OLYMPIA, WA – A tearful Washington state lawmaker begged, to no avail, his colleagues across the aisle on the House Appropriations Committee not to pass a bill out of executive session that would shut down the Rainier School and Yakima Valley School for the developmentally disabled.
The committee gave Second Substitute House Bill 1472 – which would close both schools by June 30, 2027, with a planned transition process into community-based settings – a do-pass recommendation.
Ahead of Tuesday’s committee vote, Rep. Josh Penner, R-Orting, offered an amendment that would require the Department of Social and Health Services, which runs the facilities, to prove that every resident is safely placed in community settings before closing either campus.
Penner went through some of the details in the amendment.
“If you were going to put your family in care, these are the things you would want to know,” he explained. “The facility should not close down without readiness. The amendment doesn’t say they can’t close. It says DSHS must prove to us that every resident is safely placed. It requires comprehensive assessments for every resident. Everybody needs an individual plan. We need quarterly reporting and oversight. We also need to know about deaths post-transition. We should absolutely know if somebody dies within a year of transition.”
Penner concluded by urging that committee members determined to close the schools to adopt his amendment.
Rep. Brian Burnett, R-Wenatchee, spoke in support of Penner’s amendment.
“It’s to say let’s slow this down just a little bit … it’s the family members who are saying no,” Burnett said, referencing family members of residents at Rainier and Yakima Valley Schools who testified last weekend in opposition to the bill.
The amendment did not pass.
Just ahead of a final vote on the bill, an emotional Rep. Travis Couture, R-Allyn, pleaded with Democrats to reject it.
“These facilities were set up because we had a social and moral obligation to these people who are wards of the state,” he said. “They also have families who cannot physically take care of them, and those people waited all day to say their peace on this bill, and they got one minute to try to save their kids. That’s wrong you guys.”
“Whatever savings we get will be completely destroyed because you can’t put a price tag on a human life,” he said. “They’re not like the rest of us, but they are human beings, and they dream as well, and they bleed the same red blood as the rest of us … I’m sorry for the emotion, but I know what will happen. This is a grave, grave mistake. I will work with anybody to find whatever money you think this is going to save, but this is not what we should be doing. In Georgia, they shut down all these facilities, and hundreds of people died.”
Couture, who has children with disabilities, made one last appeal to stop the committee from passing the bill.
“I’ve made this one of my champion causes to do whatever I can to find progress for these people, but this isn’t progress,” he said. “I beg everybody on this committee to please put this bill down. There’s a mix of people who believe we should get rid of RHCs [Residential Habilitation Centers] like Rainier and Yakima Valley at any cost, but is it worth any cost? The cost of human life. There’s a reason why people exist at these schools. It’s because they already failed to be placed in community settings. Community settings that right now do not even truly exist in all the places they need to. This bill is wrong.”
Two Democrats on the committee joined every Republican in voting against the bill, but Democrats had enough votes to secure a do-pass recommendation.
