WELLS RIVER — The move to replace the now-closed, state-run juvenile detention center in Essex, Vt., has run into delays and isn’t expected to open until at least next spring.
Sean Brown, commissioner of the state Department for Children and Families, delivered the news about the newly named Wells River Treatment Center during a meeting Wednesday of the Joint Legislative Justice Oversight Committee.
Back in November 2020, Scott administration officials said they were hoping the new facility, located in the Wells River section of Newbury and owned by Becket Family Services of Orford, would open as early as Oct. 1.
Brown said Wednesday a variety of factors — obtaining permits, meeting with residents, discovery of a wetland on the property and the need for a traffic study — have pushed the timeline back, with a goal of opening next spring.
The Becket property in Wells River is being renovated into a six-bed, secure residential treatment facility for justice-involved youth between ages 12 and 17.
Brown said the project still needs approval from the municipality’s Development Review Board and to obtain a state land use permit through Act 250.
“Once we received the two permits, there’s a 30-day appeal period,” Brown told the lawmakers. “We do plan to move very quickly at the end of that time period.”
The commissioner said much of the renovation work will be done inside the existing building, so work can go on through the winter and site work can be finished up in the spring.
Lawmakers set aside $3.2 million for the renovation.
Rep. Alice Emmons, D-Springfield, the committee chair, asked Brown on Wednesday where the state will send justice-involved youth requiring a secure detention facility in the meantime.
Brown said they will go to the Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, N.H. He said since the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Essex closed, only one Vermont justice-involved youth needed to be sent to the New Hampshire facility.
The state closed the 30-bed Woodside center in Vermont last October 2020. Among the reasons was the dwindling number of justice-involved youth receiving services there, often ranging from just a handful to none at all.
Also, officials decided to close the state-run facility and contract with a private organization to provide secure treatment for justice-involved youth after the state faced a lawsuit over its use of restraints at Woodside. The federal judge in that case granted an injunction against the state, ordering it to take corrective action. Judge Geoffrey Crawford wrote in his ruling about a “horrific” video he viewed about a youth going through a crisis at Woodside.
Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, the oversight committee’s vice chair, said Wednesday that, when the idea of contracting out the service was proposed, administration officials said it would save the state money.
Sears asked Brown, the DCF commissioner, if that was still the case. Brown assured him that has not changed.
“I don’t want to commit to a number, but we still believe this will be a significantly more cost-effective model than Woodside was,” Brown said. “As we finalize the lease and the operating agreement and the budget for that operating agreement, we’ll have more details to share.”
The budget for Woodside had been about $6 million per year.
Sen. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, an oversight committee member, said that while financial considerations are important, so are the conditions of a facility.
“Having toured Woodside, I was horrified by the therapeutic setting for the kids,” Baruth said, referring to it as a correctional center-like facility.
“That’s one of the things that really draws us to the project, and this facility specifically,” Brown said of the new site. “It’s a former inn, so it has a really warm feel to it,” making it a more therapeutic setting.
Steve Howard, executive director of the Vermont State Employees’ Association, the union that represented the workers at the state-run Woodside facility, said after Wednesday’s meeting that he wasn’t surprised to hear the replacement project is behind schedule.
The union had lobbied against closing Woodside and instead pushed for a scaled-down, state-run facility staffed with state workers.
He blamed lawmakers and the Scott administration for moving too fast in pushing a “privatization plan” at the expense of having a well-thought-out proposal.
“This whole project was a giant mistake,” he said, and lawmakers should have been more skeptical from the start rather than “cheerleading” for it.
Marshall Pahl, chief juvenile defender and deputy defender general, told the committee Wednesday his office remains “very supportive” of the project.
“I’m not actually surprised by some of the hiccups that have come up along the way,” he said. “We’re talking now about a spring 2022 instead of a fall 2021 sort of opening date. That’s not out of the ordinary for a large construction project to start to run into those kinds of delays.”