The Department had done
a number of proposals
to basically close facilities,
not necessarily to improve care
or to have a serious program
for normalization. It was just
more that they wanted to save money.
And what started to change all that,
I think, was when the Welsch v
Likins decree came out in '74, '75,
somewhere in there, where the court
simply said the State had failed
to provide a minimum level of care
for developmentally disabled people.
And I think the vast majority of
our members, who were the line workers
at the then-called State Hospitals,
agreed with Welsch v Likins
that they were under-funded,
they did not have the capacity and the
staff and resources to provide the
care people needed. And for a number of
years there I think we saw the
staffing levels, the funding for the...
what by now were being
called Regional Treatment Centers improve.
That started to fall apart with the funding
crises of '81, '82, '83. We went through
very, very bad times. There were special
session after special session, the revenue
wasn't coming in, and as part of one of
those the legislature in its wisdom simply
decided to close Rochester. And it was not
based on public policy reasons. It was
not based upon "This is a good change of
treatment" for both DD, I think there were
also mental - mentally ill
and chem dep folks there at that point.
It was not that there was
better treatment. It was that they just
wanted to save the money. And so Rochester
got closed. Patients got - clients and
patients got redistributed to other
facilities. Staff got redistributed
to other facilities.
I think the lesson that we as
a union took out of that,
and that a lot of the
ranks of our workers
took out of that, is you
can close a hospital. Hastings had
closed earlier, but that really wasn't
the same thing. You could close a
major facility.
And this facility was in Al Quie's ...
then Governor Quie's old
congressional district.
The fact that they can take that one
out, they can take out almost anything.
Rudy Perpich won the next election in '82.
And Rudy, I think, on a personal basis
had a strong commitment, and clearly his
brother George had a strong commitment,
to finding a way to place DD clients in
a less restrictive alternative.