Don’t cut services for the disabled

Closing Fircrest School or closing any Residential Habilitation Centers makes no sense.

The state budget shortfall should not be put on the backs of the vulnerable people. To cut and slash services for those who cannot fight back is cruel and inhumane.

In 1994 the state closed Interlake School, consolidated the clients elsewhere and the savings were to be used for community services for the disabled. In 1996 Sen. Darlene Fairley opposed a bill that would have established a planning panel to look at ways to develop land at Fircrest without closing the school. No bill, no study, no panel and no tenants providing a stream of income for the community disabled. Biased and incomplete information states that closing Fircrest would save money in the 2005-2007 biennium but failed to state that closing and moving the clients would cost $35 million now. Upgrading and renovating will be an immediate cost, and since Rainier has no nursing facilities, who will serve the neediest clients from Fircrest? Where are the community facilities willing to provide care for medically fragile, severely retarded clients? I have not seen any advertisements or invitations to visit their service location.

The lack of planning, lack of community resources for a large number of clients – and let us not forget the supposed high value of the property to house the City of Shoreline council – are glaring inequities.

The silence of the people most affected is absolutely deafening in these arguments. The clients are not being considered in this at all. Their families will be torn away from them, new staff and doctors and nurses will not know who they are, how to read their signals of duress, stress and needs. Moving clients, either way, is the most insensitive, cruel and politically motivated supposed solution to a budget crisis that punishes the vulnerable, divides the advocates for the disabled and does not provide a solution.

Maria Walsh

Woodinville