Camarillo State Advocates Sue to Prevent Closure

With the closure of Camarillo State Hospital only three months away, advocates for the institution have filed a lawsuit in a move to block the shutdown and prevent the hospital’s nearly 700 patients from being funneled to other facilities starting next month.

The lawsuit, filed late Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of family members of patients, alleges that the closure would violate state law and harm the hospital’s mentally ill and developmentally disabled clients, many of whom have lived there for years or even decades.

With time running out for the 60-year-old institution, the suit seeks a temporary court order immediately halting the closure and all patient transfers until a hearing can be held on those and other issues.

“We can’t afford to wait any longer, there will be nobody left,” said Ronald Gold, the Calabasas attorney representing hospital advocates. “Hopefully the outcome of a trial would be a finding that the needs of these patients are not being met.”

Officials with the state Department of Developmental Services--for now, the sole defendant in the lawsuit--said they have not had a good opportunity to review the case but strongly disagree with the allegations.

Michael Mount, chief counsel for the state agency, pointed out that the closure process has been highly publicized and ongoing for months, giving advocates ample opportunity to voice their concerns.

Moreover, the issue has nothing to do with the denial of services to any client, but centers on the narrow argument of where those services will be provided, he said.

“There was full opportunity for these issues to be heard, and they were,” Mount said. “For the purposes of [the temporary restraining order], emergent and irreparable harm has to be shown. From the perspective of where things are, I don’t believe there is merit to that.”

A hearing in Superior Court has been scheduled for this morning on the matter.

Filed by the Greenline Parents Group and Family and Advocates of the Mentally Ill, the lawsuit alleges that the hospital closure would violate provisions in the Welfare and Institutions Code that require the state “to prevent the dislocation of persons with developmental disabilities from their home communities.”

Furthermore, the lawsuit claims that the closure would violate the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, which requires public entities to “administer services, programs and activities in the most integrated setting appropriate” to people with disabilities.

Without a court order to halt the closure, the lawsuit alleges that patients will suffer irreparable harm.

*

And once the hospital is closed, the lawsuit asserts, it would require lengthy and expensive litigation to reopen the facility.

The legal challenge has been in the works since shortly after Gov. Pete Wilson, in January 1996, ordered the closure of the old psychiatric hospital, citing its rising costs and dwindling patient population.

Patients are scheduled to start being transferred to other state institutions late next month, with the facility expected to empty out by June 30.

To decide what should become of the property, Wilson appointed a task force of state and local leaders who eventually agreed that a four-year university campus would be the best use of the hospital’s 85 buildings, scattered across 700 rolling acres south of Camarillo.

Since then, Cal State officials have been drawing up a conversion plan, including the unveiling last week of a preliminary blueprint for Cal State University Channel Islands.

Handel Evans, president of the local campus, said the lawsuit will have no effect on efforts underway to map out Ventura County’s first public university.

“The creation of a university and the closure of the hospital are two separate issues,” Evans said. “We will continue along . . . to see if we can use the site regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit.”

The legal challenge leans heavily on expert opinion and the impassioned testimony of family members to bolster the argument that the closure would harm patients by uprooting them from their home, perhaps reversing any progress they have made at the state facility.

John Chase, spokesman for the Greenline group, said parents decided to pursue legal action only as a last resort.

*

Ultimately, Chase said, the lawsuit is not intended to halt the closure of the hospital altogether, but to ensure that at least a portion of the property is set aside to house and treat patients with families in the immediate area.

For months, mental health advocates have pitched a plan to establish a treatment center on a remote corner of the hospital property, seeking the use of what is now employee housing for 40 to 60 patients who are unsuited to community placement.

“We certainly wanted to search every other alternative before we brought this to court, but those alternatives were, one by one, pretty much undermined as time went on,” Chase said.

“I can’t be happy over filing a lawsuit,” he added. “But we have exhausted every other alternative. We just hope this might give us another chance.”

In court papers supporting the action, advocates and mental health experts drove home that argument.

Dr. Robert P. Liberman, a UCLA professor of psychiatry who for more than two decades headed the hospital’s world-renowned research unit, argued that the hospital should be spared from closure because of the treatment breakthroughs pioneered at Camarillo.

“Once closed, this irreplaceable state resource, with its staffing, infrastructure and programs, can never be re-built,” Liberman wrote. “We believe it would be a real travesty to close Camarillo, an error in state planning that will have adverse consequences for decades to come.”

*

Oxnard resident Leo O’Hearn, a retired lawyer who moved to Ventura County to be close to his schizophrenic son at Camarillo State, said in court papers that transferring him to another facility would deprive him of the support he needs for the treatment of his illness.

At Camarillo, Steve O’Hearn has found a home, a place that has rescued him from a world of delusion and hallucination. Now, after 20 years at Camarillo, he is scheduled to transfer to Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk in the coming months.

“The tranquil asylum setting of CSH with spacious grounds and foliage provides the least restrictive setting available to the mentally disabled who are not accepted in the community,” O’Hearn wrote. “The prison like setting of MSH will not be conducive to improved mental well being.”