Tom Fanning, president of Ability Beyond, brought a model of the group home the organization hopes to build off Halpin Lane to the Board of Selectmen. —Macklin Reid photo
Plans for another group home in Ridgefield are moving toward a hearing and a town meeting at the end of the month.
“Fifty or 60 years ago, when a family gave birth to a child with a significant disability, after the delivery the doctor would give them advice to ‘put the child away.’ These families said no,” Tom Fanning told the Board of Selectmen.
Fanning, the president of Ability Beyond, was describing the birth of his organization, which is working to open its second group home in Ridgefield.
The selectmen approved terms of a lease that would give Ability Beyond a place to build the facility — a half-acre of town land at the intersection of Prospect Ridge Road and Halpin Lane.
The proposed $1-a-year lease was scheduled for a public hearing next Wednesday, May 6, at 7:30 in town hall’s lower level conference room.
The selectmen also scheduled a May 27 town meeting to approve the lease.
Fanning appeared at the selectmen’s April 22 meeting and discussed his organization and the proposed lease, as well as the group home for six disabled adults that Ability Beyond has quietly operated off Ritch Drive for years.
Ability Beyond was founded in 1953 by the group of parents Fanning described, who wanted to keep their disabled kids at home, or close by, and have them be part of the community and not closed up in a large institution.
Today Ability Beyond serves some 2,500 to 3,000 people in Connecticut and New York with residential facilities, employment services, transition services, day programs, clinical supports, and other help.
“Many of the services we provide are to help people sustain themselves on their own — they don’t need a group home,” Fanning said.
The organization does operate 21 homes in Connecticut and four in New York state.
Older adults
The group home planned for the corner of Halpin Lane and Prospect Ridge would be for six adults, aged in the range of 25 to 55 years old. Probably most would be 35 or older, Fanning said.
“This home would be for people with developmental disabilities, many of whom no longer have families,” he said.
Fanning said the facility would be designed to operate on a newer model “to develop homes that will really make it possible for people to live their whole lives in the community.”
The home would be staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he said.
The model used today is no longer to have live-in staff, as some of the selectmen assumed, but to have a larger number of people working shifts, Fanning said.
Regional approach
The people living in the home would not necessarily be from Ridgefield, although the organization does seek to continue “the founding idea of keeping people in the community,” he said.
“It has to be more of a regional approach.”
But that works both ways.
“We now serve about 50 people from Ridgefield in other towns,” he told the selectmen.
The building would be about 3,000 square feet, he said.
Selectman Andy Bodner said he supported the concept of the town helping establish another group home by providing land, but he wondered at the length of the lease.
“Our contribution here is the land. My question is on the lease. In all the years we’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a 100-year lease,” Bodner said.
“You get to a certain point, it no longer is considered a lease.”
“They wanted to buy the property,” First Selectman Rudy Marconi replied. “We wanted to hang onto it.”
He said Sunrise Cottage, another group home in town operated by a different organization, had a 50-year lease for its town land off Sunset Lane.
The Board of Selectmen’s consensus was for a shorter period, and Marconi said he’d have the proposed lease amended from a 99-year length to a 50-year, renewable term.
The board was unanimous in support of the proposal.
“In Connecticut,” Fanning said, “it is estimated there are 2,000 people on a waiting list for a home of this sort.”