D.C. Has Month to Improve Retardation Agency

Possibility of Court Receivership Still Looms

A federal judge gave the District one last chance yesterday to avert court receivership for its troubled mental retardation agency, saying she was tired of a parade of city officials breaking promises to fix services for mentally and physically disabled group home residents.

U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, issuing a challenge to the political legacy of Mayor Anthony A. Williams, said she would give the District a few more weeks to show that it is making progress on its reform efforts. If that cannot be done by July 20, when she scheduled a follow-up hearing, she will hold another session in early October on proposed legal measures to fix the agency's chronic problems, she said.

Huvelle told city officials that she was not going to wait until after the election of a new mayor to take action, declaring that "people's lives are at issue while you're getting up to speed."

The judge made her remarks at a hearing that followed new allegations of abuse and neglect in the city-funded group homes. The Justice Department recently filed court papers describing 14 deaths that it deemed "preventable and questionable" since January 2003.

City Administrator Robert C. Bobb told Huvelle that Williams (D) has directed him to become personally involved in the operations of the city's Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Administration. Bobb said he will work with Kathy Sawyer, the agency's new interim administrator, to improve services for about 2,000 D.C. residents with developmental disabilities.

The performance of the mental retardation agency "has not been one of the shining moments for this administration," Bobb said.

Huvelle praised Bobb and Sawyer, a nationally recognized developmental disabilities expert from Alabama, but said she was concerned because both will probably be gone when Williams leaves office in January. She said their assurances sounded like a "broken record" after years of dealing with other city officials.

"When I get a promise, the person leaves -- and you'll leave me," she told Sawyer. "You'll go back to Alabama, and we'll miss you."

As a federal judge, Huvelle noted, she is "tenured" and "stuck" with the long-running case. And, she said, the operational problems of the mental retardation agency go well beyond individual managers.

The District is a defendant in a lawsuit filed in 1976 on behalf of hundreds of residents of Forest Haven, then the city's institution for people with mental retardation. By Huvelle's count, Sawyer is the ninth mental retardation administrator to come before her since the judge took on the case in 2001.

University Legal Services, which represents the plaintiffs, asked Huvelle last month to order a court takeover of the agency, saying the city's repeated failures are putting vulnerable lives at risk.

The Justice Department, a co-plaintiff, filed a separate motion urging Huvelle to hold the District in contempt of court for not meeting promises to improve health care and other services.