Cedar Hills closure will leave patients in lurch
That ends Oct. 31 when the center, about 10 miles east of Renton, is scheduled to shut down.
There's little doubt at the center what will happen to its patients then.
"They'll be in jail. They're going to be lying in the doorways of businesses downtown. They'll be at Harborview. ... They'll die. Many of them will die," said Phil Rohrer, lead counselor.
The shutdown is taking place because King County doesn't have enough money in its $497 million current-expense fund to meet all its commitments. Almost 70 percent of that money goes for required services such as jails, police and courts, with jails getting the biggest single piece, $117 million a year.
What's left is supposed to pay for human services such as Cedar Hills, which provides treatment for those who can't pay for it themselves or are ordered into it by the courts.
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Staff members compare it to pushing your car off a cliff because it's out of gas. King County Executive Ron Sims compares it to having a $20,000 car that's going to be destroyed unless $5 worth of oil is added to the engine, and not having $5.
"We don't have any more money," says Sims. "That's an appropriate analogy."
Still, Sims sees closing Cedar Hills as a way to save money that can be used elsewhere.
Sims is proposing that money saved through the closing of Cedar Hills be used to pay for other treatment programs. It's part of an overall plan to cut the average King County daily jail population by 400 inmates by 2003, a reduction that could save more than $15 million a year in jail costs.
The plan calls for alternatives to jail including a day-reporting center, electronic home detention, work crews and more treatment programs.
Money for the new operations and programs would come largely from the closing of the Cedar Hills and the North Rehabilitation Facility in Shoreline, said Sims. The plan would spend the money in part for treatment programs based in the west wing of the downtown jail and at the Regional Justice Center in Kent. The plan, still in draft form, notes that treatment programs housed separately in jails have shown high rates of success.
Center had some failures
The treatment provided at Cedar Hills has not always been successful, and the center has had many reported failures and scandals, from suicides and critical state audits to clients who went on to commit crimes. One of the most recent was Ronald Keith Matthews Sr., who's accused of shooting to death a deputy sheriff, Richard Herzog, in June. Matthews had been a Cedar Hills patient in the 1990s.
But Rohrer, the counselor, says studies show Cedar Hills has about a 37 percent success rate, meaning about that percentage of clients never show up again in any drug or alcoholism programs.
That's consistent with other in-patient treatment programs, and perhaps 1 to 2 percent better than many, said Fred Garcia, chief of the office of program services for the state Division of Alcohol and Substance Abuse.
With 70,000 people treated since the center opened in 1967, that means more than 25,000 patients apparently straightened out their lives at Cedar Hills, said Rohrer.
But Rohrer, who, like other counselors, carries a caseload of 12 to 20 clients at a time and often has 10 or more one-on-one counseling sessions a day with clients, says he's developed his own theory of who will respond to treatment.
About 25 percent have "taken their last drink," he says, and are resolved to change. Another 25 percent are just the opposite and will use again immediately. And about 50 percent in the middle could go either way, he adds.
Rohrer should know.
Like many of the counselors, Rohrer himself is a Cedar Hills graduate, a person who followed the model for recovery set out by the Cedar Hills founder, Ron Fagan, who himself was an alcoholic who went on to become a respected community leader.
"I was Skid Road," said Rohrer. "I was born in Seattle. My run was from 14 to 32. I drank and used drugs."
He talks about graduating from Shoreline High School in 1960, of burglarizing Richmond Beach taverns as a teenager to get beer, of being drunk in the Marine Corps, of going through Cedar Hills in the 1970s and finally deciding in 1981 that his purpose in life should be to prevent other people from duplicating his own experience by working in the long-term residential environment offered at Cedar Hills.
"I've worked with hundreds of people who have been through 15 or 20 treatment centers," said Rohrer. "But they've been successful here. The average stay in private treatment is 17 days. It's just not enough time for the lights to come on.''
Instead, Cedar Hills has offered stays that commonly lasted up to 90 days and sometimes ran as a long as a year, often providing the first place where many of its clients could pause and try to cope with their diseases.
It was Fagan who instituted many of the techniques that became part of the Cedar Hills programs, including the long-term stays, making videotapes of clients when they first arrived and showing it to them a month later and of using diet, rest, recreation and education to try to change a client's life.
Since its founding, Cedar Hills has provided a setting totally unlike the bars or doorways where its clients typically drink or use drugs, said Tony Cebollero, assistant administrator. Patients at the 10-acre site have picnic tables, paths through the woods and a complete branch of the King County Library System, stocked with books, videotapes and other materials about alcoholism and addiction.
"In simplest terms, we provide a setting for them to get well," said John Lambert, another counselor.
That setting often had not been available to most of the people at Cedar Hills, where, Rohrer says, he and other counselors deal with "the sickest of the sick."
Unlike thousands of alcoholics and addicts who have jobs, homes and families for support and insurance to pay for private counseling, clients at Cedar Hills commonly have nothing.
They're also among the most likely to commit crimes, and one part of the Cedar Hills concept is that it takes people who had been burdens on society and turns them into taxpayers.
Rohrer estimates that many of the thousands of patients he's dealt with often commit a half-dozen crimes or more a month to support their addictions. Putting hundreds of people a year back on the streets without the services provided by Cedar Hills is virtually certain to have measurable effects on the community, he said.
"I always ask my clients how they support their habits and the stories are unbelievable. The schemes are unbelievable," said Rohrer.
He's had people sit in his office and describe how they concocted scams to steal cars from their grandparents in faked traffic accidents; of stealing paint to sell but adding water first so they could sell more; of burglaries, car thefts, robberies and check forgeries beyond number.
Boarding up buildings
The last clients are expected to be gone from Cedar Hills by mid-October and the last staff members will leave Oct. 31.
Work crews are beginning to put plywood over windows of already-vacated buildings, and there are only about 75 clients left at the site, which had 208 beds at its peak.
The Fagan Building, an 80-bed, two-story structure named after the founder, has been closed, with beds stacked against walls in the empty dormitories and weeds starting to grow in the yard once well tended by patients. Sims says he hopes it will be possible to "cocoon" the buildings, but with no maintenance, they're expected to deteriorate rapidly.
The first buildings cost $480,000 in 1967 when Cedar Hills took in its first 20 clients. Sims estimates it might cost $20 million to duplicate the Cedar Hills facilities today, meeting modern energy and building codes.
Sims says closing Cedar Hills is one of the hardest decisions he's ever had to make.
"There are decisions you make as a public official that ... leave a scar," he said. "There's nothing you can do. You feel really hopeless. They're the hidden infrastructure. The hidden service. They alter lives. We're down to Scotch tape and staples trying to hold things together."
Sims says nonprofit and private treatment agencies have been asked to look at Cedar Hills to try to find a way to keep it running, but none of those businesses were able to make it pencil out either.
To Cebollero, the assistant administrator, it comes down to more than money.
"A lot of folks have been saved by this place. You can't add up how much a person's life is worth."
Peyton Whitely: 206-464-2259 or pwhitely@seattletimes.com