George Mavridis, the former Fernald League president and chief architect of the postage-stamp proposal, maintains that his proposed scaled-back version of Fernald would occupy 30 percent of the present campus or less. And, that portion would comprise land in the back of the campus, not the prime real estate near Trapelo Road that developers are seeking. "We want a scaled-down Fernald," Mavridis said, "that will never have a residential census over 300 and that will allow development that is compatible with Fernald's Trapelo Road neighbors." DMR apparently based its erroneous supposition on two plot plans, which Mavridis had sent the agency together with a written description of the postage-stamp proposal. The plot plans, however, were not intended to depict the proposal. One of the plot plans showed the full Fernald campus in 2004, and the second showed the occupied buildings on the campus. There was no way, Mavridis said, that anyone could draw any conclusions about the extent of the postage stamp plan from the plot plans themselves. We think it's time DMR actually sat down with Mavridis and other members of the Fernald League, and learned what the postage-stamp proposal is really about. We've asked for such a meeting many times. Second update: I posted here earlier this month about how the administration had done little analysis to support its claim of a relatively high cost of $239,000 per resident for care at Fernald. I noted that the administration had apparently done no analysis to support its claim of a relatively low cost of $102,000 for care for persons with mental retardation in the community. The administration cited these figures to justify its decision to go to court to close Fernald. It turns out that DMR believes they did give us an analysis regarding the $102,000 figure. It's just that the analysis didn't mention the $102,000. In the same article, The Daily News Tribune stated that Martinez, the DMR spokesman: ..said the state is working on getting the Fernald League a more detailed analysis of how they arrived at the $102,000 annually per resident in the community.
That's nice to know. In September, we had asked in a Public Records Law request for all analyses supporting the administration's Fernald cost figures. As I noted before, we received a number of spreadsheets from DMR with a variety of community-based costs on them. But nothing appeared to add up to $102,000. However, we did receive the results of an analysis done ten years previously by an internal DMR working group, which estimated the cost of community-based care at $134,247--an amount 32 percent higher than the $102,000 figure. Now, more than two months after we first asked for it, DMR is working on getting us a detailed analysis showing how they arrived at the $102,000. Our main concern, though, is that if they didn't have this analysis available to begin with, is it now being developed after the fact? In other words, they first came up with the $102,000 figure--now they seem to be developing the analysis to derive it. Shouldn't it be the other way around? |
