Wash. Budget Includes $500,000 to Study Closing State Institutions

Austin Jenkins
05/04/2009

A follow–up, now, to a pair of stories we brought you earlier this year about budget cuts in Washington state. Lawmakers contemplated closing the Yakima Valley School for the developmentally disabled and the Naselle juvenile rehabilitation camp. The Legislature also discussed shutting down the prison on McNeil Island. All of those state institutions were spared in the final budget, but as Olympia correspondent Austin Jenkins reports, that's not the end of the story.

The political storm over closing state institutions proved too much this Legislative session, so Washington lawmakers backed down. Instead, the final state budget spends $500,000 to study and recommend which facilities should close. Prisons, juvenile lock–ups and institutions for the developmentally disabled will all be reviewed. That includes two maximum security facilities run by the Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration (JRA). For now, the medium&ndsah;security Naselle Youth Camp near the Southwest Washington coast has been spared. But Jack Smith, a union shop steward there, says he still doesn't feel out of the woods.

Smith: "I think everyone in JRA is really concerned about any closures and I don't think that we can ever reach a point where there isn't some concern that we may not be closed."

Legislative budget writers say, in the face of the current economic crisis and with a surplus of beds, it only makes sense to take a hard look at closing some state institutions. I'm Austin Jenkins in Olympia.

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