— A state Senate committee today approved a bill that would rescind a controversial decision to close two of the state’s developmental centers and create a new task force to recommend changes to the institutions.
The plan to shutter the North Jersey Developmental Center in Totowa and Woodbridge Developmental Center was supposed to be set in stone. Gov. Chris Christie and Legislature had agreed an earlier task force would make a legally binding decision to select which of the seven centers would close so the state could free up more money for group homes and other forms of community housing.
But when the panel did make its wishes known, many were upset. Hundreds turned out for an emotional, hours-long hearing last month in Montclair.
Because of that, legislators said today, they were advancing a bill that would throw out that panel’s findings and create a new task force. The Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens committee approved the bill (S2596) by a 7-2 vote, with one abstention.
“For the families that have moved… to be near their loved ones — whether it’s their daughter or the brother or their sister or their parents in those communities — it would be an enormous hardship for them to have to travel from Totowa or Woodbridge or areas nearby those facilities to another part of the state, perhaps a hundred miles away, just to visit them,” Sen. Joseph Vitale (D-Middlesex), a primary sponsor and the committee chair, said during the hearing today. “To ask them to travel that distance is just wrong.”
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