State Shows Its Hand on CVTC's Future

Nearly four years ago, the state announced plans to rebuild the Central Virginia Training Center into a modern institution that would provide outstanding care for its more than 500 residents. The idea was to make the facility for people with profound mental and physical disabilities safer and more efficient for the staff and the residents.

As the price tag shrank from $90 million to something around $24 million today, parents of the residents and others began to sense that the state’s ultimate objective was to downsize the sprawling institution — even at the risk of reducing services. Among those services would be an acute medical care center that provided emergency room services on site when needed.

Plans announced last month confirmed the worst fears of the parents. After all the meetings and all the planning in the past four years, the training center’s future has been reduced to an upgrade of five buildings for 300 residents by 2014. The center had as many as 442 residents in June.

The upgrades will contain a number of basic features that should have been provided years ago for the residents. That would include sprinkler systems, emergency generators and smaller rooms that will offer more privacy for residents.

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That is one of a number of concerns raised by parents about the new plans. The state is understandably trying to deal with the rising costs of fixing or replacing outdated buildings in the face of shrinking budgets. At the same time, however, it has pursued its agenda of reducing the population at the training center, along with services.

Martha Bryant, vice chairwoman of the CVTC parents’ group, has tried to keep up with the state’s plans and continues to find them disturbing. “In five years, they plan to close 30 buildings and decrease the census below 300 residents,”she said.

“There are many unanswered questions about what is going to happen,” she added.

Many of those questions have persisted throughout the planning process, a process in which the state has always held the upper hand. The name of the agency now governing the training center has changed to the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services.

Where will the 140 or so residents now at the center be placed as the state reduces the population to 300? Conventional wisdom would put them in small group homes. Critics of such a move argue convincingly that group homes are not appropriate for the most severely handicapped at the training center.

“Hundreds of families choose CVTC” to be their relatives’ homes “and they are trying to force us out,” Bryant said.

Another nagging question is the one of emergency medical care. Residents are now treated in an acute-care center, which is a hospital-like facility at the training center. The Behavioral Health Department has already begun an experimental transition to fewer acute care beds at the training center.

Bryant worries whether the Lynchburg hospital’s er could accommodate residents from the training center in times of critical need, such as the winter flu season.

The most nagging question about its future is why the state prolonged the process for so long. Why did it solicit comments from stakeholders over the past four years if the plan all along was to upgrade a few buildings and downsize the overall institution? Why didn’t the state just level with those whose relatives are being cared for at the training center rather than lead them on through the maze of bureaucracy and double talk and shrinking capital expenditures?

Maybe officials in the state agency with new name will be able to answer those questions eventually.