December 8, 2025 – 212 Cochituate Road Advisory Committee – Video & Transcript
December 8, 2025 - 212 Cochituate Road Advisory Committee
recording in progress recorded for the ability to see it at a later date and invite individuals
to comment if they like recall from them in the moment next reading includes in person
bill whitney i'm assuming we have this point john thomas those may join us as we go next agenda
we'll include public comment next we'll bob swain president of the uh director of high spirit
community farm tony wolf will be here in person as well commissioner of mass ability for the state
of massachusetts and then we'll be discussing possibly discussing the draft report and
of proposed president bozeman we have a select board also discuss potential report of the of this
committee to the selector so at this point anybody here in public comments being none i invite
bob swain to bring his chair up on that table evening thank you brand new yourself that's where you live
and um all right i'm bob swain i live in cambridge um 18 years ago we started high spirit community farm
which is a neighborhood small community for adults with severe um special needs i'm going to interrupt
you for a second so i invited bob swain to come and join us this evening less to talk about
advocating for high spirit more to tell us some of the stories and some of his experiences with
dss because if many questions have come up during our meetings about uh dss requirements and
interactions with dss what they're looking for in shared living arrangement so i appreciate you coming
tonight and uh answering some of our questions and maybe you could start by telling us um about your
lawsuit that you filed against the state and what that was about why you had to file that repeat the
question sure is it my understanding that something high spirit had to sue the state no okay oh no no um the
swains uh we had several um stops along the way uh in front of a judge when we were negotiating with the school system
for my son's uh right to go to public school okay yeah for some reason i i i thought there was a dispute
between what high spirit were trying to achieve and the states oh yes but that was with the dbs so um
that well i can start at the beginning when we um we're trying to find a place for my son um
we could not so i think jimmy looked at 60 different places around the state whether they were in brief homes in his case you know they were hospital settings which were an option and um at that time there were still some institutions that were an option um none of those things worked for us um so we started a high spirit community farm and we did that by renting a house and hiring some people forming a 501c3 um and so then we went to the dds uh our local chapter um and told them that we actually had found a spot for our son and this was how he was going to be cared for and this is about what it would cost and um uh we had we had engaged in the agency at that time that would help us and that's uh that was an important piece of it um and honestly we walked in and they said thank you you know this is i mean the backlog at that time was so huge to find placements for adults with severe disabilities that um their first reaction to us was just nothing but pure thanks so great you're coming to us not with a problem but with a solution um so that was that was good and we started with a single house and we had five other um socially supported citizens that were in that house with my son so
that was more than they wanted in a single house and we um ended up agreeing with them that that did not work that well that was really chaotic and when you have five people that need one-on-one care that turns out that's about 20 support staff you know if you're talking eight-hour shifts or it's it's just a huge number of people in a single house so at that time this is more than 10 years ago um i went back to the dds so this time it was mary lou sutter um who was the um secretary and she said fine do it in two houses you know you still conserve all these people you still have all the staff and you can add new staff and still working with the same agency terrific you can buy the house next door so we did and uh that worked well it worked worked better by a long shot uh at that time we had three residents in one house and four residents in another house and when i speak of residents these are the socially supported citizens that have uh severe cognitive intellectual disabilities um but it was hard from a staffing standpoint um it's it's not so much just the caregiving it's the um the programming throughout the day getting into the community having the community in so that at that point i went back to the mary lou um and by that time mary mgeen was already installed she's she's the current deputy commissioner of the department of disability services um and everybody that i spoke with before i got to mary lou sutter said no you you can't add a third house this is flying in the face of something called the um olmsted act and it's going to be nothing but trouble for us i went to mary lou sutter and i said this these are the staffing challenges these are the economics if we added a third house this would really work well and she said okay well we'll make it a pilot program you can do it but we're gonna you know we're gonna watch you every step of the way and if you can prove it that it works then um terrific and that was seven years ago uh we were the only community that went the whole way through covid without ever closing without ever missing a day program we kept all our staff all the way through covid um so that was a pretty good test um we went back to to at this time mary lou was gone um jane ryder was still there uh mary mgeen was still there um but the up the top of the health and human services was changing with the bigger um to keely change and they they can't they have just been incredibly supportive they've seen how this works and so what we've been doing for the last few years other than continuing to show them budget success stories um is we've been helping other communities like high spirit begin and that's been very successful but the state has also been doing it on their own so they're now there's melmark we've had nothing to do with them but that's a larger community that's working neighborhood um we really believe that the the small neighborhood is the key you know keeping it really small if you get too big you lose track of people and then you don't get to give that same kind of care so we're we advocate for no more than three houses um uh and staffing uh affordable housing um all the things necessary to have a small neighborhood within a larger community that's offering support and that's what we have in great very good and that's actually what we're hoping to achieve in wayland too let me just say a little bit more about wayland and high spirit community farm how that works high spirit community farm is not going to be a part of the wayland vision for high spirit this is another group of families so high spirit community farm is a small neighborhood where the families of the people with severe disabilities are pouring energy into it whatever way they can we can't distract them and have them start a community in wayland we have to show people how to do this which i think we've been pretty effective at doing the reason i say that is because four communities in our model have already started i'm sure you've heard of island autism that's now got two houses in the grange um there's a branching tree which has a property in their first house two more on the docks they've got nine people uh there's the new england collective new england equity collective which is in brockton they were given seven acres by um the diocese uh what am i missing new england collective high spirit use um there's a few more there's one called service net there's one called sale now a sale home in hingham they've built their building um anyway this is happening very quickly it's like salt crystallizing on this around the string we've said this works we can show you how it works we can show you that it's a much less restrictive um way to live for people with disabilities we can show the state that it's much less expensive to do better care the caregivers have a better life these are all essentially great can you expand on that yeah in particular it seems like you've taught the state on a model that is effective um in achieving the state's end so that's fair oh did we teach them listen i don't think we taught them anything the state um i think the state was waiting for us honestly if you look at the responses it's like they've been waiting so but in fact tim cahill um just last week asked if we would come and make a presentation at the state house because um they are looking for other solutions so what do you think the state likes about what you're doing well that's worked and it hasn't perfect there hasn't been there hasn't been a problem with it um the the caregivers the support that um our people need and the high spirit community farm provides um that support receives housing so in this small neighborhood you're also fulfilling an affordable housing issue so that's a big piece of it the transportation part very often people in a you know a certain
community that's um there to provide service for people and you know i'm thinking of rehab or um even aging but any any small community that has service provided um one or two very often it's lonely and isolating or the other thing is you go out for your day programs and that's a lot of transportation costs the high spirit model doesn't have either of those the community is there as part of the surrounding community it's a small neighborhood in that community so there's the transportation piece is very expensive to take that out or reduce it in the equation that's a that's a big part of it the other part of it is the oversight so in a group home situation in fact the group homes tend to take over the guardianship of the individual that's there high spirit the parents are still the guardians the parents are still invited in the homes are actually owned by the non-profit and the support staff that lives there it's their home so when a parent comes in they're invited but these parents are part of of everybody's life so we're not giving up our sons as some institution that we don't know what's happening to them and how does it go how's it going how to ask it this way what is funding for the residents well it's been increasing every year since we started so we started with a lot of private funds um because the state they probably contributed you know about the same amount they contribute for a prisoner which i think was about eighty thousand dollars per individual um and since then um it's increased steadily i think it's still about half of what hospital care would cost for our people um but it's it's been really good and honestly they've helped us find um little nooks and crannies in the funding stream such as um there there are there are the support that we get from the state allows us to um operate um with a balanced budget so without our raised we do raise funds so we raise funds for capital expenses cars house repairs um in fact we we raise funds for retirement funds for our staff um we have brand writers we're working at that all the time too stephanie any questions uh for bob swing you're good so you mentioned um localized day programs as a cost saver what are some of the other reasons why you guys are less expensive than other models we um sounds like there's a lot of volunteerism so you have people time maybe yeah we do we have a lot of volunteers but i i think that we're messy you know you we're living like regular human beings we're not living like we need some special hygiene or some you know some incredible uh hand over hand care we're just living like regular human beings and that is a lot less expensive than um other kinds of care that are provided so and have you guys been done any new construction and would that change the balance sheet at all or well it's a it's a funny question because all these new communities are doing new construction because we recommend it but no we bought a some of these other ones are doing new construction yeah yeah we we bought an old bed and breakfast that was our first one that had the required 11 bedrooms and five bathrooms and that's been nothing but a headache as you can imagine then we bought a farm a barn next to it that's not right yeah then we then we bought an attorney's house next to that and that's pretty good yeah but it's feasible to do construction with a project like this like and other places or it would be next yeah cape cod villages is gorgeous i mean you would all want to live in island it's stunning um so some of these places are just well nice yeah nice new houses but ours are not
good john thomas any questions uh no thank you i think i'm good i'm curious about how you achieve your economies and you're talking a little bit about okay you're messy well i i assume most facilities are providing those services that they are required but not going above and beyond what's required so yeah how is that happening well i'm i'll make it pretty simple i think um it costs 350 000 to run a house you can just kind of imagine that if you've got a house with three individuals that need 24 7 care and they all everybody's eating a common meal so regular kitchen regular oatmeal the people who lives there make breakfast you know normal breakfast everybody sits down at the kitchen table and has breakfast then you go about your day so you put on your boots in our case in high spirit community farm and your car hearts and you go out to the farm and you work all day so that's not a program that's expensive the the the the work is for its sake of beauty and it's the the people who are getting paid to oversee that work are that's just part of their regular job there's no extra there's nothing extra there um so there's no there's no specialized skills for which you would pay a premium no in fact that's a really good point you brought up some of our best caregivers uh were receptionists at target or hvac guys or you know you just don't know i mean people it's really about finding people who want to commit to living in a small neighborhood but a community where you're giving care and giving care to people turns out if it's not your own son is a is a huge amount it's very fulfilling and a ton of fun so people people stay too our our staff um stayed a long time we can when you talk about day programs yeah um is your day program outdoor activity on the farm not for everybody but that's that primarily the answer is yes okay so we have one person um who goes to something called extra special teas and works at a tea shop every day we have um another person who does that a couple of days um and then works on the farm the other days uh not not exclusively but mostly yeah okay but there's tons of things to do it's not just pushing wheelbarrows we have we have a woman who just does dry seeds and um folding laundry stuff that's what she likes to do and she's good at it so it's that kind of okay therapy though where it's not really therapy it's just life yeah it turns out it has positive effect very often better than therapy yeah so i they're not i'm not hiding anything about the cost it does cost 350 000 to run a house and it costs that for two people and it costs that for four people yeah but three people work yeah yeah okay that's very interesting uh i have a number of questions that i can't answer we have a lot of time all right so uh i'm interested that uh when you went to the state to go from two houses to three you felt that would make a big difference were there economies of scale that you achieved by having three houses yeah um specifically it takes a lot of weight off caregivers so people get sick people have their own kids they have to take care of they're there are all these things that draw a caregiver out of a house right so in with two houses as often as it happens it was really hard to cover everything with three houses you don't even notice so that that was the biggest piece of it um
and it there there's you you end up filling the car when you go to extra specialties you go out for pizza everybody that goes whereas with two houses you might be taking one or two people so events are bigger you know special olympics is a it's a everybody goes it's a big it's an it's a neighborhood two houses was better than one three houses is it's a little neighborhood and that's that's what we've hit on that we think is kind of the big deal there's three half three three little houses there's some dynamic there that works where with two houses it's not just the same people right weighing on each other all the time there's enough going on that the the community has a life of its own that being said you you grew from one house to two houses to three houses um do you advise the people you're working with to try to build two or three houses yeah at the get-go not not necessarily the get-go you got to start somewhere yeah it's not like there's a ton of money in this world at least not in in the world of service for people with severe intellectual disabilities there's there's not a ton of money right um nobody graduates makes a bunch of money right so um start wherever you can you know and so we we recommend you you start with the goal of hopefully having a full and vibrant small neighborhood but start yeah and uh do most of the caregivers uh i take it they live on site yeah and are they single people or couples or couples usually um we have a single person now um usually couples yeah uh we've had couples with two kids um right now we have couples with no kids and a single person but we're open to to you know couples with parents or parents-in-law you know just it's a small neighborhood if you want to be part of that that community and live there there's no reason you you shouldn't so to what degree um is your small neighborhood connected to the larger community uh significantly um i mentioned a few things extra specialties um therapeutic riding um we have something out there called canna which is a community access to the arts um birkshire south which is the special olympics training but swimming and you know the community center there we go to those things every day in room so that those are important but you know maybe more important than all that is the pizza joint and the movie theater and that's not just for the the residents but for the support staff i mean to keep the support staff you have to be near enough to uh a vibrant you know social scene and community that those people can have life as well a full life yeah conversely do people from the community come to your place to volunteer or yeah um we have several events each year we have two work days a year and we have tour days and things like that but it's a little tricky i mean the doors um kind of open but at the same time it is a uh facility that has very vulnerable people there and so the the state and the families want to make sure they're safe that's probably a top priority right so
but it's not different from you know your own home your own small neighborhood sure so i i almost would say it's like if you build a tennis court on that property plenty of people will be there all the time i think people will be part of it not everybody can walk in and play thanks there right somebody's got to kind of check the gate i have his hand raised uh pardon me just one more um which i have lost an ether so john go ahead what do you got john uh bob i know so you you've evolved um into kind of a non-traditional model in terms of uh how dds usually does business but i was curious if you could talk a little bit about uh how the funding works um do you have a contract with dds uh it does the funding come out of their residential line item um so that's that's it's a multi-pronged question maybe you could uh hear hear all of my questions and then maybe uh respond um yeah and just as part of that also you were mentioning that you have low turnover which is fantastic and as i'm sure you're aware that's always a challenge when when serving this population is to attract and retain good good staff um do you have so maybe if you could also address that how do you pay uh your staff maybe uh you'd be willing to uh talk about what your what what you pay your entry level staff i'd be curious to hear that and and just finally how do you i'm assuming one of the reasons you're able to retain staff is um you're able to address the the cola issue and if you are um are you able to tap into the the salary reserve which provides um contracted vendors the ability to pay their uh their workers a cost of living increase um that one i might not be able to ask answer because i'm not sure i know um but i can do the rest if you like um so the the funding follows the individual for the most part so the if you have a person who has epilepsy and autism and is blind and that those the state prioritizes um what their citizen would would need and there's some back and forth there most of our people are called priority one like they're they're not going to um survive long on their own so they need supports um so this there's a range for the adults in high spirit but it's you know it's it covers the 350 000 between the three of them if that gives you a good idea and those that comes in the form of ssi funds it comes in the form of occupancy funds comes in the form of um uh that where they're called waiver funds but they all come through the dds and then through an agency that's um and and half of them are federal funds in most states um in massachusetts i think we're down to about 35 maybe 40 percent maybe tony knows when she comes later but i think most of our funds are actually from our own tax base so that the health and human services i think this year had a budget of three and a half billion and so a percentage of that goes to adults with um these sort of challenges so most of our funds come through that but they come through the individual so when my son walks through the door he's bringing with him whatever the state says it's going to cost for him to survive that's the that's the first question i think is that a good enough answer or do you want more well i was actually curious if you if you were aware and if you're not that's that's perfectly fine i'm trying to get a little bit more um into the the details of how the money flows to your son and to the other residents uh for example other individuals and other models might receive their funding through family support dollars so which would be tied to the person some other people would have self-directed funding which sounds like it might be more in line with what the individuals in this program are are receiving i don't know and then most common of course the biggest line item in the dds budget is the residential account which basically provides for funding for more traditional contracted services right through a residential vendor which i'm assuming is not the case here no we are we're part of that lineup yeah we're part of those residential funds but we're not we're not a group home so those are not our our funds and we're not exactly shared living so we're a hybrid of those two models okay so we call ourselves um integrated work life um but we do not have uh a line item that details exactly how we're funded we are still a pilot program and you're bringing up an important point um or it used to be important we actually don't think it's so important anymore i i can give you the history of that if you like but let me let me answer your other questions first um the uh you wanted to know i believe the next piece was what we pay people um and our starting salary is forty thousand dollars per year but that includes um room and board forty thousand plus room and board um you have access to a car if you're using it for private use you can pay it uh i think it's 52 cents a mile or something like that um after you've been there three years we contribute to your retirement plan um and you get six weeks of vacation a year that's that's our package more or less okay um it equates to about 80 000 a year i think in great barrington for that sort of housing um that you would receive here it might be more because the housing would be much more expensive i would think but you have to pay people enough that they can save enough money or or you know have enough money that they can live their own life and so we feel like this 80 000 number is um that attracts a really good quality of person so that's that's what we pay people um now back to the pilot program thing which we could end up going down this way for a long while while so you can stop me whenever you like but um we we went to write a bill and we had supports from uh mike bartlett mary lou center wrote the bill um we had support um representatives in great barrington um in cambridge uh out here um and down south shore and we got it pretty far through and then um mary uh mcgeen said you know what i think we could just solve this legislatively without writing an actual bill so the state has taken this new position this has all happened within the last couple of years that the the way the olmstead law is written it's not clear and so their their new take on it is is much more nuanced than it used to be and i think you'll find that from you'll find people throughout the dds who who now say that's true that in fact the federal law does not say that people with intellectual intellectual disabilities cannot live together some states interpret it that way pennsylvania for instance still does not allow two individuals with uh that are socially supported to live in the same house as i said in massachusetts i'm sorry so the int what what was the i i'm sorry if i missed this but what was the intent of the the bill what were you trying to do by initiating well well we we the intent of the bill was to get rid of this language that says that uh that first of all the language of the olmstead act i'm not going to be able to come up with but you could look it up um um but least restrictive center yeah it's it's interpreted very differently from state to state right massachusetts took a very progressive view and it's taking a more and more progressive view every day um and that's something that we feel like we've had uh some impact on on that that sea change and that's why all these small communities are opening up now because we've discovered they're less lonely they're better you can get caregivers and people have a better life and it's much easier to integrate into a larger community so that's that's where we are we're actually not pushing for the legislative change right now we're allowing we're watching the dds commit to all these other small communities and very happily so so you were concerned that dds might come along and have a a change of heart or there'd be a new administration there'd be new people at the top that would all of a sudden turn over the rock and see you guys and say oh wow we can't have this and so you were concerned that you would you would lose what you built exactly okay other questions john no i i guess i'm good i'm i'm just really uh impressed that you're able to do what you do uh it sounds like the the whole pilot program has given you a bit of a get out of jail free card in terms of circumventing what a lot of other providers uh have to abide by so had had to abide by not to abide i think they have to have to anymore they had to yeah those those are the old days though i think this is this is new so yeah well as you can imagine for for us waiting in at this point with the ambiguity you've described you know we've talked to a lot of folks and they have different viewpoints about how flexible pds might be with us they used to not be flexible you know um so if you were waiting into the same project today knowing what you know now about the environment would it have changed how you developed your property or selected your residence or any substantive difference in what you do no okay thank you no i don't i i would say though that if we were doing it today we would not have the worries we had about it then yeah so we're we're pretty confident that this is the way that it's going
and it is it's a victory lap for us honestly and we'd love to see it you know but it's really fun to see these other communities start sure thank you well how is it that you're not a group home given that uh your residents can ees support um that requires a level of oversight that we felt was oppressive um
one thing um tend to be um staff very differently you need you need nursing staff we don't have nursing staff you need all kinds of um sort of protective uh barriers that we don't have i i i since we're not a group home we didn't go that way i can't really speak to that but i think if you look at a group home situation and you look at a neighborhood situation they're night and day so this is a the the big thing for me in the group home was i wasn't i didn't want to give over the guardianship of my child for somebody that i didn't know that well does the fact that you're not a group home affect the availability of funding from used to doesn't anymore thank you and this might be out of your area but do you think that same flexibility around having two group homes in the same space would apply or is that a whole different set of rules because we've heard one person in the last month say absolutely not you have to be a certain distance apart another person said no i think it's pretty negotiable there's a there's a new one that's uh i think it's in hyannis called uh it's three group homes um they're not right next door to each other but they're they don't say happy uh um staff that's managed they're like in it's in hyannis um called something like hi ho or something i can't remember but
i think that's changing to by the minute so that's seems like it has to seems like it's a crazy it's a crazy rule the rule is written in response to um institutions that needed to be torn down and like you know you start caring for somebody in an institution and very quickly you lose track of that person's individuality and austerity starts to become a priority and you know you're trying to run the institution in a way that is very different than you would run your own home we're trying to make high spirit as close as possible to how you'd run your own home let me mention um no mark really on your comments um are you familiar with that project and how is how different is it i i oh i am not familiar with it the only reason i know it is because mary beguine told me about it she said oh yeah here's another one that's happening right now so i think it's four buildings in tokesbury uh housing 20 residents but also uh something a cafe or some other sort of retail things uh no they're just they're just happening all of a sudden yeah really exciting you know three acres cited another questions well we really appreciate you coming in tonight um they're very informative um learned a lot well i'm delighted to come i'm excited that you guys are your town is thinking about this sort of stuff it's such a it's really inspiring to think that the town would be willing to give up profit to help people who need it to be helped it's awesome well you you uh we appreciate those comments yeah but as you know individuals who are different you know enhance the community and i think that that'll be the case here yeah yeah well thank you very much enjoy your holiday thanks for coming good luck with all your hard decisions thank you very much thank you bob our agenda included appearance by deb johnson and that was in the agenda because it was possible that it was possible that she might appear but scheduling wise she's not able to so we'll get her in at another meeting okay she's the area director of the mass department to buy developmental services but um in a few minutes tony wolf will be here she's commissioner mass ability which used to be as soon as it's all about them disabled in business it's not screwed up commission yeah yeah i got rebranded that's right and uh but before we get to uh tony we have no minutes to approve regarding the report that um request proposal that bill really put together he invited us to comment uh on the report to bill i'm not sure you've seen anything gold from since then also she volunteered to put together the report that we've had a company the armed closed rfp um appreciate that you um and now we have a few minutes um is there information that you'd like to elicit from the committee at this stage um as you begin to put pen to paper um i i think what i'll do is just you know come up with a pretty standard format with uh you know the charge the assumption uh organizations and speakers uh range of populations to be served amongst which we may or may not have to pick depending on what kind of project we do um you know and we haven't really drawn any conclusions yet and that's kind of everything else is just reporting of this happened that happened and these are the externalities we've discovered that are relevant to our work and put those in would it help you to um ask the committee members questions on that would help us get to conclusions that would help you do your report um yeah i guess one question is about the uh ownership of the buildings of the physical plant and property so we're seeing models where there's uh for-profit and entity uh owning it uh which we talked some about like that last week and then non-profit entities and it in some of the stuff i read that's kind of a breakpoint decision making whether you go with a for-profit entity um the idea being that you may have some conflict in the long term if they fail to meet their profit objectives then they may look for some way to change the nature of their business and you end up with a facility not doing what you really wanted where uh non-profits tend not to have that pattern once they've established their mission they tend to persist in their mission over time so one question would be do we want to decide we do not want to do business with a for-profit owner of the physical plant comments i guess my sort of going in assumption was that our recommendation would be to encourage the select or to be open to different models that are out there and to evaluate them as they came in and we did have one group uh that is a for-profit builder that builds these buildings and they turn around and they sell them or lease them to non-profits who operate them and they seem to have that down pretty well uh so i i wouldn't and you know they pay a few bucks in property taxes which wouldn't be terrible so okay but just one person's opinion i i uh i tend to agree i think the rfp could be written in such a way that it uh provides enough guidelines and enough um enforcement ability by this by the town to make sure that the end itself is isn't shaved and uh i think there are very few for-profits by the way in this industry i think we know yeah but uh but by keeping keeping it open never know what might come up what groups might end up responding to it on yeah yeah i have to say i started out very anti-for-profit and having experienced steward health care recently um but hearing the speaker last week i was pretty impressed by what they were doing and so i think i wouldn't rule it out necessarily yeah but i some type of guard rail so that the commission is maintained if the town puts up a sizable contribution into the to the pot i think you'd want to have a land disposition agreement that speaks to continue uh nature of having the uh the residence needs taken care of the alternative it could be a ground lease so i i i think there are protections that could be built in okay you may also we may also want to advise the select board to have the first right of refusal so that if somebody gets in trouble and they need to sell it uh the town has the opportunity to set up there forever let's understand it's over to our highest bidder okay well let me come back that's fine so commissioner welcome good to see you come on up to the to the mountain good evening commissioner we're so happy to see you thank you hello it's nice to meet everyone in this cold day and i dressed up for a cold night i know not fooling around so we appreciate you coming this evening uh commissioner and i think you have a sense in your friendship with gene what we're about here and uh so i won't blame that background uh you don't live too far from here no it was 15 minutes away it was a really tough for me it's not hard to bet off but we appreciate being here in person um so this committee's been meeting since about august this year and uh exploring areas that most of us um uh didn't know much about and it's been real interesting i think for many of us in education in a very positive way and uh you've been in this field for many years and maybe you could tell us uh about your experience saying before and what you see in the industry trying to address housing needs for adult for disabilities sure be happy to so it's a pleasure to meet everyone and i just again as i said to tell on the phone uh i really commend uh the town of wyland to do this housing is such a critical issue for everyone um particularly individuals with disabilities particularly accessible housing so i can't say enough of how much i have appreciated all your diligence and hard work so thank you so let me say a little bit about who i am and i was just saying as we were walking in the hallway it's a maze in state government uh and it's amazing figuring out how best to access services for everyone so let me just try to kind of set the stage about the agency that i represent so we used to be called mass rehab commission uh we're now called mass ability and the reason for that was that we really wanted to make sure that the name of our agency demonstrated the strength and the talent of individuals with disabilities but people didn't need to be rehab they're not broken they have a disability um and so that's really one reason why we changed our name um how who we serve is a little complicated in that we have uh major agencies that serve certain populations and i know i think in january because i was going to invite the commissioner here and i think someone from developmental disabilities is coming in january so they serve individuals uh that are eligible that have developmental disabilities as well as neurodiverse that's the population that they serve and they serve individuals that both in terms of independent living all right group homes or residential supports an array of other services employment services and so forth um then there's department of mental health that serves people with uh acute uh psychiatric disorders all right and again their eligibility is um determined by uh the process where they will assess the medical needs of the individual and become eligible so that's the department of mental health or dmh we serve individuals that sometimes are served by the department of mental health and sometimes served by the developmental disabilities and individuals that don't meet those criteria okay and that's how who we serve so i say when i say we serve individuals from the department of mental health we we provide all the employment services or the career services for people from the department of mental health so if somebody is served from the department of mental health they could access our services particularly employment or career services all right if they're in development disability services also people with developmental needs or neurodiverse needs they could also access our services in terms of employment career services so you can hear there's an overlap which is why it makes it very confusing for people to figure out the needs of state government but i think it's essential because you really want to leverage the expertise of all agencies right and particularly in terms of making sure that you maximize the tax payers dollars so that's kind of how this works so we serve individuals residentially with brain injury services all right particularly and we don't provide group homes we really encourage more community living and shared living situations where somebody might share a complex with somebody or actually have somebody in their home where they could use shared living experiences all right um and we really work hard also in having people from institutions and primarily that is uh nursing facilities uh and that nursing facility could be at any age so when i say nursing facility people think oh we're talking about people 60 and up uh we have many individuals with disabilities that are 20 25 30 and up that because of their medical challenges and because of the nature of of the disorders that they're experiencing are in nursing homes we work very hard at mass ability to have work with those individuals to live in the community so that's who we are so i think i know it's confusing and trying to figure out all the silos that sometimes can happen um but i'm really excited to say that uh i have been at stake up and now for the last eight years uh and there's been a lot of effort in cross-federalization collaboration sharing resources um bringing resources together to really better serve the individual um and so i'm excited that again this is one opportunity that you're thinking about i would suggest as i'm eavesdropping over there uh that maybe you might want to think instead of an rfp an rfi and i don't know enough about town procurement so i don't want to assume anything but it sounds like you're still not clear what the model you want and an rfi leasing state government will allow provide vendors providers to respond to your your rfi and you can just put out this is what we're thinking tell us um how you can provide a model of service so it's not so prescribed while in recent state government rps are pretty prescribed this is what we want this is what we want to tell you to do tell us how that's going to get done an rfi really allows the provider to tell you and share with you their ideas um and so i just suggest if you are thinking about um being open to different models so that you can decide an r5 might be an opportunity for you to think about um so just throw that out as a thought not knowing though uh municipal procurement processes actually we did do an rfi and okay we got two responses and uh which were informative so we might get more but but it'll be it might have been our error not sharing r5 more widely but some of the central central registers from yeah i do you know i have to say we also put out rfps and rfis it is very hard to market though that information out it really is so um uh the rules are pretty strict what you can do what you can't do right understandably but it does unfortunately limit so you really i really encourage you to when you and if you are going to do something again we could help kind of send that out and then so that people know about it because it is really important for you to have as much information as you can
questions for the commissioner or john thomas hello everyone up there thank you commissioner for being here um so we've heard from a myriad of traditional residential provider agencies that standard group homes supervised apartments that sort of a thing we've heard um as the recent speaker uh was talking about um his family member's story um in a very non-traditional um model that's that's quite outside the norm of of the the type of group that dds typically would uh be funding in terms of residential services and um so i i think it's been a a healthy learning curve for for this committee to sort of you know get get our hands around the variety of uh models that are out there providing services for adults in the commonwealth um so you're you're sort of a neighbor of this community um we're talking about a four acre parcel of land uh situated in a residential neighborhood uh it's on route 27 it's on a you know you know relatively busy state highway it's not terribly accessible in terms of its walkability to local resources but you know we we i think have all come to the conclusion that that's not a deal breaker for what it is that we're looking to do uh so i guess i would be interested to hear from your perspective in your experience working with the state and with people that do business with the state if you had a black slate slate like this what what would you propose uh be situated what what would you like to see uh go uh on this site what what do you think would be the most practical uh approach to developing a program that would serve uh people with disabilities in the town of wayland so first i do have magic wand it's in my office uh but i'm happy to share bring it with you i didn't bring it with me had i known i would have um so let me just say a few things one of the questions i had asked jean in the beginning was if are you clear of what population you want to serve all right because i think that is something to think about and we may not have to have we actually we actually have given it a great deal of thought and i think we've struggled with not wanting to dictate to the to the rest of the world that potentially is going to come in here and propose a development and propose a program right that's going to require operational dollars we don't want to limit our possibilities so i i think i don't want to speak for the rest of the committee but i i'm going to try to paraphrase what i think is the sentiment which is that we would like to see what people would like to propose having said that i'm i'm i'm asking very curious what you what your thoughts are so uh and prior to being at mass ability i ran a non-profit and so we did a hud 811 project all right um what we found which is not surprising to anybody is that people don't love having roommates people like their own apartments right um maybe one maybe they have somebody that they could share with at some time but the end of the day people want their own place um and what we found was very challenging because we built two unit apartment complex uh it was a 10 unit apartment uh it was really challenging sometimes to match roommates right so i say that in that what does anyone want right that's really how i think about housing right and if you think about individuals depending upon their age all right uh they want their own place they want to be able to have independence they want to make sure it's accessible and why i said about the if you were thinking about a neurodiverse population i think there's a lot of learning that has happened to make sure that housing is specifically um designed for individual neurodiversity all right but that's also true true for other people with disabilities as well right so what i would suggest in my magic wand that's in my office is to make it as normalizing as possible think of your family member what do they want they want their own place right they want to be able to have it be as independent as possible so i realize that it's more perhaps cost effective as we when we build our hud 811 to have two bedrooms so people could share but i need to tell you it was very challenging i also want to say do not under underestimate that people with disabilities are also caregivers so be mindful that they could be parents all right so how did we think about that be mindful that they may have an older older uh person in their home that they are also caretaking for so i think again it depends upon the dynamics of the individual all right but i would really encourage not to think of a traditional group home i'm going to tell you that's an old model that no one loves all right when i say no one meaning individuals themselves with disabilities all right and i know that uh um there are group homes and there's a reason for group homes and it has enormous value i don't want to underestimate that but if you're thinking about the wider range of individuals with disabilities in wayland you need to think about people like anyone else you're building housing you're building you're building a place for people to have a home how would you want your home who do you want to live with those are the questions that i'm going to ask you to think about uh and i do tend to be a little bit more on the other side so i do want to warn you all right i am a little bit more um uh aggressive in my belief systems but i i just have to tell you people with disabilities want everything what everyone else wants all right um and so if you think about creating an environment to make sure that whatever it is as independent as possible as accessible as possible all right um i think you're going to be ahead of the game did that answer your question kind of kind of can can you ask another question so i could be a little more clearer no no i appreciate completely where you're coming from and uh i i guess it it's it's a really hard question isn't it because like like i was saying i mean we we don't want to dictate necessarily what the final product looks like but on the other hand we want to encourage people to uh come and propose a development program so there there there needs to be a middle ground where we make that happen uh we're not being overly obtrusive into the process in in dictating the terms but by the same token we we're largely beholden to um other people with greater expertise to suggest uh a way to to build something here i think you know i just like the towns that are metro west and the towns of wayland and weston and other communities you want to be innovative you have an incredible opportunity you have an incredible property all right how do you think about using technology to make sure that's as accessible as possible for people you know those are the questions that i think you want might want to ask and what are the needs of the residents of what wayland i am sure that you're thinking that this is going to uh accommodate to the needs of wayland residents right um i think those are the questions i don't know if you've actually held disability uh forums but it would be an opportunity to make sure that you listen to your residents who have a disability what how do they want to live what is their hopes staying in wayland i you know those are the questions that you're in my mind all right uh to think about future state all right and that's what you want to do i hear i know that all right what are the future state needs of individuals with disabilities in the town of us and the town of wayland and um let me just say about transportation uh you can work transportation there you know uh i know that the mwrta covers boyland that you can design uh wrta has been very very open to looking at transportation models all right you are on a fixed line you so you have more uh they have more obligations legally to provide transportation to you so those are all really great advantages to the community so you know i have you held forums where residents of wayland came together from the disability community so we've reached out to um parents who have young people would be in that group and um none have come forward yet but we're going to continue to push that we also have an individual from the school system who is very knowledgeable in that area she's very helpful stef you have a question oh yes thank you thank you so much for coming i a model i'm kind of thinking about would would have some um well my son for one example he's he has down syndrome he's 40 and he attends um charles river center part-time and made it and um they arranged the dds you know through arranges the um the transportation we've tried the the bus the ride but um they they give themselves in such a wide uh range of times they can actually pick people up often they would pick him up you know after the program was closed um so it's really not good but um we right now i'm his caregiver um he's a afc caregiver um and um you know a a model i i really liked um that i saw in new hampshire was um they were building where people had a bedroom and a little sitting room with maybe a little area where they could have a microwave or something maybe not and then there'd be there'd be like five or six of those and then uh like a little caregiver unit and then there would be a combined kitchen and a living room so that there would be a chance for people to have their own their own space there um to a degree but also meals could be prepared for them and things like that or you could maybe have more or less number of them taken up with caregivers depending if people are two-on-one or one-on-one that kind of idea and then they would have a day program and then try to have that kind of thing so it would qualify for for dds uh supports it's that's um that's sort of what's coalescing in my mind and then the idea we've also been thinking of is people are going to get older and accessibility is going to be even more important um over time so yeah i think there's a lot of different models come to housing you know as a as exactly as you described it where again people have their own but own kind of apartment and they have a community space right very similar to what we're seeing in elderly or aging retirement communities right um i think that certainly is a very valid model um uh no question about it i'm curious what does your son say he wants he he likes to have his own space he does but he likes to be able to go and see the other people and you know when he wants to but he he definitely he's got his own little room there and it's his his castle you don't touch anything in there right right i read my case i mean it's it's just you know uh we all want our own space we all want to feel like this is our home right um and that's why i uh totally understand the needs for group um for good living it has its limitations for sure bill any questions no but i i'm interested in uh in your last comment i have a niece who has um cp and some significant learning uh challenges um and uh she is uh she doesn't identify as with the disability community in particular uh has her own apartment which is not well adapted to her needs yeah and uh and we her uncle and aunt are concerned about her being isolated and uh so i take your point about uh group homes and so forth but i i think for somebody like my niece uh we would aspire to having her own space but also living uh with other people not necessarily uh sharing her specific disability uh just for sort of social contact and so forth so does that make sense to you yeah no i i just don't want to have people assume that people with disabilities want social contact right i i think like all of us we have individual needs right a friend of mine just recently moved to a retirement a lovely retirement community lots of social engagement lots of uh classes that's not something i want to do right um so i think i just want to say just think about the wide range of individual disabilities and don't make assumptions and there are also other ways for people to network we don't have to live with people necessarily to network with them um so again i just want to make sure that uh people's homes people can feel like it's their home and that's sometimes harder to do when you share a place or when you don't feel like you have freedom um and my guess is if your niece had a very accessible place would you tell me would she be pleased to be in the home that really adapted to her and her needs uh i think she would have but with covid uh she uh really uh developed a a sense that she didn't want to be out and exposed and that sort of carried old so that uh she doesn't go out much uh you know it's it's a concern to us and concern to her mother sure understand and that's true for lots of other people without disabilities that are very frightened of the situation sure understand thank you yeah bill adams questions um i guess and i imagine this level of independence though has to depend on how much support you need too and there are people who deserve and need to have their own space but also need to be highly supported so those folks will never be completely independent and so um is it not possible to design a group home that gives people their personal space and supports them well and feels like a home sure we've seen some really good examples absolutely no question about it and i don't mean to uh but i also have to say we work with people with brain injury all right who have coil lifts in their home and have uh a nurse's assistants coming into their home and they've chosen to be in apartments on their own all right so again i just want to help you see that there's just like all of us we all have different interests right and different desires of what home is to us now it does mean we have you have to organize cnas to come into people's homes and personal care attendants to come in people's homes all that is true um but that's the choice that people make um you know and so that's you know i just say just be mindful of the array of individuals with disabilities i think we all have a tendency to lump everyone together i think everybody is the same and has the same needs that's not true any more than when we all lived together we were all in this building together in our home we have different needs i just want to make sure you hear that which is why a lot of folks and we not the full spectrum but we've i think we've come to appreciate that spectrum that you're talking about absolutely right and that's why i was that initially do you have a certain population to work with if not then even more the challenge and also the opportunity to design something that really meets people's individual needs gee yeah um so i think we see the range of the existing options so when you say innovate you know i think we're willing to consider innovation but we've heard enough about trouble with funding sources that they aren't very innovative and they or they innovate very slowly and very guardedly so if we say oh let's do something nobody's done for decades you know let's do something really new and then the funding organizations all rear back and say you know it violates all our rules we don't want to fund anybody to come to your facility we're really over a barrel so we keep being pulled back and forth between having a you know more safe model that's one of these clear paths to funding and and we keep hearing for example that dds really needs space and that if you open space and it fits their profile they'll fill your facility up in two seconds uh
so that's one conundrum another conundrum is this desire to serve our own community um and for example there's families here who fear that we build a facility and then their child wouldn't be eligible and their child's still going to get sent a two-hour drive away to be housed um and the problem with us and trying to take make sure that waylanders get priority is that it seems to involve walking away from these real reliable funding sources for whatever agencies we have do this work because what will happen in a small town like this is we'll have one head injury person and one person with another thing and another another so we'll end up with this huge array that of people that these vendors don't normally house together so even if we wanted to say let's make this for wayland we'd end up with this array of people where the mix and match problem process of the agency is not going to work and a lot of the agencies may say well we understand that that person considers himself disabled but he doesn't meet our criteria and we're not funding him so here we sit you know and um so that is part of what's been driving us to this um let's have a wide open rfp find out which vendors are ready to take their next step in investing in a new project and wayland will just get what the market gives us you know if there isn't a vendor who's already thinking about a particular model yeah so how do we work in an environment where innovation would be valued how do we work around those constraints to do something new well kira i mean you've already brought in some state agencies correct already so yeah what have they said not that i don't want to answer your question but i just want to you know what because you're right if you are working with a particular state agency they determine eligibility uh good or bad that's what they do right and so you are uh constraint so to speak um in terms of who you can cert yeah i don't feel like we've talked to them directly very much but we've heard from people who have spoken to some providers and some people say it's very rigid and some people say well the need is so great that it's actually pretty flexible so yeah that's why i had actually had hope that developmental disability would have come to me with me today and then i heard that she was coming january i was like okay i i do think agencies are thinking differently but you're right they're going to serve their individuals that they have to be deemed eligible your niece may not be eligible for those services i don't know right so that's the quandary but if you have a provide a good provider right who's willing to think out of the box they can it's their responsibility hopefully to kind of figure out the myriad of funding sources that's available um and i do want to say i think that um uh state agencies are realizing more and more the need to be flexible but everyone has constraints i don't want to give you false information what do you think a company with a potential proposal would want to hear from the town that would convince them that we're open within certain guardrail or like what could we say to a group to spark their well i think the first one is there are you thinking of of any provider utilizing federal resources i mean there is federal housing resources when we did our hud 811 project i didn't have any i had i had property that i have i our agency had purchased but i didn't have any availability of any other resources all right and so very similar to you we wanted to serve our people of you so to speak the people that we served in our agency so we went after federal money now that's not a quick process we went after federal money and we then built a 10 unit of complex and then we could decide all right who could go into those services and then it was up to us to figure out the myriad of funding resources all right so it is possible i think that's what i'm trying to trying to get a sense of are you thinking of this being state funded where you are very much uh part of what the state eligibility process is are you thinking that you're going to mix federal and state dollars together and i think you brought out advocates to come out and talk to you i mean they're very good at looking at both state and federal resources um riverside also i'm sure you've talked to them as well um they're also used to mixing and matching and in this environment you probably have to mix and match uh federal and state dollars does that help so i think the challenge for me is you you are you're a little caught up understandably with how are people going to get served versus what's the housing right what's the housing picture needs to look like right and and in some ways in some ways you might want to separate that out a little bit to figure out what's the housing model you want because if you put it all together it's a little overwhelming to be honest um now you would want to negotiate that with your provider well tell us what your services are right and how that matches the needs of whalen i think is really important i mean you dictate in an rfr an rfi you dictate what you want or if an rni you can say these are our problems i mean you know uh we want to match federal and state dollars we want to make sure that a certain percentage of whalen residents right uh we want to make sure it has cross cross disability groups um supporting um getting the housing you tell us how that's going to happen and i would encourage to have a myriad of funding diversities funds because you can't rely on anyone particularly now i don't know just saying not forever making us nervous right so what you're saying then is it wise for us to maybe an rfp list preferences but you want the wish list put out the wish list put out the requirements because we don't want to cause organizations not to but it gives gives them the sense as to what would be ideal that's more ideal than another situation that's right excuse me where we pardon me have the draft rfp and we did articulate sort of five or six principles to sort of steer the uh
the responses that talking about such things as uh the ability for women yeah instead of their loved ones they're uh something that is uh uh responsive or rather complementary of the residential area uh something of a demonstrated uh experience uh financial and financial stability that kind of thing but again we've tried to rightly or wrongly steer clear of specifying the client population per se you should you know bob swain high spirit i just met him in the hallway are you familiar with his high spirit yes and fear that's a fear that's an example of innovative i do and it's encouraging for you to kind of echo what he has said he said tonight and that is that the state is is more open-minded than it is today i do i mean again um you know these are unique times so i think everyone is a little bit more cautious but i do think that people want to serve people right and they want to make sure that housing is available for individuals and you're talking about permanent housing and i'm talking about transitional housing right okay i just want to make sure i should have asked that first um uh so i think that you know agencies are wanting to really serve the community and also serve clients serve their participants and the um open-mindedness that you're seeing um would likely result in the state not being an obstacle if we want to if we wanted to have two structures on this four acres to serve a dollar disability something what you see so that i can't you know i don't know the density issues that you may be raising so i i can't speak to that um but i do think that you have you're a commodity right i probably shouldn't say this publicly but it is rare for towns who want to make sure that there is housing for people with disabilities all right and you have property all right and you have a community that is passionate about the work those are all amazing commodities all right state agencies look for that to be honest but providers look for that you know um uh i'm should i have to assume that your town is also very committed to this so there won't be enormous not my backyard mentality that has happened in the past right that is incredible strength and we did get a positive vote at town meeting so the select boards brought forth an article you know proposing that the land be used in this way and the town voted it down to me i mean that's incredible so those are things you want to leverage you have more uh that you know to really leverage that uh and creative providers are eager to work with you um for sure uh and when i say innovation i think it's also you know thinking the long term not just thinking short term right and then also thinking about how you could use technology to support individuals you know more and more people using technology to prompt people to take medication all right or to prompt you know other ways to kind of make sure that people using technology you know it's time to leave catch the bus you know those kinds of things so i you know it's evolving quickly and it's exciting as much as it's challenging um but it's incredible opportunity what you have thank you very much your kind words other uh comments or questions for members of the community probably obvious but new construction is perfectly set up for that type of it's a big deal to have new construction it's a big deal yeah um for sure um a question about we're thinking about flexible physical plan because whales population will change over time people will come and go they'll move they'll take their loved one with them their family goes to illinois so um thinking about uh you know populations who can easily live in flex space for example you serve a lot of brain injury people do they have a lot of specialized physical space needs that are different than let's say people who are confined to a wheelchair well i mean again every individual that the brain injury survivor also has different disabilities attached to that so um there are people that are are wheelchair users as well as individuals that are not okay so i think number one you have to have universal design okay all right um and there are agencies that just focus on universal design that i think is critical and i could certainly hook you up with some folks just to learn what is universal design so that aging isn't a challenge right uh regardless of the disability uh so that's critical and it's um it's a little frustrating that we don't as just our own buildings are not as so universally defined as we would see with life i think um uh you know showering accommodations and bathing accommodations and those kinds of things the ability to have a possible ahoya lift you wouldn't want to necessarily install it but have the ability to have one if you need some like the bracing and the ceiling right those are the things you want to kind of think ahead if someone's um a condition worsens over time or they lose more their mobility those are some things you want to think about right um i think it's critical you know we're also wanting to not assume that people are not deaf or blind so what are the things that you want to create to make sure that there's ways for people to have access who are deaf and live aligned all right so again that's why it's it's great that you've opened and did it it's also a little bit more of a complexity issue because then you want it all and then it gets it gets i'm sure it's challenging in terms of finances are there sorry are there foundations that are interested in partnering in a design process like this who could um i can help supplement things to do something really cool yes once you decide on a build or something yeah definitely and i could uh suggest a few foundations for you to reach out to true um who particularly focus on visibility yeah issues yeah um we'll reach out to you on that yeah that'd be great and um my name doesn't have an e at the end i think that was the problem
yeah so i think that was the problem last time with emails oh that's right yeah just like the animal
other comments or questions by members of the community you've been very generous with your time i'm not sure i gave i gave you i gave you more aggravation than anything i think but uh i really want you just to think not in the box i worry so much that unintentionally people put everyone with a disability in a box and think you know one disability is the same that is not true all right and so i just want to make sure that whatever you think about you really make sure that we're talking about individual needs and individual lives and just like all of us uh we all want the same well great great comments thank you thank you thank you very much for your generosity and your willingness to do this you could be model you could be a model town wouldn't that be awesome we're awesome let's see how it turns out in the end you're even being so thoughtful and bringing providers in and state agencies and listening towns many towns don't take this on so thank you thank you very much thank you
all right bye everyone it's nice meeting you up there thank you appreciate it why don't we return our conversation to um topic that we were discussing before we start the show other other questions you might have for the members at this point to help put together or where you want to put something together and then we can digest it yeah i think from previous projects i'll give you a straw man and you can all beat it with a big stick right i mean that works fine and and you'll find oh she there should be a category for this other thing and managing the complexity with all these inputs and all these different points of view is a challenge so i'm sticking a lot of stuff back in the pandasies true yeah so that people who want to read about right can't get back there and people who just want the executive summary right right um it was nice tonight to think about universal design it's a good one yeah and um you know i was interested in this property uh i talked to the guy who runs it where it's you know 30 apartments and their criteria is let's see i think you have to be over 18 you can't smoke and you've got to use a wheelchair so they have lots of different kinds of people with many different conditions but the universal design serves everybody they could move in and out lots of different kinds of people with just those simple guidelines uh how is that different than accessibility like when people talk about accessibility is number one concern is that the same as universal design or accessibility is more how how is accessibility achieved you know how much how much support do people need though how much you know uh physical health care there could be a huge range there could be behavioral needs too um it could be through just a huge very uh different needs of people and needs needs for staff bill it's also um a question of um regulations and laws universal design is i don't want to speak out of turn here because i'm not uh a universal design expert or an architect but universal design i think in general is is more of an aspiration and a concept as opposed to accessibility uh uh there which is codified right when you're building a pizza parlor you need to make the the thresholds certain measurement and and doorways and bathrooms accessible if you're going to have members of the public come in so i mean by by def i think you know you you can spend as much money as you want basically to uh uh to achieve uh optimum universal design specs that that's sort of my impression that's where i'm like as an academic thinking would there be a foundation once we decide kind of what we want to build could we find it a foundation that wanted to contribute extra to help us achieve something that's closer to universal design or something like that maybe uh at an innovative angle that would be interesting and and helpful to people who live there i think if if we could zero in on on somebody uh who who would respond to an rfp i i think they'd be thrilled to work with the town uh in like you said putting together an application to a foundation to provide you know x number of dollars above and beyond what they would be able to to put on the table for their uh construction budget sure why not assuming it's a non-profit right you would get a foundation giving to it forward right so i guess a question i should ask um you know we keep trying to constrain this project in some way that will give a definition then we are struggling to do that the thing that's constraining it most is the physical site you know which it either needs to be treated as one big four acre site or two two acre sites side by side and the appearance needs to be residential and it's a question of how how many people can we serve you know we if we when we were thinking dds was going to hold us to five people in a building i think we could all get a vision you know five bedroom ranch house on each of the two lots how further afield do we want to go with our recommendations in terms of well any anything we could tell these in terms of the number of square feet in a building or anything that would help somebody see if their vision might fit on our site well if we did let this criminal tour 40b work with a developer into it we'd probably maybe build more than two structures maybe out of three but i think what we've heard in our meetings is the number of uh people in our in a home should be no more than x or like five you heard from chris first i think he has nine one gun house but um that doesn't frankly based on what we've heard from other people i'm not sure that's ideal um and and those people are higher functioning and can walk to the t it's a good point good point which goes to the commissioner's question who do you want to serve and uh but and then if you serve individuals who are high function you have the level of uh the design of the structure is different right we bought homes all going over i think family homes a lot of them still thinking we need to hear from dds i think what would be possible maybe maybe one of the buildings could be more dds the others could be uh for different groups that may be higher functioning but we just don't know what we're going to be allowed to do and i think if we're going to we're going to try to count on reliable funding um that we need to know you know what the rules are actually going to be well anybody also bear in mind a reputable developer uh or a vendor organization or some of these other or uh folks that have a track record they're they they're going to know i would think they're going to do their homework they're going to look at this site they're going to look where it's situated they're going to know how accessible or not accessible it is they're going to see the limited amount of parking that's available they're they're going to understand oh we can't have uh for example 12 unrelated people served in one or two buildings that are high functioning that are each going to have their own vehicle i mean it's going to be somewhat self-limiting i would think so i sort of question whether or not it's really worth our while uh to try and come up with parameters that are going to kind of be meaningless um it's it's it's going to kind of self-direct itself to to a certain extent uh i mean that's kind of my my thinking people are going to if people are thinking that they're going to get it get their operational dollars from dds for example they're going to know what the constraints of getting that annualized funding from dds are they're going going to know whether or not dds wants to situate a group home x number of miles away from the charles river house on route 20 or not right but just just to have for us to have some idea though just you know it's a general idea for ourselves of what's what it is because the the you know just seems all over the place what different people are saying and and just from the experience of new hampshire um and the insecurity from year to year not never knowing what's going to happen with the new administration and and um just i think i don't want willing to have to have that kind of insecurity
i do feel like only one person has said there's no way you're ever going to have these two buildings closed together or that the you know and everyone else has said well the need is so great and the guys are so innovative that we're going to be they're most likely going to be flexible but i don't think even when you have a dds person sitting here they're going to say yeah you could do that no problem like they just won't say that but you'll get hints though you're right and you could get a little better idea but i think they could what they could do is give us more details about you know criteria uh yeah our first visitor this evening named a lot of projects without saying what characteristics they had he just listed them as once that were not fitting the dds model yet dds money is flowing into their coffers so i think we can say you know the details of all these projects lay them out for us and maybe within that array we'll find something that we think is a good fit but stephanie to your point um deb johnson who agreed to join us in in large part due to john thomas's help uh it's just a matter of scheduling so i remember she she's free more during the day so what i'll do is try to get her in for a quick meeting okay maybe just her but during the day maybe we all go one hours yeah that would be great so i'll be in touch on them that'd be great
so this sounds like at the moment i just leave a lot of white space for the committee's conclusions and i'll work around organizing the information so that people know what we have considered in coming to the conclusions that we don't have yet so we're next scheduled to meet on the 17th of December uh do you think um you'd be in a position to put something together by then otherwise we'll just uh yes okay great so we'll try it on hey tom could could we just talk just briefly about what town council uh referenced in terms of language because i think if we are going to start to write things down the the language that we choose to use is kind of important or the language that we choose not to use right so after our meeting um on december 3rd john reached out about the term what was the term again john well shared shared living is the term that's technically in the the town meeting right so shared living was a term that brian motion um educated me on versus group home and we used the term shared living in the warrant article so john thomas was concerned that somehow that term was restrictive in some way but i reached out the town council and she said she said it wasn't that the plain the plain meaning of the word is is uh it's very broad so it doesn't constrain us but to your point john what you want to make sure is that maybe we don't use that phrase in any report to the select board or to it or within rp that you're thinking yeah i mean if if we are going to be broadcasting to the the segment of the population for whom this terminology does matter i would suggest that we use a more generalized uh terminology other than something that's highly specialized 95 of the folks that do this work for a living look at shared living and they're they're thinking of one very specific type of model and if that's what we're looking for and that's what we say that we're looking for uh then it's it's it's going to uh con it's going to limit uh the responses that we get so i would suggest respectfully that we adopt a more generalized terminology and and this is just a placeholder just as an example housing for people uh or adults with disabilities just a very general uh term i mean if you folks would like to open that up even further i i'm completely game uh so long as it isn't one of the already um codified uh it's it language that's already promulgated into regulations so long as it doesn't exist in in any of those other contexts i'm i'm perfectly happy with it because that's that's my only concern i think that's good good advice john um i in the models of the of documents like this i've been looking at they almost all include a definition of term section so that anyone reading it can look at the definition used in the document and realize that it is or it is not a match to their understanding of the term so that might keep us from tripping over ourselves if we that's another way if we have town council look at it and say make it better you know good any other questions or comments i had a comment about the rfp yes oh yeah is this okay to say it now oh yes it's a small thing but i finally did my homework and so uh two questions one was there's really no information in here about the land and what someone who's going to build on the land might expect in terms of cost or complexity and i don't know if you can say anything about it but could you say something like the town will partially share i don't know or will the expectation be that the person buys the land or the the company at the fair market price or whatever so i just raised that as a question actually i didn't have an answer and then um the other question would you when would we be able to circulate this with the neighbors or whatever and ask them so yeah to the first question i'll let bill answer that the second question my thinking is that once we're in good shape with the important good shape of the rfp then we said don't invite the neighbors and say this is where this is where we're at perfect but bill do you have thoughts on the first question don't repeat that for me i'm not sure well someone who's going to put a proposal will have to deal with the cost of the bill building the building right but then they'll also wonder about what's the deal with the town around the last the land or not i mean really bottom it's simply isn't yeah and i think i think the draft uh said something about uh the the terms that they would propose for uh acquiring the land or acquiring an interest uh i would hope that and we're and the draft also asked for a detail operating performance and development pro forma uh the development perform the capital costs including the cost of the land so uh so i'd be interested in seeing what they think they can afford or whether they're proposing to lease it for a dollar uh and uh it's kind of deliberately vague on the point of what we would suggest to the select board because i would hope that the board would uh have some flexibility and uh and with respect to the land cost uh in order to make the project financially feasible you're going to get a lot more innovation the the least the the less expensive the land is there's going to be a a a a graph that you can correlate innovation with an inexpensive land cost i i almost guarantee you i think that was kind of my question is if we don't say anything it might limit what people would propose like feeling they have to buy the land and build a structure so yeah well i think the way you those word it it it indicates that it's a flexible topic something that i think we'd like to know what their drivers are so that we would then have a point of view it it may be that some on the select board would say hey we should really get fair market value for this land um so i'm not sure i want to yeah is it this flag up one way or another but rather that so that is conversation you have not been able to conclude amongst yourselves thus far no they'll they'll they'll digest our report and then they'll we'll have a discussion okay lively discussion okay if there are people that feel very strongly about the bottom line though bill i i do i do strongly feel that you know perhaps some of those folks haven't been the beneficiary of all of the the public uh comment and uh some some of the testimony of all the visitors before this committee so i i again i would feel very strongly that i would want to impart as a member of this committee to the select board that you you are going to if if innovation is something that that is valued into what this future development and program looks like uh to the extent that you'd like to increase that uh there there's a inverse relationship to very likely uh inverse relationship to what the ultimate cost of the land is going to be to to a developer you know um availability of land is is very difficult as we all know in massachusetts and availability of affordable land is even more rare um but you'll recall that the uh warren article talks about affordable housing and we've heard that most of the residents if not all the residents will be on some form of public assistance uh whether it's a section 8 voucher or dds uh support or ssi or ssdi uh so i think a case can be made that if the economics suggest that uh you really the town needs to have some flexibility in the land costs and uh i don't think anyone would complain if it were an entirely affordable development and so if this is likely going to be pretty much entirely affordable i mean that would be my perspective right but to you to john's point it may be something you want to put in the report that based on our um i don't speak for the committee but something along the lines of based on our multiple hours of listening to individuals in the field that we're likely to get more responses to the rfp or as john says innovative ideas if the property is available at the least cost or the town is there's flexibility on the part of the town to work with the right developer to ensure long-term financial feasibility sometimes okay thanks thanks so other thoughts questions for anybody all right so hearing none um look forward to seeing you on the 17th i did reach out to melmar by the way and one of the executives will be here on the 8th of january to talk about the project that they have going on so i'll entertain a motion to adjourn thank you thank you thank you thank you at uh 804 who's in favor of the mode phone yes yes stephanie yes thank you yes jean yes no yes and so thank you recording stopped
we could not so i think jimmy looked at 60 different places around the state whether they were in brief homes in his case you know they were hospital settings which were an option and um at that time there were still some institutions that were an option um none of those things worked for us um so we started a high spirit community farm and we did that by renting a house and hiring some people forming a 501c3 um and so then we went to the dds uh our local chapter um and told them that we actually had found a spot for our son and this was how he was going to be cared for and this is about what it would cost and um uh we had we had engaged in the agency at that time that would help us and that's uh that was an important piece of it um and honestly we walked in and they said thank you you know this is i mean the backlog at that time was so huge to find placements for adults with severe disabilities that um their first reaction to us was just nothing but pure thanks so great you're coming to us not with a problem but with a solution um so that was that was good and we started with a single house and we had five other um socially supported citizens that were in that house with my son so
that was more than they wanted in a single house and we um ended up agreeing with them that that did not work that well that was really chaotic and when you have five people that need one-on-one care that turns out that's about 20 support staff you know if you're talking eight-hour shifts or it's it's just a huge number of people in a single house so at that time this is more than 10 years ago um i went back to the dds so this time it was mary lou sutter um who was the um secretary and she said fine do it in two houses you know you still conserve all these people you still have all the staff and you can add new staff and still working with the same agency terrific you can buy the house next door so we did and uh that worked well it worked worked better by a long shot uh at that time we had three residents in one house and four residents in another house and when i speak of residents these are the socially supported citizens that have uh severe cognitive intellectual disabilities um but it was hard from a staffing standpoint um it's it's not so much just the caregiving it's the um the programming throughout the day getting into the community having the community in so that at that point i went back to the mary lou um and by that time mary mgeen was already installed she's she's the current deputy commissioner of the department of disability services um and everybody that i spoke with before i got to mary lou sutter said no you you can't add a third house this is flying in the face of something called the um olmsted act and it's going to be nothing but trouble for us i went to mary lou sutter and i said this these are the staffing challenges these are the economics if we added a third house this would really work well and she said okay well we'll make it a pilot program you can do it but we're gonna you know we're gonna watch you every step of the way and if you can prove it that it works then um terrific and that was seven years ago uh we were the only community that went the whole way through covid without ever closing without ever missing a day program we kept all our staff all the way through covid um so that was a pretty good test um we went back to to at this time mary lou was gone um jane ryder was still there uh mary mgeen was still there um but the up the top of the health and human services was changing with the bigger um to keely change and they they can't they have just been incredibly supportive they've seen how this works and so what we've been doing for the last few years other than continuing to show them budget success stories um is we've been helping other communities like high spirit begin and that's been very successful but the state has also been doing it on their own so they're now there's melmark we've had nothing to do with them but that's a larger community that's working neighborhood um we really believe that the the small neighborhood is the key you know keeping it really small if you get too big you lose track of people and then you don't get to give that same kind of care so we're we advocate for no more than three houses um uh and staffing uh affordable housing um all the things necessary to have a small neighborhood within a larger community that's offering support and that's what we have in great very good and that's actually what we're hoping to achieve in wayland too let me just say a little bit more about wayland and high spirit community farm how that works high spirit community farm is not going to be a part of the wayland vision for high spirit this is another group of families so high spirit community farm is a small neighborhood where the families of the people with severe disabilities are pouring energy into it whatever way they can we can't distract them and have them start a community in wayland we have to show people how to do this which i think we've been pretty effective at doing the reason i say that is because four communities in our model have already started i'm sure you've heard of island autism that's now got two houses in the grange um there's a branching tree which has a property in their first house two more on the docks they've got nine people uh there's the new england collective new england equity collective which is in brockton they were given seven acres by um the diocese uh what am i missing new england collective high spirit use um there's a few more there's one called service net there's one called sale now a sale home in hingham they've built their building um anyway this is happening very quickly it's like salt crystallizing on this around the string we've said this works we can show you how it works we can show you that it's a much less restrictive um way to live for people with disabilities we can show the state that it's much less expensive to do better care the caregivers have a better life these are all essentially great can you expand on that yeah in particular it seems like you've taught the state on a model that is effective um in achieving the state's end so that's fair oh did we teach them listen i don't think we taught them anything the state um i think the state was waiting for us honestly if you look at the responses it's like they've been waiting so but in fact tim cahill um just last week asked if we would come and make a presentation at the state house because um they are looking for other solutions so what do you think the state likes about what you're doing well that's worked and it hasn't perfect there hasn't been there hasn't been a problem with it um the the caregivers the support that um our people need and the high spirit community farm provides um that support receives housing so in this small neighborhood you're also fulfilling an affordable housing issue so that's a big piece of it the transportation part very often people in a you know a certain
community that's um there to provide service for people and you know i'm thinking of rehab or um even aging but any any small community that has service provided um one or two very often it's lonely and isolating or the other thing is you go out for your day programs and that's a lot of transportation costs the high spirit model doesn't have either of those the community is there as part of the surrounding community it's a small neighborhood in that community so there's the transportation piece is very expensive to take that out or reduce it in the equation that's a that's a big part of it the other part of it is the oversight so in a group home situation in fact the group homes tend to take over the guardianship of the individual that's there high spirit the parents are still the guardians the parents are still invited in the homes are actually owned by the non-profit and the support staff that lives there it's their home so when a parent comes in they're invited but these parents are part of of everybody's life so we're not giving up our sons as some institution that we don't know what's happening to them and how does it go how's it going how to ask it this way what is funding for the residents well it's been increasing every year since we started so we started with a lot of private funds um because the state they probably contributed you know about the same amount they contribute for a prisoner which i think was about eighty thousand dollars per individual um and since then um it's increased steadily i think it's still about half of what hospital care would cost for our people um but it's it's been really good and honestly they've helped us find um little nooks and crannies in the funding stream such as um there there are there are the support that we get from the state allows us to um operate um with a balanced budget so without our raised we do raise funds so we raise funds for capital expenses cars house repairs um in fact we we raise funds for retirement funds for our staff um we have brand writers we're working at that all the time too stephanie any questions uh for bob swing you're good so you mentioned um localized day programs as a cost saver what are some of the other reasons why you guys are less expensive than other models we um sounds like there's a lot of volunteerism so you have people time maybe yeah we do we have a lot of volunteers but i i think that we're messy you know you we're living like regular human beings we're not living like we need some special hygiene or some you know some incredible uh hand over hand care we're just living like regular human beings and that is a lot less expensive than um other kinds of care that are provided so and have you guys been done any new construction and would that change the balance sheet at all or well it's a it's a funny question because all these new communities are doing new construction because we recommend it but no we bought a some of these other ones are doing new construction yeah yeah we we bought an old bed and breakfast that was our first one that had the required 11 bedrooms and five bathrooms and that's been nothing but a headache as you can imagine then we bought a farm a barn next to it that's not right yeah then we then we bought an attorney's house next to that and that's pretty good yeah but it's feasible to do construction with a project like this like and other places or it would be next yeah cape cod villages is gorgeous i mean you would all want to live in island it's stunning um so some of these places are just well nice yeah nice new houses but ours are not
good john thomas any questions uh no thank you i think i'm good i'm curious about how you achieve your economies and you're talking a little bit about okay you're messy well i i assume most facilities are providing those services that they are required but not going above and beyond what's required so yeah how is that happening well i'm i'll make it pretty simple i think um it costs 350 000 to run a house you can just kind of imagine that if you've got a house with three individuals that need 24 7 care and they all everybody's eating a common meal so regular kitchen regular oatmeal the people who lives there make breakfast you know normal breakfast everybody sits down at the kitchen table and has breakfast then you go about your day so you put on your boots in our case in high spirit community farm and your car hearts and you go out to the farm and you work all day so that's not a program that's expensive the the the the work is for its sake of beauty and it's the the people who are getting paid to oversee that work are that's just part of their regular job there's no extra there's nothing extra there um so there's no there's no specialized skills for which you would pay a premium no in fact that's a really good point you brought up some of our best caregivers uh were receptionists at target or hvac guys or you know you just don't know i mean people it's really about finding people who want to commit to living in a small neighborhood but a community where you're giving care and giving care to people turns out if it's not your own son is a is a huge amount it's very fulfilling and a ton of fun so people people stay too our our staff um stayed a long time we can when you talk about day programs yeah um is your day program outdoor activity on the farm not for everybody but that's that primarily the answer is yes okay so we have one person um who goes to something called extra special teas and works at a tea shop every day we have um another person who does that a couple of days um and then works on the farm the other days uh not not exclusively but mostly yeah okay but there's tons of things to do it's not just pushing wheelbarrows we have we have a woman who just does dry seeds and um folding laundry stuff that's what she likes to do and she's good at it so it's that kind of okay therapy though where it's not really therapy it's just life yeah it turns out it has positive effect very often better than therapy yeah so i they're not i'm not hiding anything about the cost it does cost 350 000 to run a house and it costs that for two people and it costs that for four people yeah but three people work yeah yeah okay that's very interesting uh i have a number of questions that i can't answer we have a lot of time all right so uh i'm interested that uh when you went to the state to go from two houses to three you felt that would make a big difference were there economies of scale that you achieved by having three houses yeah um specifically it takes a lot of weight off caregivers so people get sick people have their own kids they have to take care of they're there are all these things that draw a caregiver out of a house right so in with two houses as often as it happens it was really hard to cover everything with three houses you don't even notice so that that was the biggest piece of it um
and it there there's you you end up filling the car when you go to extra specialties you go out for pizza everybody that goes whereas with two houses you might be taking one or two people so events are bigger you know special olympics is a it's a everybody goes it's a big it's an it's a neighborhood two houses was better than one three houses is it's a little neighborhood and that's that's what we've hit on that we think is kind of the big deal there's three half three three little houses there's some dynamic there that works where with two houses it's not just the same people right weighing on each other all the time there's enough going on that the the community has a life of its own that being said you you grew from one house to two houses to three houses um do you advise the people you're working with to try to build two or three houses yeah at the get-go not not necessarily the get-go you got to start somewhere yeah it's not like there's a ton of money in this world at least not in in the world of service for people with severe intellectual disabilities there's there's not a ton of money right um nobody graduates makes a bunch of money right so um start wherever you can you know and so we we recommend you you start with the goal of hopefully having a full and vibrant small neighborhood but start yeah and uh do most of the caregivers uh i take it they live on site yeah and are they single people or couples or couples usually um we have a single person now um usually couples yeah uh we've had couples with two kids um right now we have couples with no kids and a single person but we're open to to you know couples with parents or parents-in-law you know just it's a small neighborhood if you want to be part of that that community and live there there's no reason you you shouldn't so to what degree um is your small neighborhood connected to the larger community uh significantly um i mentioned a few things extra specialties um therapeutic riding um we have something out there called canna which is a community access to the arts um birkshire south which is the special olympics training but swimming and you know the community center there we go to those things every day in room so that those are important but you know maybe more important than all that is the pizza joint and the movie theater and that's not just for the the residents but for the support staff i mean to keep the support staff you have to be near enough to uh a vibrant you know social scene and community that those people can have life as well a full life yeah conversely do people from the community come to your place to volunteer or yeah um we have several events each year we have two work days a year and we have tour days and things like that but it's a little tricky i mean the doors um kind of open but at the same time it is a uh facility that has very vulnerable people there and so the the state and the families want to make sure they're safe that's probably a top priority right so
but it's not different from you know your own home your own small neighborhood sure so i i almost would say it's like if you build a tennis court on that property plenty of people will be there all the time i think people will be part of it not everybody can walk in and play thanks there right somebody's got to kind of check the gate i have his hand raised uh pardon me just one more um which i have lost an ether so john go ahead what do you got john uh bob i know so you you've evolved um into kind of a non-traditional model in terms of uh how dds usually does business but i was curious if you could talk a little bit about uh how the funding works um do you have a contract with dds uh it does the funding come out of their residential line item um so that's that's it's a multi-pronged question maybe you could uh hear hear all of my questions and then maybe uh respond um yeah and just as part of that also you were mentioning that you have low turnover which is fantastic and as i'm sure you're aware that's always a challenge when when serving this population is to attract and retain good good staff um do you have so maybe if you could also address that how do you pay uh your staff maybe uh you'd be willing to uh talk about what your what what you pay your entry level staff i'd be curious to hear that and and just finally how do you i'm assuming one of the reasons you're able to retain staff is um you're able to address the the cola issue and if you are um are you able to tap into the the salary reserve which provides um contracted vendors the ability to pay their uh their workers a cost of living increase um that one i might not be able to ask answer because i'm not sure i know um but i can do the rest if you like um so the the funding follows the individual for the most part so the if you have a person who has epilepsy and autism and is blind and that those the state prioritizes um what their citizen would would need and there's some back and forth there most of our people are called priority one like they're they're not going to um survive long on their own so they need supports um so this there's a range for the adults in high spirit but it's you know it's it covers the 350 000 between the three of them if that gives you a good idea and those that comes in the form of ssi funds it comes in the form of occupancy funds comes in the form of um uh that where they're called waiver funds but they all come through the dds and then through an agency that's um and and half of them are federal funds in most states um in massachusetts i think we're down to about 35 maybe 40 percent maybe tony knows when she comes later but i think most of our funds are actually from our own tax base so that the health and human services i think this year had a budget of three and a half billion and so a percentage of that goes to adults with um these sort of challenges so most of our funds come through that but they come through the individual so when my son walks through the door he's bringing with him whatever the state says it's going to cost for him to survive that's the that's the first question i think is that a good enough answer or do you want more well i was actually curious if you if you were aware and if you're not that's that's perfectly fine i'm trying to get a little bit more um into the the details of how the money flows to your son and to the other residents uh for example other individuals and other models might receive their funding through family support dollars so which would be tied to the person some other people would have self-directed funding which sounds like it might be more in line with what the individuals in this program are are receiving i don't know and then most common of course the biggest line item in the dds budget is the residential account which basically provides for funding for more traditional contracted services right through a residential vendor which i'm assuming is not the case here no we are we're part of that lineup yeah we're part of those residential funds but we're not we're not a group home so those are not our our funds and we're not exactly shared living so we're a hybrid of those two models okay so we call ourselves um integrated work life um but we do not have uh a line item that details exactly how we're funded we are still a pilot program and you're bringing up an important point um or it used to be important we actually don't think it's so important anymore i i can give you the history of that if you like but let me let me answer your other questions first um the uh you wanted to know i believe the next piece was what we pay people um and our starting salary is forty thousand dollars per year but that includes um room and board forty thousand plus room and board um you have access to a car if you're using it for private use you can pay it uh i think it's 52 cents a mile or something like that um after you've been there three years we contribute to your retirement plan um and you get six weeks of vacation a year that's that's our package more or less okay um it equates to about 80 000 a year i think in great barrington for that sort of housing um that you would receive here it might be more because the housing would be much more expensive i would think but you have to pay people enough that they can save enough money or or you know have enough money that they can live their own life and so we feel like this 80 000 number is um that attracts a really good quality of person so that's that's what we pay people um now back to the pilot program thing which we could end up going down this way for a long while while so you can stop me whenever you like but um we we went to write a bill and we had supports from uh mike bartlett mary lou center wrote the bill um we had support um representatives in great barrington um in cambridge uh out here um and down south shore and we got it pretty far through and then um mary uh mcgeen said you know what i think we could just solve this legislatively without writing an actual bill so the state has taken this new position this has all happened within the last couple of years that the the way the olmstead law is written it's not clear and so their their new take on it is is much more nuanced than it used to be and i think you'll find that from you'll find people throughout the dds who who now say that's true that in fact the federal law does not say that people with intellectual intellectual disabilities cannot live together some states interpret it that way pennsylvania for instance still does not allow two individuals with uh that are socially supported to live in the same house as i said in massachusetts i'm sorry so the int what what was the i i'm sorry if i missed this but what was the intent of the the bill what were you trying to do by initiating well well we we the intent of the bill was to get rid of this language that says that uh that first of all the language of the olmstead act i'm not going to be able to come up with but you could look it up um um but least restrictive center yeah it's it's interpreted very differently from state to state right massachusetts took a very progressive view and it's taking a more and more progressive view every day um and that's something that we feel like we've had uh some impact on on that that sea change and that's why all these small communities are opening up now because we've discovered they're less lonely they're better you can get caregivers and people have a better life and it's much easier to integrate into a larger community so that's that's where we are we're actually not pushing for the legislative change right now we're allowing we're watching the dds commit to all these other small communities and very happily so so you were concerned that dds might come along and have a a change of heart or there'd be a new administration there'd be new people at the top that would all of a sudden turn over the rock and see you guys and say oh wow we can't have this and so you were concerned that you would you would lose what you built exactly okay other questions john no i i guess i'm good i'm i'm just really uh impressed that you're able to do what you do uh it sounds like the the whole pilot program has given you a bit of a get out of jail free card in terms of circumventing what a lot of other providers uh have to abide by so had had to abide by not to abide i think they have to have to anymore they had to yeah those those are the old days though i think this is this is new so yeah well as you can imagine for for us waiting in at this point with the ambiguity you've described you know we've talked to a lot of folks and they have different viewpoints about how flexible pds might be with us they used to not be flexible you know um so if you were waiting into the same project today knowing what you know now about the environment would it have changed how you developed your property or selected your residence or any substantive difference in what you do no okay thank you no i don't i i would say though that if we were doing it today we would not have the worries we had about it then yeah so we're we're pretty confident that this is the way that it's going
and it is it's a victory lap for us honestly and we'd love to see it you know but it's really fun to see these other communities start sure thank you well how is it that you're not a group home given that uh your residents can ees support um that requires a level of oversight that we felt was oppressive um
one thing um tend to be um staff very differently you need you need nursing staff we don't have nursing staff you need all kinds of um sort of protective uh barriers that we don't have i i i since we're not a group home we didn't go that way i can't really speak to that but i think if you look at a group home situation and you look at a neighborhood situation they're night and day so this is a the the big thing for me in the group home was i wasn't i didn't want to give over the guardianship of my child for somebody that i didn't know that well does the fact that you're not a group home affect the availability of funding from used to doesn't anymore thank you and this might be out of your area but do you think that same flexibility around having two group homes in the same space would apply or is that a whole different set of rules because we've heard one person in the last month say absolutely not you have to be a certain distance apart another person said no i think it's pretty negotiable there's a there's a new one that's uh i think it's in hyannis called uh it's three group homes um they're not right next door to each other but they're they don't say happy uh um staff that's managed they're like in it's in hyannis um called something like hi ho or something i can't remember but
i think that's changing to by the minute so that's seems like it has to seems like it's a crazy it's a crazy rule the rule is written in response to um institutions that needed to be torn down and like you know you start caring for somebody in an institution and very quickly you lose track of that person's individuality and austerity starts to become a priority and you know you're trying to run the institution in a way that is very different than you would run your own home we're trying to make high spirit as close as possible to how you'd run your own home let me mention um no mark really on your comments um are you familiar with that project and how is how different is it i i oh i am not familiar with it the only reason i know it is because mary beguine told me about it she said oh yeah here's another one that's happening right now so i think it's four buildings in tokesbury uh housing 20 residents but also uh something a cafe or some other sort of retail things uh no they're just they're just happening all of a sudden yeah really exciting you know three acres cited another questions well we really appreciate you coming in tonight um they're very informative um learned a lot well i'm delighted to come i'm excited that you guys are your town is thinking about this sort of stuff it's such a it's really inspiring to think that the town would be willing to give up profit to help people who need it to be helped it's awesome well you you uh we appreciate those comments yeah but as you know individuals who are different you know enhance the community and i think that that'll be the case here yeah yeah well thank you very much enjoy your holiday thanks for coming good luck with all your hard decisions thank you very much thank you bob our agenda included appearance by deb johnson and that was in the agenda because it was possible that it was possible that she might appear but scheduling wise she's not able to so we'll get her in at another meeting okay she's the area director of the mass department to buy developmental services but um in a few minutes tony wolf will be here she's commissioner mass ability which used to be as soon as it's all about them disabled in business it's not screwed up commission yeah yeah i got rebranded that's right and uh but before we get to uh tony we have no minutes to approve regarding the report that um request proposal that bill really put together he invited us to comment uh on the report to bill i'm not sure you've seen anything gold from since then also she volunteered to put together the report that we've had a company the armed closed rfp um appreciate that you um and now we have a few minutes um is there information that you'd like to elicit from the committee at this stage um as you begin to put pen to paper um i i think what i'll do is just you know come up with a pretty standard format with uh you know the charge the assumption uh organizations and speakers uh range of populations to be served amongst which we may or may not have to pick depending on what kind of project we do um you know and we haven't really drawn any conclusions yet and that's kind of everything else is just reporting of this happened that happened and these are the externalities we've discovered that are relevant to our work and put those in would it help you to um ask the committee members questions on that would help us get to conclusions that would help you do your report um yeah i guess one question is about the uh ownership of the buildings of the physical plant and property so we're seeing models where there's uh for-profit and entity uh owning it uh which we talked some about like that last week and then non-profit entities and it in some of the stuff i read that's kind of a breakpoint decision making whether you go with a for-profit entity um the idea being that you may have some conflict in the long term if they fail to meet their profit objectives then they may look for some way to change the nature of their business and you end up with a facility not doing what you really wanted where uh non-profits tend not to have that pattern once they've established their mission they tend to persist in their mission over time so one question would be do we want to decide we do not want to do business with a for-profit owner of the physical plant comments i guess my sort of going in assumption was that our recommendation would be to encourage the select or to be open to different models that are out there and to evaluate them as they came in and we did have one group uh that is a for-profit builder that builds these buildings and they turn around and they sell them or lease them to non-profits who operate them and they seem to have that down pretty well uh so i i wouldn't and you know they pay a few bucks in property taxes which wouldn't be terrible so okay but just one person's opinion i i uh i tend to agree i think the rfp could be written in such a way that it uh provides enough guidelines and enough um enforcement ability by this by the town to make sure that the end itself is isn't shaved and uh i think there are very few for-profits by the way in this industry i think we know yeah but uh but by keeping keeping it open never know what might come up what groups might end up responding to it on yeah yeah i have to say i started out very anti-for-profit and having experienced steward health care recently um but hearing the speaker last week i was pretty impressed by what they were doing and so i think i wouldn't rule it out necessarily yeah but i some type of guard rail so that the commission is maintained if the town puts up a sizable contribution into the to the pot i think you'd want to have a land disposition agreement that speaks to continue uh nature of having the uh the residence needs taken care of the alternative it could be a ground lease so i i i think there are protections that could be built in okay you may also we may also want to advise the select board to have the first right of refusal so that if somebody gets in trouble and they need to sell it uh the town has the opportunity to set up there forever let's understand it's over to our highest bidder okay well let me come back that's fine so commissioner welcome good to see you come on up to the to the mountain good evening commissioner we're so happy to see you thank you hello it's nice to meet everyone in this cold day and i dressed up for a cold night i know not fooling around so we appreciate you coming this evening uh commissioner and i think you have a sense in your friendship with gene what we're about here and uh so i won't blame that background uh you don't live too far from here no it was 15 minutes away it was a really tough for me it's not hard to bet off but we appreciate being here in person um so this committee's been meeting since about august this year and uh exploring areas that most of us um uh didn't know much about and it's been real interesting i think for many of us in education in a very positive way and uh you've been in this field for many years and maybe you could tell us uh about your experience saying before and what you see in the industry trying to address housing needs for adult for disabilities sure be happy to so it's a pleasure to meet everyone and i just again as i said to tell on the phone uh i really commend uh the town of wyland to do this housing is such a critical issue for everyone um particularly individuals with disabilities particularly accessible housing so i can't say enough of how much i have appreciated all your diligence and hard work so thank you so let me say a little bit about who i am and i was just saying as we were walking in the hallway it's a maze in state government uh and it's amazing figuring out how best to access services for everyone so let me just try to kind of set the stage about the agency that i represent so we used to be called mass rehab commission uh we're now called mass ability and the reason for that was that we really wanted to make sure that the name of our agency demonstrated the strength and the talent of individuals with disabilities but people didn't need to be rehab they're not broken they have a disability um and so that's really one reason why we changed our name um how who we serve is a little complicated in that we have uh major agencies that serve certain populations and i know i think in january because i was going to invite the commissioner here and i think someone from developmental disabilities is coming in january so they serve individuals uh that are eligible that have developmental disabilities as well as neurodiverse that's the population that they serve and they serve individuals that both in terms of independent living all right group homes or residential supports an array of other services employment services and so forth um then there's department of mental health that serves people with uh acute uh psychiatric disorders all right and again their eligibility is um determined by uh the process where they will assess the medical needs of the individual and become eligible so that's the department of mental health or dmh we serve individuals that sometimes are served by the department of mental health and sometimes served by the developmental disabilities and individuals that don't meet those criteria okay and that's how who we serve so i say when i say we serve individuals from the department of mental health we we provide all the employment services or the career services for people from the department of mental health so if somebody is served from the department of mental health they could access our services particularly employment or career services all right if they're in development disability services also people with developmental needs or neurodiverse needs they could also access our services in terms of employment career services so you can hear there's an overlap which is why it makes it very confusing for people to figure out the needs of state government but i think it's essential because you really want to leverage the expertise of all agencies right and particularly in terms of making sure that you maximize the tax payers dollars so that's kind of how this works so we serve individuals residentially with brain injury services all right particularly and we don't provide group homes we really encourage more community living and shared living situations where somebody might share a complex with somebody or actually have somebody in their home where they could use shared living experiences all right um and we really work hard also in having people from institutions and primarily that is uh nursing facilities uh and that nursing facility could be at any age so when i say nursing facility people think oh we're talking about people 60 and up uh we have many individuals with disabilities that are 20 25 30 and up that because of their medical challenges and because of the nature of of the disorders that they're experiencing are in nursing homes we work very hard at mass ability to have work with those individuals to live in the community so that's who we are so i think i know it's confusing and trying to figure out all the silos that sometimes can happen um but i'm really excited to say that uh i have been at stake up and now for the last eight years uh and there's been a lot of effort in cross-federalization collaboration sharing resources um bringing resources together to really better serve the individual um and so i'm excited that again this is one opportunity that you're thinking about i would suggest as i'm eavesdropping over there uh that maybe you might want to think instead of an rfp an rfi and i don't know enough about town procurement so i don't want to assume anything but it sounds like you're still not clear what the model you want and an rfi leasing state government will allow provide vendors providers to respond to your your rfi and you can just put out this is what we're thinking tell us um how you can provide a model of service so it's not so prescribed while in recent state government rps are pretty prescribed this is what we want this is what we want to tell you to do tell us how that's going to get done an rfi really allows the provider to tell you and share with you their ideas um and so i just suggest if you are thinking about um being open to different models so that you can decide an r5 might be an opportunity for you to think about um so just throw that out as a thought not knowing though uh municipal procurement processes actually we did do an rfi and okay we got two responses and uh which were informative so we might get more but but it'll be it might have been our error not sharing r5 more widely but some of the central central registers from yeah i do you know i have to say we also put out rfps and rfis it is very hard to market though that information out it really is so um uh the rules are pretty strict what you can do what you can't do right understandably but it does unfortunately limit so you really i really encourage you to when you and if you are going to do something again we could help kind of send that out and then so that people know about it because it is really important for you to have as much information as you can
questions for the commissioner or john thomas hello everyone up there thank you commissioner for being here um so we've heard from a myriad of traditional residential provider agencies that standard group homes supervised apartments that sort of a thing we've heard um as the recent speaker uh was talking about um his family member's story um in a very non-traditional um model that's that's quite outside the norm of of the the type of group that dds typically would uh be funding in terms of residential services and um so i i think it's been a a healthy learning curve for for this committee to sort of you know get get our hands around the variety of uh models that are out there providing services for adults in the commonwealth um so you're you're sort of a neighbor of this community um we're talking about a four acre parcel of land uh situated in a residential neighborhood uh it's on route 27 it's on a you know you know relatively busy state highway it's not terribly accessible in terms of its walkability to local resources but you know we we i think have all come to the conclusion that that's not a deal breaker for what it is that we're looking to do uh so i guess i would be interested to hear from your perspective in your experience working with the state and with people that do business with the state if you had a black slate slate like this what what would you propose uh be situated what what would you like to see uh go uh on this site what what do you think would be the most practical uh approach to developing a program that would serve uh people with disabilities in the town of wayland so first i do have magic wand it's in my office uh but i'm happy to share bring it with you i didn't bring it with me had i known i would have um so let me just say a few things one of the questions i had asked jean in the beginning was if are you clear of what population you want to serve all right because i think that is something to think about and we may not have to have we actually we actually have given it a great deal of thought and i think we've struggled with not wanting to dictate to the to the rest of the world that potentially is going to come in here and propose a development and propose a program right that's going to require operational dollars we don't want to limit our possibilities so i i think i don't want to speak for the rest of the committee but i i'm going to try to paraphrase what i think is the sentiment which is that we would like to see what people would like to propose having said that i'm i'm i'm asking very curious what you what your thoughts are so uh and prior to being at mass ability i ran a non-profit and so we did a hud 811 project all right um what we found which is not surprising to anybody is that people don't love having roommates people like their own apartments right um maybe one maybe they have somebody that they could share with at some time but the end of the day people want their own place um and what we found was very challenging because we built two unit apartment complex uh it was a 10 unit apartment uh it was really challenging sometimes to match roommates right so i say that in that what does anyone want right that's really how i think about housing right and if you think about individuals depending upon their age all right uh they want their own place they want to be able to have independence they want to make sure it's accessible and why i said about the if you were thinking about a neurodiverse population i think there's a lot of learning that has happened to make sure that housing is specifically um designed for individual neurodiversity all right but that's also true true for other people with disabilities as well right so what i would suggest in my magic wand that's in my office is to make it as normalizing as possible think of your family member what do they want they want their own place right they want to be able to have it be as independent as possible so i realize that it's more perhaps cost effective as we when we build our hud 811 to have two bedrooms so people could share but i need to tell you it was very challenging i also want to say do not under underestimate that people with disabilities are also caregivers so be mindful that they could be parents all right so how did we think about that be mindful that they may have an older older uh person in their home that they are also caretaking for so i think again it depends upon the dynamics of the individual all right but i would really encourage not to think of a traditional group home i'm going to tell you that's an old model that no one loves all right when i say no one meaning individuals themselves with disabilities all right and i know that uh um there are group homes and there's a reason for group homes and it has enormous value i don't want to underestimate that but if you're thinking about the wider range of individuals with disabilities in wayland you need to think about people like anyone else you're building housing you're building you're building a place for people to have a home how would you want your home who do you want to live with those are the questions that i'm going to ask you to think about uh and i do tend to be a little bit more on the other side so i do want to warn you all right i am a little bit more um uh aggressive in my belief systems but i i just have to tell you people with disabilities want everything what everyone else wants all right um and so if you think about creating an environment to make sure that whatever it is as independent as possible as accessible as possible all right um i think you're going to be ahead of the game did that answer your question kind of kind of can can you ask another question so i could be a little more clearer no no i appreciate completely where you're coming from and uh i i guess it it's it's a really hard question isn't it because like like i was saying i mean we we don't want to dictate necessarily what the final product looks like but on the other hand we want to encourage people to uh come and propose a development program so there there there needs to be a middle ground where we make that happen uh we're not being overly obtrusive into the process in in dictating the terms but by the same token we we're largely beholden to um other people with greater expertise to suggest uh a way to to build something here i think you know i just like the towns that are metro west and the towns of wayland and weston and other communities you want to be innovative you have an incredible opportunity you have an incredible property all right how do you think about using technology to make sure that's as accessible as possible for people you know those are the questions that i think you want might want to ask and what are the needs of the residents of what wayland i am sure that you're thinking that this is going to uh accommodate to the needs of wayland residents right um i think those are the questions i don't know if you've actually held disability uh forums but it would be an opportunity to make sure that you listen to your residents who have a disability what how do they want to live what is their hopes staying in wayland i you know those are the questions that you're in my mind all right uh to think about future state all right and that's what you want to do i hear i know that all right what are the future state needs of individuals with disabilities in the town of us and the town of wayland and um let me just say about transportation uh you can work transportation there you know uh i know that the mwrta covers boyland that you can design uh wrta has been very very open to looking at transportation models all right you are on a fixed line you so you have more uh they have more obligations legally to provide transportation to you so those are all really great advantages to the community so you know i have you held forums where residents of wayland came together from the disability community so we've reached out to um parents who have young people would be in that group and um none have come forward yet but we're going to continue to push that we also have an individual from the school system who is very knowledgeable in that area she's very helpful stef you have a question oh yes thank you thank you so much for coming i a model i'm kind of thinking about would would have some um well my son for one example he's he has down syndrome he's 40 and he attends um charles river center part-time and made it and um they arranged the dds you know through arranges the um the transportation we've tried the the bus the ride but um they they give themselves in such a wide uh range of times they can actually pick people up often they would pick him up you know after the program was closed um so it's really not good but um we right now i'm his caregiver um he's a afc caregiver um and um you know a a model i i really liked um that i saw in new hampshire was um they were building where people had a bedroom and a little sitting room with maybe a little area where they could have a microwave or something maybe not and then there'd be there'd be like five or six of those and then uh like a little caregiver unit and then there would be a combined kitchen and a living room so that there would be a chance for people to have their own their own space there um to a degree but also meals could be prepared for them and things like that or you could maybe have more or less number of them taken up with caregivers depending if people are two-on-one or one-on-one that kind of idea and then they would have a day program and then try to have that kind of thing so it would qualify for for dds uh supports it's that's um that's sort of what's coalescing in my mind and then the idea we've also been thinking of is people are going to get older and accessibility is going to be even more important um over time so yeah i think there's a lot of different models come to housing you know as a as exactly as you described it where again people have their own but own kind of apartment and they have a community space right very similar to what we're seeing in elderly or aging retirement communities right um i think that certainly is a very valid model um uh no question about it i'm curious what does your son say he wants he he likes to have his own space he does but he likes to be able to go and see the other people and you know when he wants to but he he definitely he's got his own little room there and it's his his castle you don't touch anything in there right right i read my case i mean it's it's just you know uh we all want our own space we all want to feel like this is our home right um and that's why i uh totally understand the needs for group um for good living it has its limitations for sure bill any questions no but i i'm interested in uh in your last comment i have a niece who has um cp and some significant learning uh challenges um and uh she is uh she doesn't identify as with the disability community in particular uh has her own apartment which is not well adapted to her needs yeah and uh and we her uncle and aunt are concerned about her being isolated and uh so i take your point about uh group homes and so forth but i i think for somebody like my niece uh we would aspire to having her own space but also living uh with other people not necessarily uh sharing her specific disability uh just for sort of social contact and so forth so does that make sense to you yeah no i i just don't want to have people assume that people with disabilities want social contact right i i think like all of us we have individual needs right a friend of mine just recently moved to a retirement a lovely retirement community lots of social engagement lots of uh classes that's not something i want to do right um so i think i just want to say just think about the wide range of individual disabilities and don't make assumptions and there are also other ways for people to network we don't have to live with people necessarily to network with them um so again i just want to make sure that uh people's homes people can feel like it's their home and that's sometimes harder to do when you share a place or when you don't feel like you have freedom um and my guess is if your niece had a very accessible place would you tell me would she be pleased to be in the home that really adapted to her and her needs uh i think she would have but with covid uh she uh really uh developed a a sense that she didn't want to be out and exposed and that sort of carried old so that uh she doesn't go out much uh you know it's it's a concern to us and concern to her mother sure understand and that's true for lots of other people without disabilities that are very frightened of the situation sure understand thank you yeah bill adams questions um i guess and i imagine this level of independence though has to depend on how much support you need too and there are people who deserve and need to have their own space but also need to be highly supported so those folks will never be completely independent and so um is it not possible to design a group home that gives people their personal space and supports them well and feels like a home sure we've seen some really good examples absolutely no question about it and i don't mean to uh but i also have to say we work with people with brain injury all right who have coil lifts in their home and have uh a nurse's assistants coming into their home and they've chosen to be in apartments on their own all right so again i just want to help you see that there's just like all of us we all have different interests right and different desires of what home is to us now it does mean we have you have to organize cnas to come into people's homes and personal care attendants to come in people's homes all that is true um but that's the choice that people make um you know and so that's you know i just say just be mindful of the array of individuals with disabilities i think we all have a tendency to lump everyone together i think everybody is the same and has the same needs that's not true any more than when we all lived together we were all in this building together in our home we have different needs i just want to make sure you hear that which is why a lot of folks and we not the full spectrum but we've i think we've come to appreciate that spectrum that you're talking about absolutely right and that's why i was that initially do you have a certain population to work with if not then even more the challenge and also the opportunity to design something that really meets people's individual needs gee yeah um so i think we see the range of the existing options so when you say innovate you know i think we're willing to consider innovation but we've heard enough about trouble with funding sources that they aren't very innovative and they or they innovate very slowly and very guardedly so if we say oh let's do something nobody's done for decades you know let's do something really new and then the funding organizations all rear back and say you know it violates all our rules we don't want to fund anybody to come to your facility we're really over a barrel so we keep being pulled back and forth between having a you know more safe model that's one of these clear paths to funding and and we keep hearing for example that dds really needs space and that if you open space and it fits their profile they'll fill your facility up in two seconds uh
so that's one conundrum another conundrum is this desire to serve our own community um and for example there's families here who fear that we build a facility and then their child wouldn't be eligible and their child's still going to get sent a two-hour drive away to be housed um and the problem with us and trying to take make sure that waylanders get priority is that it seems to involve walking away from these real reliable funding sources for whatever agencies we have do this work because what will happen in a small town like this is we'll have one head injury person and one person with another thing and another another so we'll end up with this huge array that of people that these vendors don't normally house together so even if we wanted to say let's make this for wayland we'd end up with this array of people where the mix and match problem process of the agency is not going to work and a lot of the agencies may say well we understand that that person considers himself disabled but he doesn't meet our criteria and we're not funding him so here we sit you know and um so that is part of what's been driving us to this um let's have a wide open rfp find out which vendors are ready to take their next step in investing in a new project and wayland will just get what the market gives us you know if there isn't a vendor who's already thinking about a particular model yeah so how do we work in an environment where innovation would be valued how do we work around those constraints to do something new well kira i mean you've already brought in some state agencies correct already so yeah what have they said not that i don't want to answer your question but i just want to you know what because you're right if you are working with a particular state agency they determine eligibility uh good or bad that's what they do right and so you are uh constraint so to speak um in terms of who you can cert yeah i don't feel like we've talked to them directly very much but we've heard from people who have spoken to some providers and some people say it's very rigid and some people say well the need is so great that it's actually pretty flexible so yeah that's why i had actually had hope that developmental disability would have come to me with me today and then i heard that she was coming january i was like okay i i do think agencies are thinking differently but you're right they're going to serve their individuals that they have to be deemed eligible your niece may not be eligible for those services i don't know right so that's the quandary but if you have a provide a good provider right who's willing to think out of the box they can it's their responsibility hopefully to kind of figure out the myriad of funding sources that's available um and i do want to say i think that um uh state agencies are realizing more and more the need to be flexible but everyone has constraints i don't want to give you false information what do you think a company with a potential proposal would want to hear from the town that would convince them that we're open within certain guardrail or like what could we say to a group to spark their well i think the first one is there are you thinking of of any provider utilizing federal resources i mean there is federal housing resources when we did our hud 811 project i didn't have any i had i had property that i have i our agency had purchased but i didn't have any availability of any other resources all right and so very similar to you we wanted to serve our people of you so to speak the people that we served in our agency so we went after federal money now that's not a quick process we went after federal money and we then built a 10 unit of complex and then we could decide all right who could go into those services and then it was up to us to figure out the myriad of funding resources all right so it is possible i think that's what i'm trying to trying to get a sense of are you thinking of this being state funded where you are very much uh part of what the state eligibility process is are you thinking that you're going to mix federal and state dollars together and i think you brought out advocates to come out and talk to you i mean they're very good at looking at both state and federal resources um riverside also i'm sure you've talked to them as well um they're also used to mixing and matching and in this environment you probably have to mix and match uh federal and state dollars does that help so i think the challenge for me is you you are you're a little caught up understandably with how are people going to get served versus what's the housing right what's the housing picture needs to look like right and and in some ways in some ways you might want to separate that out a little bit to figure out what's the housing model you want because if you put it all together it's a little overwhelming to be honest um now you would want to negotiate that with your provider well tell us what your services are right and how that matches the needs of whalen i think is really important i mean you dictate in an rfr an rfi you dictate what you want or if an rni you can say these are our problems i mean you know uh we want to match federal and state dollars we want to make sure that a certain percentage of whalen residents right uh we want to make sure it has cross cross disability groups um supporting um getting the housing you tell us how that's going to happen and i would encourage to have a myriad of funding diversities funds because you can't rely on anyone particularly now i don't know just saying not forever making us nervous right so what you're saying then is it wise for us to maybe an rfp list preferences but you want the wish list put out the wish list put out the requirements because we don't want to cause organizations not to but it gives gives them the sense as to what would be ideal that's more ideal than another situation that's right excuse me where we pardon me have the draft rfp and we did articulate sort of five or six principles to sort of steer the uh
the responses that talking about such things as uh the ability for women yeah instead of their loved ones they're uh something that is uh uh responsive or rather complementary of the residential area uh something of a demonstrated uh experience uh financial and financial stability that kind of thing but again we've tried to rightly or wrongly steer clear of specifying the client population per se you should you know bob swain high spirit i just met him in the hallway are you familiar with his high spirit yes and fear that's a fear that's an example of innovative i do and it's encouraging for you to kind of echo what he has said he said tonight and that is that the state is is more open-minded than it is today i do i mean again um you know these are unique times so i think everyone is a little bit more cautious but i do think that people want to serve people right and they want to make sure that housing is available for individuals and you're talking about permanent housing and i'm talking about transitional housing right okay i just want to make sure i should have asked that first um uh so i think that you know agencies are wanting to really serve the community and also serve clients serve their participants and the um open-mindedness that you're seeing um would likely result in the state not being an obstacle if we want to if we wanted to have two structures on this four acres to serve a dollar disability something what you see so that i can't you know i don't know the density issues that you may be raising so i i can't speak to that um but i do think that you have you're a commodity right i probably shouldn't say this publicly but it is rare for towns who want to make sure that there is housing for people with disabilities all right and you have property all right and you have a community that is passionate about the work those are all amazing commodities all right state agencies look for that to be honest but providers look for that you know um uh i'm should i have to assume that your town is also very committed to this so there won't be enormous not my backyard mentality that has happened in the past right that is incredible strength and we did get a positive vote at town meeting so the select boards brought forth an article you know proposing that the land be used in this way and the town voted it down to me i mean that's incredible so those are things you want to leverage you have more uh that you know to really leverage that uh and creative providers are eager to work with you um for sure uh and when i say innovation i think it's also you know thinking the long term not just thinking short term right and then also thinking about how you could use technology to support individuals you know more and more people using technology to prompt people to take medication all right or to prompt you know other ways to kind of make sure that people using technology you know it's time to leave catch the bus you know those kinds of things so i you know it's evolving quickly and it's exciting as much as it's challenging um but it's incredible opportunity what you have thank you very much your kind words other uh comments or questions for members of the community probably obvious but new construction is perfectly set up for that type of it's a big deal to have new construction it's a big deal yeah um for sure um a question about we're thinking about flexible physical plan because whales population will change over time people will come and go they'll move they'll take their loved one with them their family goes to illinois so um thinking about uh you know populations who can easily live in flex space for example you serve a lot of brain injury people do they have a lot of specialized physical space needs that are different than let's say people who are confined to a wheelchair well i mean again every individual that the brain injury survivor also has different disabilities attached to that so um there are people that are are wheelchair users as well as individuals that are not okay so i think number one you have to have universal design okay all right um and there are agencies that just focus on universal design that i think is critical and i could certainly hook you up with some folks just to learn what is universal design so that aging isn't a challenge right uh regardless of the disability uh so that's critical and it's um it's a little frustrating that we don't as just our own buildings are not as so universally defined as we would see with life i think um uh you know showering accommodations and bathing accommodations and those kinds of things the ability to have a possible ahoya lift you wouldn't want to necessarily install it but have the ability to have one if you need some like the bracing and the ceiling right those are the things you want to kind of think ahead if someone's um a condition worsens over time or they lose more their mobility those are some things you want to think about right um i think it's critical you know we're also wanting to not assume that people are not deaf or blind so what are the things that you want to create to make sure that there's ways for people to have access who are deaf and live aligned all right so again that's why it's it's great that you've opened and did it it's also a little bit more of a complexity issue because then you want it all and then it gets it gets i'm sure it's challenging in terms of finances are there sorry are there foundations that are interested in partnering in a design process like this who could um i can help supplement things to do something really cool yes once you decide on a build or something yeah definitely and i could uh suggest a few foundations for you to reach out to true um who particularly focus on visibility yeah issues yeah um we'll reach out to you on that yeah that'd be great and um my name doesn't have an e at the end i think that was the problem
yeah so i think that was the problem last time with emails oh that's right yeah just like the animal
other comments or questions by members of the community you've been very generous with your time i'm not sure i gave i gave you i gave you more aggravation than anything i think but uh i really want you just to think not in the box i worry so much that unintentionally people put everyone with a disability in a box and think you know one disability is the same that is not true all right and so i just want to make sure that whatever you think about you really make sure that we're talking about individual needs and individual lives and just like all of us uh we all want the same well great great comments thank you thank you thank you very much for your generosity and your willingness to do this you could be model you could be a model town wouldn't that be awesome we're awesome let's see how it turns out in the end you're even being so thoughtful and bringing providers in and state agencies and listening towns many towns don't take this on so thank you thank you very much thank you
all right bye everyone it's nice meeting you up there thank you appreciate it why don't we return our conversation to um topic that we were discussing before we start the show other other questions you might have for the members at this point to help put together or where you want to put something together and then we can digest it yeah i think from previous projects i'll give you a straw man and you can all beat it with a big stick right i mean that works fine and and you'll find oh she there should be a category for this other thing and managing the complexity with all these inputs and all these different points of view is a challenge so i'm sticking a lot of stuff back in the pandasies true yeah so that people who want to read about right can't get back there and people who just want the executive summary right right um it was nice tonight to think about universal design it's a good one yeah and um you know i was interested in this property uh i talked to the guy who runs it where it's you know 30 apartments and their criteria is let's see i think you have to be over 18 you can't smoke and you've got to use a wheelchair so they have lots of different kinds of people with many different conditions but the universal design serves everybody they could move in and out lots of different kinds of people with just those simple guidelines uh how is that different than accessibility like when people talk about accessibility is number one concern is that the same as universal design or accessibility is more how how is accessibility achieved you know how much how much support do people need though how much you know uh physical health care there could be a huge range there could be behavioral needs too um it could be through just a huge very uh different needs of people and needs needs for staff bill it's also um a question of um regulations and laws universal design is i don't want to speak out of turn here because i'm not uh a universal design expert or an architect but universal design i think in general is is more of an aspiration and a concept as opposed to accessibility uh uh there which is codified right when you're building a pizza parlor you need to make the the thresholds certain measurement and and doorways and bathrooms accessible if you're going to have members of the public come in so i mean by by def i think you know you you can spend as much money as you want basically to uh uh to achieve uh optimum universal design specs that that's sort of my impression that's where i'm like as an academic thinking would there be a foundation once we decide kind of what we want to build could we find it a foundation that wanted to contribute extra to help us achieve something that's closer to universal design or something like that maybe uh at an innovative angle that would be interesting and and helpful to people who live there i think if if we could zero in on on somebody uh who who would respond to an rfp i i think they'd be thrilled to work with the town uh in like you said putting together an application to a foundation to provide you know x number of dollars above and beyond what they would be able to to put on the table for their uh construction budget sure why not assuming it's a non-profit right you would get a foundation giving to it forward right so i guess a question i should ask um you know we keep trying to constrain this project in some way that will give a definition then we are struggling to do that the thing that's constraining it most is the physical site you know which it either needs to be treated as one big four acre site or two two acre sites side by side and the appearance needs to be residential and it's a question of how how many people can we serve you know we if we when we were thinking dds was going to hold us to five people in a building i think we could all get a vision you know five bedroom ranch house on each of the two lots how further afield do we want to go with our recommendations in terms of well any anything we could tell these in terms of the number of square feet in a building or anything that would help somebody see if their vision might fit on our site well if we did let this criminal tour 40b work with a developer into it we'd probably maybe build more than two structures maybe out of three but i think what we've heard in our meetings is the number of uh people in our in a home should be no more than x or like five you heard from chris first i think he has nine one gun house but um that doesn't frankly based on what we've heard from other people i'm not sure that's ideal um and and those people are higher functioning and can walk to the t it's a good point good point which goes to the commissioner's question who do you want to serve and uh but and then if you serve individuals who are high function you have the level of uh the design of the structure is different right we bought homes all going over i think family homes a lot of them still thinking we need to hear from dds i think what would be possible maybe maybe one of the buildings could be more dds the others could be uh for different groups that may be higher functioning but we just don't know what we're going to be allowed to do and i think if we're going to we're going to try to count on reliable funding um that we need to know you know what the rules are actually going to be well anybody also bear in mind a reputable developer uh or a vendor organization or some of these other or uh folks that have a track record they're they they're going to know i would think they're going to do their homework they're going to look at this site they're going to look where it's situated they're going to know how accessible or not accessible it is they're going to see the limited amount of parking that's available they're they're going to understand oh we can't have uh for example 12 unrelated people served in one or two buildings that are high functioning that are each going to have their own vehicle i mean it's going to be somewhat self-limiting i would think so i sort of question whether or not it's really worth our while uh to try and come up with parameters that are going to kind of be meaningless um it's it's it's going to kind of self-direct itself to to a certain extent uh i mean that's kind of my my thinking people are going to if people are thinking that they're going to get it get their operational dollars from dds for example they're going to know what the constraints of getting that annualized funding from dds are they're going going to know whether or not dds wants to situate a group home x number of miles away from the charles river house on route 20 or not right but just just to have for us to have some idea though just you know it's a general idea for ourselves of what's what it is because the the you know just seems all over the place what different people are saying and and just from the experience of new hampshire um and the insecurity from year to year not never knowing what's going to happen with the new administration and and um just i think i don't want willing to have to have that kind of insecurity
i do feel like only one person has said there's no way you're ever going to have these two buildings closed together or that the you know and everyone else has said well the need is so great and the guys are so innovative that we're going to be they're most likely going to be flexible but i don't think even when you have a dds person sitting here they're going to say yeah you could do that no problem like they just won't say that but you'll get hints though you're right and you could get a little better idea but i think they could what they could do is give us more details about you know criteria uh yeah our first visitor this evening named a lot of projects without saying what characteristics they had he just listed them as once that were not fitting the dds model yet dds money is flowing into their coffers so i think we can say you know the details of all these projects lay them out for us and maybe within that array we'll find something that we think is a good fit but stephanie to your point um deb johnson who agreed to join us in in large part due to john thomas's help uh it's just a matter of scheduling so i remember she she's free more during the day so what i'll do is try to get her in for a quick meeting okay maybe just her but during the day maybe we all go one hours yeah that would be great so i'll be in touch on them that'd be great
so this sounds like at the moment i just leave a lot of white space for the committee's conclusions and i'll work around organizing the information so that people know what we have considered in coming to the conclusions that we don't have yet so we're next scheduled to meet on the 17th of December uh do you think um you'd be in a position to put something together by then otherwise we'll just uh yes okay great so we'll try it on hey tom could could we just talk just briefly about what town council uh referenced in terms of language because i think if we are going to start to write things down the the language that we choose to use is kind of important or the language that we choose not to use right so after our meeting um on december 3rd john reached out about the term what was the term again john well shared shared living is the term that's technically in the the town meeting right so shared living was a term that brian motion um educated me on versus group home and we used the term shared living in the warrant article so john thomas was concerned that somehow that term was restrictive in some way but i reached out the town council and she said she said it wasn't that the plain the plain meaning of the word is is uh it's very broad so it doesn't constrain us but to your point john what you want to make sure is that maybe we don't use that phrase in any report to the select board or to it or within rp that you're thinking yeah i mean if if we are going to be broadcasting to the the segment of the population for whom this terminology does matter i would suggest that we use a more generalized uh terminology other than something that's highly specialized 95 of the folks that do this work for a living look at shared living and they're they're thinking of one very specific type of model and if that's what we're looking for and that's what we say that we're looking for uh then it's it's it's going to uh con it's going to limit uh the responses that we get so i would suggest respectfully that we adopt a more generalized terminology and and this is just a placeholder just as an example housing for people uh or adults with disabilities just a very general uh term i mean if you folks would like to open that up even further i i'm completely game uh so long as it isn't one of the already um codified uh it's it language that's already promulgated into regulations so long as it doesn't exist in in any of those other contexts i'm i'm perfectly happy with it because that's that's my only concern i think that's good good advice john um i in the models of the of documents like this i've been looking at they almost all include a definition of term section so that anyone reading it can look at the definition used in the document and realize that it is or it is not a match to their understanding of the term so that might keep us from tripping over ourselves if we that's another way if we have town council look at it and say make it better you know good any other questions or comments i had a comment about the rfp yes oh yeah is this okay to say it now oh yes it's a small thing but i finally did my homework and so uh two questions one was there's really no information in here about the land and what someone who's going to build on the land might expect in terms of cost or complexity and i don't know if you can say anything about it but could you say something like the town will partially share i don't know or will the expectation be that the person buys the land or the the company at the fair market price or whatever so i just raised that as a question actually i didn't have an answer and then um the other question would you when would we be able to circulate this with the neighbors or whatever and ask them so yeah to the first question i'll let bill answer that the second question my thinking is that once we're in good shape with the important good shape of the rfp then we said don't invite the neighbors and say this is where this is where we're at perfect but bill do you have thoughts on the first question don't repeat that for me i'm not sure well someone who's going to put a proposal will have to deal with the cost of the bill building the building right but then they'll also wonder about what's the deal with the town around the last the land or not i mean really bottom it's simply isn't yeah and i think i think the draft uh said something about uh the the terms that they would propose for uh acquiring the land or acquiring an interest uh i would hope that and we're and the draft also asked for a detail operating performance and development pro forma uh the development perform the capital costs including the cost of the land so uh so i'd be interested in seeing what they think they can afford or whether they're proposing to lease it for a dollar uh and uh it's kind of deliberately vague on the point of what we would suggest to the select board because i would hope that the board would uh have some flexibility and uh and with respect to the land cost uh in order to make the project financially feasible you're going to get a lot more innovation the the least the the less expensive the land is there's going to be a a a a graph that you can correlate innovation with an inexpensive land cost i i almost guarantee you i think that was kind of my question is if we don't say anything it might limit what people would propose like feeling they have to buy the land and build a structure so yeah well i think the way you those word it it it indicates that it's a flexible topic something that i think we'd like to know what their drivers are so that we would then have a point of view it it may be that some on the select board would say hey we should really get fair market value for this land um so i'm not sure i want to yeah is it this flag up one way or another but rather that so that is conversation you have not been able to conclude amongst yourselves thus far no they'll they'll they'll digest our report and then they'll we'll have a discussion okay lively discussion okay if there are people that feel very strongly about the bottom line though bill i i do i do strongly feel that you know perhaps some of those folks haven't been the beneficiary of all of the the public uh comment and uh some some of the testimony of all the visitors before this committee so i i again i would feel very strongly that i would want to impart as a member of this committee to the select board that you you are going to if if innovation is something that that is valued into what this future development and program looks like uh to the extent that you'd like to increase that uh there there's a inverse relationship to very likely uh inverse relationship to what the ultimate cost of the land is going to be to to a developer you know um availability of land is is very difficult as we all know in massachusetts and availability of affordable land is even more rare um but you'll recall that the uh warren article talks about affordable housing and we've heard that most of the residents if not all the residents will be on some form of public assistance uh whether it's a section 8 voucher or dds uh support or ssi or ssdi uh so i think a case can be made that if the economics suggest that uh you really the town needs to have some flexibility in the land costs and uh i don't think anyone would complain if it were an entirely affordable development and so if this is likely going to be pretty much entirely affordable i mean that would be my perspective right but to you to john's point it may be something you want to put in the report that based on our um i don't speak for the committee but something along the lines of based on our multiple hours of listening to individuals in the field that we're likely to get more responses to the rfp or as john says innovative ideas if the property is available at the least cost or the town is there's flexibility on the part of the town to work with the right developer to ensure long-term financial feasibility sometimes okay thanks thanks so other thoughts questions for anybody all right so hearing none um look forward to seeing you on the 17th i did reach out to melmar by the way and one of the executives will be here on the 8th of january to talk about the project that they have going on so i'll entertain a motion to adjourn thank you thank you thank you thank you at uh 804 who's in favor of the mode phone yes yes stephanie yes thank you yes jean yes no yes and so thank you recording stopped