Mayor Adrian Fenty on Wednesday laid out his plans to improve the District’s historically wretched care of the developmentally and mentally disabled.
Through the Department of Disability Services, a new Cabinet-level D.C. agency, Fenty said he expects his reform blueprint to be the “real difference-maker in what in the past has been rhetoric, but in the future will be action on behalf of our disabled neighbors.” The city is under court order and close watch to make quick and vast progress.
The new department was formerly known as the Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Administration, an arm of the Department of Human Services. No decisions have been made yet on its organization, officials said, including any staff cuts.
Fenty named Judith Heumann, most recently the World Bank’s adviser on disability and development, as the agency’s first director. Heumann will replace Kathy Sawyer, a consultant who was retained last spring.
“Disabled people, regardless of the significance of our disability, can make major contributions,” said Heumann, who uses a wheelchair. “But in order for this to occur we must remove barriers which have put people in harm’s way, limited their vision of what they believe they can achieve and lowered the expectations of our city regarding what contributions they believe we can make.”
Fenty’s reform plan includes 64 tasks in the areas of leadership, health, safety and welfare — from reassessing clients and reviewing all client deaths to shifting people out of “poorly performing facilities” and into less-restrictive residential settings. Peter Nickles, Fenty’s general counsel, said the mayor would like to have the goals met by November. Implementing them will cost between $1.3 million and $1.8 million.
In the most recent court judgment against the District, tied to a class-action lawsuit filed 30 years ago on behalf of 650 disabled residents, the city was again chastised. In a March 30 opinion, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle found that while the city has made some progress, it has “failed to comply with existing Court Orders in the core areas of health, safety, and welfare.”
The failures are systemic, serious and continuous, Huvelle wrote, “in that the same issues of noncompliance have persisted year after year.”
