Future after Closing of NYS Developmental Center

Faced with the closing of Broome Developmental Center, the state has failed to develop a strategy to shift the future burden of care to the private sector.

The New York State Office for People With Developmental Disabilities has a general timetable for the transfer of clients. But the nonprofit organizations facing heavier caseloads say they lack a clear picture of how the state will attend to future clients coming into the system.

“Programs and supports have been discontinued before alternative options have been developed,” said Steven Kroll, the Albany-based executive director of NYSARC Inc., the nation’s largest nonprofit provider of services to people with developmental disabilities.