents and now there’s about 100. Because of this population shortfall, 3 of the buildings (including the original infirmary) have been converted to other uses, while one cottage was converted into a new infirmary. Groups that use former Holly Center buildings include Healthy U, the Child Advocacy Center, Wor-Wic Community College, and the Eastern Shore Laboratory.
A goal of the Holly Community group is to build up the population by giving those who have dependents in need of their services the ability to choose care at the center. Currently the state of Maryland has a preference for integrating those who would’ve been the target population of the Holly Center into the community at large as part of group homes. (My stepdaughter works in a similar group home in Ohio, she is one of the caregivers to five adult individuals whose mental ages range from infancy to age 12.) In 1981, claimed the presenters, there were 11 facilities similar to theirs in Maryland, now there’s just four and Holly Center is the lone one on the Eastern Shore (there’s state-run facilities in Hagerstown, Cumberland, and Owings Mills as well.) The Holly Community group argues that because the facility is there and already on the state’s budget, it should be one of the choices available to those in need; however, the state discourages admissions and only a few have occurred in the last decade. Currently the state has money in its budget for what’s called “respite care” (allowing temporary admissions to avoid family caregiver burnout) but that program will sunset in September of 2007. The Holly Community group chided Governor Ehrlich for wishing to shift the focus of caring for the severely mentally disabled to community-based services, but admissions to state-run facilities were practically ceased in 2001 before he took office. They also noted that a bill allowing the choice of using state-run facilities for care didn’t make it out of committee in the last General Assembly session.
The Holly Community group also talked about the loss of employees in the last decade; at one time there were 374 employees and now the number is about 285. They asserted that payroll is about $15 million (of a budgeted $18 million) and the economic impact to the region is over $90 million. Additionally, the group complained that other state agencies who advocate community-based care get 90% of the budget targeted for those individuals who have severe to profound mental retardation.
One asset the Holly Center does enjoy is a large parcel of land. The site is 75 acres and stretches back from Snow Hill Road all the way back to the apartments at the end of Onley Road. At one time it was planned to sell the “back 40” as state surplus land, but that was shelved in part by Delegate Conway, or at least that was what was said. (I’d have to say that the Holly Community folks are pretty strong backers of Norm, they frequently referred to him doing things for the center including the respite care funding.) A portion of that land is going to be developed soon as a new senior center, the 30,000 square foot facility is on target for a mid-2007 groundbreaking.
What the Holly Community advocated to those of us in attendance was a model that is being used in the commonwealth of Virginia, that of a “community resource center”, or, the “one-stop shop” I called it earlier. And to me that actually seemed fairly logical. With an estimated 700 families on the Eastern Shore in need of these services, it makes sense to have this concept become reality.
Let’s face it, there’s a large NIMBY factor that comes into play when word gets out that a group home for the profoundly retarded is plopped into the community at large. To a large extent, that’s fear of the unknown, but just as there’s communities that are tailored to “active seniors” and are age restricted enclaves, maybe here’s an opportunity to have a community of individuals who are in various states of mental retardation have the care they need in one facility. Perhaps the entities who run group homes in various areas could have a parcel leased to them by the state on the Holly Center grounds and locate the group homes there. With a senior center coming on site, there’s the possibility of interaction between these two distinct communities as well. This would also allow the current facilities to be used for their intended purposes more fully and also allow for better training opportunities for the personnel in the privately-run group homes.
Until mankind figures out a way to magically cure the condition of severe to profound mental retardedness, there’s going to be a need for someone to take care of these less fortunate individuals. While families of those afflicted and privately-run entities take up an increasing portion of the slack, it’s still been dictated by the citizens of Maryland (as is their right as one of the “several states” under the Constitution) that the state assist to one extent or another with seeing to the needs of that population. Given that, I think that this care should be given as efficiently (yet effectively) as possible and to me the Holly Center has some underused assets in that quest that should be taken advantage of. Let’s allow people more choice in the matter.
