STEPPS member Peter Adams wrote the following response to the Globe's Eileen McNamara regarding her column "Unhealth Objection," which scolded Framingham and the Planning Board for not having approved the oversized health clinic proposed by Great Brook Valley.
March 22, 2006
Dear Ms. McNamara,
I normally enjoy your columns very much, but your recent column "Unhealthy Objection" (March 19) was strikingly uninformed. Whoever provided you with the background material for the story either misled you deliberately or through ignorance. The health center issue is complex and the more you learn about it, the more troublesome it becomes. This is why, last month, one of the clinic's most outspoken supporters recently stated that the developer "has shown disrespect to our neighborhood, the people within, and to the Town of Framingham[. ...] I no longer support the health center."
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Some people simply want this project to go through for their own reasons, without thorough examination: witness the Framingham Board of Selectmen voting last month to support the clinic, but only after the Planning Board had closed the matter to public input and only after the chair of the Board of Selectmen squelched full discussion of the matter. One Selectman wanted a copy of the agreement Great Brook Valley made with the Framingham hospital, and Zoila Torres Feldman, Director of Great Brook Valley, said that she could get a copy to the Board. The chair, Katie Murphy, said not to, that the Board would obtain a copy. It was never done.
You call the clinic "urgently needed," but without evidence. In fact, a health clinic in Northborough just closed because of lack of demand and the current clinic -- yes, we already have one! -- is underused. If it were open longer hours, it might serve the entire need here. Even the proposed clinic will not be open 24 hours, so it will not be able to fully relieve the burden on the emergency room for those most needy who work multiple jobs or can't afford to take a day off to go to the doctor.
And, as you said, the legislature is working on a plan to provide the very folks who most need this clinic with health insurance! This makes me wonder where the "urgent need" is. The legislature's plan will be enacted before Great Brook Valley could even start construction, should they receive approval, and will attract small, local private medical facilities -- ones that will actually serve the needs of local residents -- to the area.
You cite the support of the Chamber of Commerce and say the "protracted process is not good for anyone's health." Yet this "protracted process" has given the community time to speak out. For instance, the Planning Board received a petition opposing the clinic with the signatures of over 100 downtown residents and business owners.
You write, "as is often the case when a construction project is proposed to serve the poor, the objections raised are about parking and traffic. Just as often, the real issue is race and class." This is an amazing and outrageous assertion. How many people did you interview before writing this? Clinic opponents are a diverse lot, from whites (who make up almost 80% of Framingham, after all) to Asians to Brazilians. We are middle class and lower class, homeowners and renters, business owners and regular employees. Please do your research before making assertions like this.
And there are real parking and traffic issues. The proposed clinic is too large for the parcel it is on, and the site is in the middle of an area known for having inadequate parking and heavy traffic. What's more, the proposed clinic is not designed for Framingham's needs -- it will serve a twenty-five town area! Because it is designed to attract clients from such a large area, it can only make the existing traffic and parking problems worse.
You point out that the clinic will be "financed by hard-to-come-by federal grants." Far from "hard to come by," these grants seem to be alarming easy to get -- IF you know the right people. There seems to be a "good old boy" network at play in the social service industry and the state's Office of Health and Human Services. Witness the near collapse of the clinic proposal over their hopelessly inadequate parking plan: within a space of two weeks, Great Brook Valley came up with $2 million for an underground parking garage (but still have revealed no plans for its security). Even with the garage, the clinic is short of the 160 parking places required under Framingham law.
You write that "fear that the Framingham Community Health Center will be a magnet for the uninsured ignores the fact that they are already here." Not at all. We are aware of the need, and are more than willing to address the needs of Framingham residents, but we are tired of serving the entire region's needs. As I said before, the proposed clinic is simply not designed for Framingham -- it will serve a twenty-five town area! This ties in with your passing mention that "there is merit to complaints by Stop Tax Exempt Private Property Sprawl, or STEPPS, that neighboring suburbs do little or nothing to serve the poor."
Yes, there is merit to these complaints. Framingham has far more social services than any other town in the region -- not just Wellesley, but Ashland, Marlborough, or Northborough, as well, and not just in number, but per capita. There are many reasons for this, which I'll be glad to elaborate on if you're interested, but it isn't as simple as your assertion that "noting that Wellesley fails to shoulder its social responsibility does not address the needs of patients of the clinic, 70 percent of whom live in Framingham itself."
For one thing, there's the chicken-or-egg question of why so many needy live in Framingham. Are they here for the social services, or are the social services here for them? One clue was at the last PILOT committee forum, at which dozens of local residents of South Middlesex Opportunity Council facilities testified. Not one was from Framingham. I believe that if the social service industry did the responsible thing and spread their programs around instead of concentrating them in "hubs" like Framingham, the number of needy would stop being concentrated in these hubs as well, which would better serve both the towns and the needy.
You wrote, "in its material opposing the health center, STEPPS insists 'this clinic will service social service clients (such as wet shelter residents), MCI inmates, and illegal immigrants.' On Friday afternoon, the tidy waiting room was filled not with drunks or drug addicts but with mothers bringing newborns for routine checkups and an older man being fitted with crutches for a broken foot. A trilingual staff was quietly going about its work in extraordinarily cramped quarters, serving English, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking patients."
What you did not write was that the Planning Board received a complaint from an English speaking woman who was refused treatment at the existing clinic because she did not speak Portuguese! You also failed to point out that the proposed clinic, unlike the existing one, will accept CenterCare and will have service agreements with SMOC and other social service providers to service their clients, as well as housing other Great Brook Valley programs. The existing clinic is designed specifically for Framingham residents. Comparing the two is simply not useful.
Yes, we need to do a better job of serving the uninsured, and yes, community health centers are important. But we can only deal with the health care crisis in this country effectively at the national level. Until we do that, subsidized community health centers like this one are merely a band aid on a hemorrhage.
And yes, the approval process can be a headache, but there is a good reason for this. It's called "due diligence." Without it, you might wind up with a town overburdened by social service facilities serving the whole region, affecting crime (Boston Globe, March 23, 2006) and budgets.
No one wants this to happen, but all too often they're willing to look the other way when it happens to someone else, as long as it doesn't happen in their town.
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