A Department for Children and Families official said that a planned Vergennes residential youth facility will not include space for older teens, backtracking on earlier plans to expand the campus.
State officials are working on drawing up plans for the Green Mountain Youth Campus, a treatment center in Vergennes for “justice-involved youth” — the department’s term for youths who have been criminally charged.
The program is intended as a more therapeutic successor to Woodside, the Essex juvenile detention center that closed in the fall of 2020. The initial plan, unveiled May 2024, called for the campus to include 14 beds and to offer treatment to youths aged 12 to 18 on state-owned land in Vergennes, starting in 2026.
Late last year, however, state Department for Children and Families officials said they were considering expanding the facility to 22 beds so it could also house 18 and 19 year olds.
But in an interview last month, Tyler Allen, the adolescent services director at the Department for Children and Families, said that the state decided to scrap that proposed expansion after hearing concerns from Vergennes officials and others.
Those meetings with stakeholders led the department to determine that a 22-bed Green Mountain Youth Campus would be “trying to serve too many needs, too many ages, too many populations,” Allen said.
The state is now moving forward with the original 14 bed-plan, although Allen said officials have made some other changes as well, including structural design tweaks and expanding capacity for vocational programs.
“DCF changed our position while we did the exploration, because this is all about working with stakeholders and working with multiple perspectives,” he said.
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The shift comes as Gov. Phil Scott’s administration is seeking the repeal of Vermont’s “Raise the Age” statute, a law to bring 18 and 19-year-olds charged with less severe crimes into family court and out of adult prisons.
Currently, 18-year-olds charged with misdemeanors and some minor felonies have their cases heard in family court. Lawmakers, however, seem inclined to again delay the complete implementation of the law, which was scheduled to expand to include 19-year-olds in April.
The proposal for an expanded Green Mountain Youth Campus would have allowed the facility to serve some of those older teens. Now, the status quo, in which some youths charged with criminal offenses end up in adult prisons, seems likely to prevail for the near future.
In an interview Monday, Allen said that the changes to the facility design and the governor’s proposal to repeal “Raise the Age” were not connected.
“I could see how somebody might connect those dots, but they are separate from one another,” he said.
In Vergennes, the prospect of housing older youths at the facility had drawn concern from residents.
Mark Koenig, the chair of a Vergennes committee negotiating with the state about the facility, said that the fact that state officials were considering a larger campus with older youths had come as a surprise.
“Suddenly, it’s not just 18 and under, it’s possibly 19-, 20-, 21-year-olds,” he said in an interview last month.
The proposal was also a complicating factor in their negotiations, he said.
“We can’t buy a car if all you’re saying is it has four wheels, right?” Koenig said. “We’d like to know, is it a Mini Cooper, or is it a semi?”
The committee that Koenig led, called simply the Ad Hoc Committee, has drafted a list of items that state officials could provide that would help Vergennes residents accept the construction of the youth campus.
The most recent draft of that list includes a request for 180 acres of state land for affordable housing, as well as state investments in public safety and infrastructure, among other items.
In December, the city sent a letter to Wanda Minoli, the commissioner of the Department of Buildings and General Services, asking for specifics on the proposed youth facility and who will be held there.
That letter has not yet been answered, Vergennes city officials said.
“We’re kind of in a holding pattern, waiting to hear back from BGS,” Vergennes City Manager Ron Redmond said in a phone interview Monday.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Proposed Vergennes youth facility will not include 18 and 19 year olds, officials say.