D.C. Council moves on disabilities statute

Improved grievance process included, but safeguard removed

It has been more than three decades since the enactment of the District's law governing the care of people with developmental disabilities, and yesterday, the D.C. Council took its first step toward rewriting a statute brought about by the abuses of another era.

In the works for more than two years, the Developmental Disabilities Reform Act would encourage people living in group homes to move into smaller residential settings and would create new grievance processes for families that have long felt ignored by one of the District's most dysfunctional bureaucracies.

But the proposed law would also eliminate what has been one of the system's most powerful safeguards, ending the role of D.C. Superior Court judges in ensuring that people in the system receive the services they need. And the bill envisions, for the first time in the District's history, wait lists for services.

It is a sweeping piece of legislation, a 127-page bill intended to inaugurate a new era -- even as the city continues to wrestle with decades-old problems.

Still alive today is a 1976 class action lawsuit filed against the District over its care of the developmentally disabled. Forest Haven, the facility that was the home of the disabled and that was the focus of the lawsuit, was closed by court order in 1991. But nearly 20 years later, the city's developmental disabilities agency remains under the supervision of a federal judge. And far from seeking an end to the lawsuit, advocates are asking the court to ratchet up its oversight of the Department of Disability Services.

Earlier this month, in a reminder of the problems that still plague some group homes, the District asked a court to place two facilities in receivership, saying the poor quality of care was imperiling residents.

The Development Disabilities Reform Act, introduced Tuesday by council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) and Human Services Committee Chairman Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), is a legislative attempt to break with that troubled past.

For Gray, it is a particularly personal effort. As a psychology graduate student in the late 1960s, he visited Forest Haven and saw the conditions firsthand. As the executive director of The Arc of the District of Columbia from 1974 to 1991, he led the city's most active advocacy group for the developmentally disabled. And as head of the District's Department of Human Services in the early 1990s, he oversaw the shuttering of Forest Haven.

"It has enormous meaning for me," Gray said of the bill, which he said is one of the legislative efforts he is most proud of. "It's an exceedingly important bill."

Mary Lou Meccariello, the current executive director of The Arc, which played a central role in shaping the bill, said that many people have lost faith in the District's ability to serve their disabled family members. "We're facing a history of things that should never have happened that unfortunately did happen," she said.

The law would instill a new confidence in the District and its Department of Disability Services by giving the families served a greater say in what they want and what they need, Meccariello said. "We have to believe that this is the beginning of something much better than what we had."