Windsor residents are fed up, and who could blame them?
The town hosted a state prison for 200 years until 2017, when the Southeast State Correctional Facility finally closed. So when state lawmakers took up legislation earlier this month that would have “temporarily” located a 10-bed secure juvenile treatment center on the 100-acre former prison site off County Road, they got an earful.
Town Manager Tom Marsh and Donna Sweaney, a former state representative who now chairs the Windsor Improvement Commission, reminded senators that town residents have repeatedly made clear that they oppose any further use of the property as a prison. That almost certainly understates the degree of hostility to the idea.
Marsh and Sweaney implored the Senate Committee on Institutions to instead help redevelop the site for sorely needed housing, as Valley News correspondent Patrick O’Grady reported. Their objection eventually carried the day. Last week, the committee killed the proposal.
But the state is in crisis mode when it comes to dealing with youths who are caught up in the juvenile justice and/or child welfare systems. It closed the 30-bed Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Essex, Vt., in 2020, which was certainly the right thing to do. There is every indication that it was a house of horrors. A federal lawsuit filed in December on behalf of seven Vermont youths held at Woodside between 2016 and 2020 paints a picture of systemic abuse by staff that makes a mockery of the very notion of rehabilitation. (Readers who remember our colleague Jim Kenyon’s reporting on Woodside from 2015 will hardly be shocked by those allegations.) More recently, VtDigger has reported that Vermont youths in need of a secure setting have been sent to the Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, N.H., a facility with its own history of accusations of widespread abuse.
At a minimum Vermont needs a secure facility where troubled youths can receive skilled treatment for mental health and behavioral issues without the risk of being further traumatized. The state’s first choice for a replacement, in Newbury, is on hold while it appeals a permit denial by the Newbury Development Review Board. Windsor has been the only other possible site identified so far.
While mindful of Windsor’s staunch and entirely understandable opposition to the idea, we nevertheless wonder if there isn’t room here to make a deal that would serve the long-term interests of both the town and the state.
To that end, we offer this back-of-the-envelope proposal. Suppose the state transferred the prison property to Windsor for $1, in return for being able to operate the juvenile center for, say, 30 months. The state would lease the property from the town for monthly payments sufficient to cover the costs of hiring consultants to develop a detailed master plan for redevelopment of the property, perhaps a mixture of affordable and market-rate housing. At the end of 30 months, the state would vacate the property and remove from the site any physical obstacles to its redevelopment, as well as — and here’s the key — providing a handsome payment to the town to jump start the redevelopment.
Why would the town get on board with such a plan? Well, other than persuasion, it has very little leverage over what happens at the prison site until it gets control of the property, and a lump sum payment at the end would boost the chances of a successful redevelopment. What’s it in for the state? It would get a time-limited reprieve while finding an appropriate place for a permanent facility that would fulfill a pressing moral obligation. And it would not be seen to be running roughshod over Windsor’s very legitimate feeling that it has more than done its share over the years when it comes to incarcerating people in Vermont.
There certainly may be legal or other obstacles to such a plan, but the point is that finding common ground, often between valid competing interests, is what politics is, or should be, all about.