Hospital Hill Seeks Bowles’ Blessing

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on March 9, 2010
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From The Valley Advocate
By Tom Vannah and Mark Roessler
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

On March 1, Hospital Hill Development, LLC, submitted a “Notice of Project Change” to the state Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, asking OEEA Secretary Ian Bowles to find that the recent changes made to the Village Hill development plans outlined in the report are “insignificant” and do not require further review of the impact on the surrounding environment.

The plan will add more than a hundred new housing units to what is currently open space and woodlands near the Mill River. Should Bowles deem the changes “insignificant,” developers will be allowed to bypass a thorough state review of the changes and eliminate the opportunity for public comment on the finalized plan.

MassDevelopment, in partnership with Springfield-based Community Builders, has been working over the last decade to turn the site of the former Northampton State Hospital into a development that includes housing, offices, retail, and light industry. A local Citizen’s Advisory Committee (CAC) is charged with overseeing the project.

New York supported living under fire

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on March 9, 2010
in Mental Health and Opinion
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From The Gothamist
Monday, March 8, 2010
By Sabrina Jaszi

Peyser: Putting Mental Patients in Their Own Apts is Crazy

In this city of crazies, lots of people joked that a judge’s ruling to release mental patients from group homes and allow them to live in their own apartments was nothing special. But not Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who calls the decision (cue eye-roll) “insanity.” Peyser opines that the move will strengthen “the army of the damned,” leading to more incidents like a 2005 stabbing by an unsupervised mental patient who went off his meds and attacked a baby. She also accuses the judge who made the ruling, Nicholas Garaufis, of a potential conflict of interest.

Judge Garaufis—the same who ruled in favor of minorities in several cases concerning racism in the FDNY—is married to a board member at the Fountain House, an institution that according to Peyser, “supplies the very “supported” housing units to the city that the judge so loves.” Garaufis says he disclosed that information back in 2007, and no one objected. The columnist says he declined further comment.

State Hospital Memorial Eligible for CPA Funding

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on January 27, 2010
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From The Valley Advocate
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
By Mark Roessler

A memo sent out last week to the Northampton State Hospital Fountain Committee by Jacky Duda, the group’s chair, announced that the committee is eligible to apply for Community Preservation Funds for the planning and building of a memorial on the former property of historic Northampton State Hospital. The memo accompanied minutes from the group’s first meeting on January 3, 2010.

The group is a subcommittee of the Citizens’ Advisory Committee (CAC) that has overseen the redevelopment of the site of the former hospital. When it was initially looking for developers for the site in the 1990s, the CAC mandated that prospective applicants include a memorial in the site plan. Last year, the CAC considered multiple locations for the proposed memorial—a cast iron fountain that once stood at the hospital’s entrance. While it’s been decided the fountain will play a central role in the memorial, no design or overall concept has yet been proposed due to lack of funding.

Community Preservation (CP) funds could change that.

Gov. cutting $2.4 million from program

Published
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on December 17, 2009
in Current, Local News and Mental Health
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From The Republican via CHD
Monday, December 14, 2009
By Dan Ring

Elfie E. Arocho, of Springfield, said her 26-year-old son is turning his life around with help provided by an intensive clinical program in Springfield for the severely mentally ill.

Now, she is concerned that Gov. Deval L. Patrick has announced plans to abolish the program.

“I would be devastated,” said Arocho, 46. “It would be horrible.”

Patrick is cutting the service to save money that will be used to finance the jobs of 84 case managers in the state Department of Mental Health.

The state expects to save $2.4 million on an annual basis by eliminating the so-called Program for Assertive Community Treatment programs in Springfield and Chelsea. The Center for Human Development, a private, nonprofit agency, has run the program in Springfield under a contract with the state since 2002.

Without eliminating the two programs, the 84 case managers would be laid off, according to a spokeswoman for the Patrick administration.

Arocho said she couldn’t find anything that worked until she enrolled her son in the Springfield program about five years ago. Before that, her son would refuse to take medication and was in and out of hospitals, she said. He once grabbed her by the neck and attempted to choke her. She said she was so afraid of him that she couldn’t allow him to come home, forcing him to the streets.

Also see the follow up article:

Families make plea for program

From The Republican via CHD
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
By Dan Ring

A Springfield mother on Tuesday pleaded with an aide to Gov. Deval L. Patrick to cancel plans to abolish a state program that is helping her daughter recover from severe mental illness.

Patricia A. Dickson said her daughter, Takiyah D. Dickson, 25, was in an out of hospitals and plagued by hallucinations and paranoia until about four years ago when she enrolled in a special program for the severely mentally ill called Program for Assertive Community Treatment.

“For this program to end would be devastation for my family,” Dickson told Andrew M. London, an aide to Patrick.

Dickson and her daughter were in a group of parents, mental health professionals and mentally ill people who traveled to the Statehouse to lobby the Patrick administration to retain the special programs in Chelsea and Springfield.

Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics

Published
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on December 12, 2009
in Current and Mental Health
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From the New York Times
Friday, December 11, 2009
By Duff Wilson

Image care of the New York TimesNew federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.

Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?

The questions go beyond the psychological impact on Medicaid children, serious as that may be. Antipsychotic drugs can also have severe physical side effects, causing drastic weight gain and metabolic changes resulting in lifelong physical problems.

On Tuesday, a pediatric advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration met to discuss the health risks for all children who take antipsychotics. The panel will consider recommending new label warnings for the drugs, which are now used by an estimated 300,000 people under age 18 in this country, counting both Medicaid patients and those with private insurance.

State, town to work on defunct school

Published
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on December 12, 2009
in Current and Local News
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From the Amherst Bulletin
Friday, December 11, 2009
By Stephen C. Hill

MassDevelopment and the town’s Economic Development and Industrial Corp. will begin working on a memorandum of agreement to have the agency provide assistance in obtaining grants for the demolition of buildings and cleaning of hazardous materials at the former Belchertown State School.

Sample contracts with Springfield and Chicopee will be forwarded to the EDIC, said Richard Henderson, executive vice president for real estate for MassDevelopment, the commercial development arm of the state that helped redevelop the former Northampton State Hospital, Friday at a meeting with town officials, state legislators and MassDevelopment officers.

Grants for the state school cleanup could be a more readily available source of funding than the $10 million earmarked by the state Legislature for the task. That money would come from a state environmental bond for which $1.4 billion was available and $4.5 billion sought this fiscal year, and with the state’s fiscal situation bleak, other financing sources should be explored, said Anne Marie Dowd, vice president for legislative affairs for MassDevelopment.

Bait & Switch

Published
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Superintendent
on December 9, 2009
in Current, Development, Mental Health and Opinion
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From Kirby on the Loose
Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Image via Kirby on the Loose

Image via Kirby on the Loose

Bait and Switch at the Village?

A lot of people put in applications at the Hilltop Apartments on Village Hill when it opened three years ago, drawn by assurances from its developer, Community Builders, that its apartments would remain affordable. Hilltop has many nice apartments, the upper floors have terrific views, but it still has an institutional air to it. Long windowless corridors, no community space to speak of.

Bill “W” lives there, for now. He is a recovered alcoholic, works in food service in a supermarket. The pace is fast, he deals with the public directly, he works hard, puts in a full forty hour week and sometimes a weekend shift. He earns about $26,000 a year. For the last three years, almost since it opened, he has lived there. It was a big step up from a chaotic druggy rooming house on Green Street where he used to live. Community Builders engineered an $8 million rebuild of the old nurses quarters at the State Hospital, creating 33 apartments. Of the 33 units, 18 were supposed to be low income housing units, 8 would be for Department of Mental Health clients, and seven would be market level. The rents varied, based on your income and the square-footage of the apartments. The range of monthly rents in 2006 were $645 – $850 for a one bedroom apartments, $626 to $1050 for a two bedroom, and $1,050 for the lone three bedroom unit.

Citizens Advisory Committee meeting Wednesday

Published
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Superintendent
on November 28, 2009
in Citizen Advisory Committee, Current, Development and Memorialization
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Northampton State Hospital Citizens Advisory Committee
will next be meeting Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at John F. Kennedy Middle School, in the Community Room.
5-7pm
100 Bridge Road,
Florence

Agenda

  1. Approval of meeting minutes:
    • March 4, 2009
    • June 17, 2009
  2. Project updates
  3. Proposed Fountain Subcommittee
  4. Other Business

We need a mid-course correction on Village Hill

Published
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Superintendent
on October 8, 2009
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From Kirby on the Loose
Wednesday, October 7, 2009

A confession: In the days that Hospital Hill still had a hospital on it, and design aspects seemed as if they could be talked about at public hearings, I got over-involved fighting to save Old Main. Too many meetings. Ask my wife. But even in the thick of it, I wondered if I and other people were being obstructionist: was I involved just because Pat Goggins was the kingpin of the thing and getting about 98% of the commissions on property transfers? MassDevelopment is not a bunch of goons; maybe with Old Main gone and its so-called stigma gone and the old fountain safely crated up in some warehouse, people and industries would flood in, and the city would be better for it.

But it is now 2009, and Old Main is long gone, and many, many millions of state and federal dollars have been put into infrastructure up there. On December 10, 2002 MassDevelopment split up the bulk of the land north of Prince Street into lots for resale. 34 lots, constituting about 34 acres. There are streets up there, but most of them are empty of life. Phase two, which was the area adjacent to Paradise Pond and the Smith playing fields was left undivided. That was the area they were going to build big houses on big lots with views of Paradise Pond.

Six years has gone by, and the developer has had a chance to do his stuff untroubled by pesky community activists. The houses that we saw in all the many plans MassDevelopment has circulated over the years at CAC meetings are now here. Three of them.

Percolate

Published
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Superintendent
on July 2, 2009
in Citizen Advisory Committee, Current and Local News
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From Mary Serreze
Wednesday, July 1, 2009

CAC by Mary SerrezeLeft: members of the Hospital Hill Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) deliberate.

In case you missed it the first time—here’s a public document from the archives. Essential reading for anyone who is interested in the Hospital Hill story. In a nutshell: how is it that a lunatic asylum got taken over by a military contractor? Somebody with a more poetic writing style than mine might wish to take that one on. And perhaps the story needs to percolate: ten years from now, how will things be working on Hospital Hill?