Chatsworth Facilities Granted License : Homes for Quadriplegics Get ‘New Start’

Last September, wheelchair-bound residents of New Start Homes in Chatsworth protested in Los Angeles Superior Court because the facilities, which care for adult quadriplegics, were in danger of being shut down.

On Saturday, those same residents celebrated a new lease on life for the homes.

Patients, friends and the founder of the facilities, which had been threatened with closure late last year because of financial difficulties and health and safety problems, gathered at a party to mark the licensing of the homes by state health officials. The license granted by the state gave the homes six months to operate and the opportunity to obtain a longer-term license, the founder, Mary Williams, said.

“I had no doubt this day would come, but it sure took a long time to get here,” Williams said during the party, held in the back yard of one of the two Chatsworth single-family homes where New Start bases its operation. As she talked, several of the 10 adults who stay at the homes sipped drinks and chatted with friends.

Alternative to Hospital

Williams opened the homes in 1983 to provide quadriplegics with an alternative to staying in a hospital or with family. New Start’s patients are paralyzed from the neck down and need respirators to breathe. The state had allowed the homes to operate without a license because regulations governing such homes are still being drafted.

But state health officials last September found the homes to be in violation of health and safety regulations, and they ordered Williams to correct the problems or close the homes. The officials said New Start had to construct emergency exits from each patient’s room, widen access paths, improve the nutritional program and install backup electrical generators.

The cost of the improvements was so prohibitive that Williams was forced to shut down three of the five New Start homes then in operation. In October, the homes’ board of directors ordered Williams to liquidate the privately owned company because the improvements would be too costly.

Home Sold

However, Williams, a former director of Northridge Hospital Medical Center’s rehabilitation center, was determined to save New Start. She and her husband sold their home and put the money into the operation. Fund-raisers were held, and private donations were solicited. More than $50,000 was raised to pay for the improvements.

“I think we can manage now,” Williams said. “We have to plan now. But the program is no longer in jeopardy.”

Robert Carp, program manager for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, said the home was given a provisional license, which is a six-month permit granted to facilities that are new or have never been licensed.

If the home passes inspection at the end of the six months, an official license will be issued that will be good for a year, Carp said. “They seem to have taken care of our concerns,” he said.

One of the homes’ patients, Darrell Jackson, 22, said he had been worried about the future of the home. “Now I can sleep in peace,” said Jackson, who has been at the home for five years, the longest of any patient.

Jackson, who will attend Pierce College in the fall to study hotel management, was disabled at age 7 after being struck by a car while he was riding a bicycle. “This place lets us do what we want to do. In the hospital, you live, but you’re not living a life.”