Fairview's troubled history forces Oregon to rethink how it cares for the developmentally disabled

The construction in 1908 of Fairview Training Center, originally named the State Institution for the Feeble-Minded, reflected the most progressive thinking of the time.

Family doctors almost always advised parents of children born with developmental disabilities to send them away. The common attitude: They were better off living with their own kind.

It didn't take long before Fairview became a place of abandonment rather than care.

By the 1960s, more than 3,000 people were committed to Fairview, hundreds of them very young children. There was little time for personalized attention. Understaffed cottages where residents lived relied on restraints: Locked rooms, straitjackets, handcuffs and leg shackles.

It wasn't until the early 1970s that things began to change. In 1974, national momentum toward more humane treatment of people with developmental disabilities received a boost from an Alabama court case.

A judge ruled that institutionalized people have a right to training and treatment. The state began to pay for community-based programs, and Fairview's population began to decline.

In 1980, Oregon was the first state to get a federal waiver to use Medicaid money to develop alternatives to institutional living for the mentally retarded. Proud bureaucrats trumpeted Oregon as one of the most innovative social policy reformers in the country. There remained one large flaw in that assessment: Fairview.

By 1987, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state for human rights violations at the 79-year-old institution.

The problems were so serious that officials in Washington, D.C., froze federal dollars to Fairview. The money resumed only after Oregon pledged in writing to drastically reduce the institution's population, then 1,200 residents, and improve services for those who remained.

State officials agreed to spend $30 million to hire about 900 employees and upgrade facilities.

In 1996, under continued pressure from the federal government, the state developed a long-term plan for developmental disability services that included closing Fairview.

But the large investment in improving Fairview slowed the state's efforts to create community services to replace it. By the mid-1990s, Fairview consumed 30 percent of the state budget for developmental disability services but served only 3 percent of those in need.

Advocates say the decision to close Fairview was based on compassion, but also cost.

"It wasn't all enlightened public policy or a heartfelt, 'We need to do this for the people,'" said Bill Lynch, executive director of the Oregon Council on Developmental Disabilities. "It was, 'We could get them a room at the Hilton for a year and still not spend as much as we're spending on Fairview.'"

By the time the last residents moved out on Feb. 24, 2000, the new system was already in serious trouble.

That year, hundreds of Medicaid-eligible adults with developmental disabilities who had never lived at Fairview but had waited years for services filed a class-action lawsuit against the state.

The resulting Staley Agreement ordered the state to find residential services for at least 300 of the plaintiffs by 2009. Human services officials scrambled to comply.

"It was definitely a hurry-up job," Lynch said. "They were under the gun."

Today, the system relies on 1,200 group and foster residences spread throughout the state. They are the homes for about 4,200 developmentally disabled adults who live in the community.