Reopening Iowa Juvenile Home would be a Hatch priority

DES MOINES - The inability of the Legislature to reopen the Iowa Juvenile Home may well be the biggest disappointment of his 22 years as a lawmaker, Sen. Jack Hatch said Friday.

It will be a priority of his administration if elected governor this fall, the Des Moines Democrat told The Gazette Editorial Board, and he would not rule out working with a private provider to operate the Toledo home and school for delinquent girls.

Hatch didn't blame conditions at the Iowa Juvenile Home - frequent use of isolation rooms and inadequate education - on Republican Gov. Terry Branstad.

'What was going on at the juvenile home had been going on for years,” Hatch said. The isolation rooms, for example, were appropriate on an open campus.

However, Hatch, who is seeking to derail Branstad's bid for a sixth term, does blame the governor for his unilateral decision to close the home 'against any recommendation of either his own task force or Disability Rights of Iowa.”

The Disability Rights report 'woke us up to something that should have been taken care of a long time ago,” according to Hatch.

Unfortunately, he said, the governor didn't want anything to do with it.

'I think he wanted to divert attention away from the fact that this was going on under his administration,” he said. 'What he didn't know because he never asked was that we didn't blame him for what was going on, but for closing it without a plan to reopen it.”

The Iowa Senate Democrats used those recommendations as the basis of legislation to correct the situation. It called for operating it as a home for delinquent girls without any Children in Need of Assistance who had behavioral problems and without boys on campus. The plan included getting accreditation from the American Correction Association and certification from the Department of Education.

However, they could not reach agreement with the Republican-controlled House on a plan to reopen the facility.

'In the past, everything we did was to maintain the status quo or improve it,” Hatch said. 'With this, we made it worse with our eyes wide open.”

One option, Branstad reportedly is considering is to contract with a private company to operate the Iowa Juvenile Home.

Hatch would not reject that out-of-hand.

'It could be part of a solution, but the governor has a pretty bad record on trying to privatize public services,” he said, referring to the Iowa Veterans Home at Marshalltown.

At one time, Hatch's company had a contract with the state to train people how to look for and keep jobs. Eventually, he trained state employees to do the jobs and take over the program.

In the case of Branstad and the Iowa Juvenile Home, Hatch said, privatization would be punitive.

'I don't mind privatization,” Hatch said, 'but this is an example of privatization being used, I believe, to get back at unions, to eliminate public employees.”

He would expect private human services providers to be interested in operating the Iowa Juvenile Home because of the investments the state has made in recent years to improve facilities there.

However, Hatch said, it's hard for a private firm to provide the services necessary and still make a profit.

'You can't provide that kind of public service (because) private business has to make a rate of return,” he said.

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