The Suncoast Residential Center, a sprawling place in the Gateway area of St. Petersburg, is home to six adults with developmental disabilities, ranging from mental retardation to cerebral palsy.
Their needs are so great that their families can't care for them. They often can't communicate well, and they try to hurt themselves or others when upset.
The other day, I watched a man with autism, 40-year-old Guy Adkins, moan incessantly in the living room. He kept it up while riding an exercise bike and pacing the floor.
How does the world look to him?
Whatever the answer, the picture is about to change drastically, thanks to the logic, such as it is, of state government.
The Department of Children and Families is cutting the payments it gives to Goodwill Industries-Suncoast, which runs the center where Guy lives.
The cuts are so deep that Goodwill has decided it can no longer afford to run the program at Suncoast and another group home in St. Petersburg. Somebody else will have to pick up the job.
What's going on at Suncoast is being duplicated across the state. Other programs might close.
Late in October, with little warning, the DCF cut rates paid to agencies that care for people like Adkins. The money was being spent so fast that a multimillion-dollar deficit was in the offing.
The cut might sound like a responsible fiscal act until you realize that it occurs in a state where corporations skip out on a half-billion dollars or more in taxes every year. If the state had its priorities straight and those taxes were paid, the people at Suncoast might not be in this jam.
Suncoast has a second problem. Whichever agency takes over for Goodwill will have to do so someplace else.
The DCF is kicking out Adkins and his roommates at the end of January. The state says the building has health and safety problems, although there have been no licensing or code violations found, according to the agency.
The state says clients at Suncoast will be placed in other programs close to home. Their families don't trust a word of what they've been promised.
They're afraid their children will be moved far from Pinellas County, put in homes not equipped to handle their needs, drugged to keep their behavioral problems in check or, worst of all, abused.
"They're like pieces on a game board," says Sherryl Mantell, who has an autistic son at Suncoast.
Mantell and some other parents have taken leave from their jobs to find a new home for their grownup children, a place where the vagaries of state budget policy and politics can't hurt them.
They formed a nonprofit, Home At Last of Tampa Bay Inc. Mantell is the president. The group even set up a Web site, www.home-at-last.org
But we're talking about a near to impossible goal for people like these, of ordinary means. They estimate a home for a half-dozen disabled men and women would cost $400,000. A 20 percent down payment would amount to $80,000.
So far, they have only $10,000.
"I will sell whatever I have to sell," says Adkins' mother, Cheryl Caudill. "My husband and I will come up with the rest of the down payment."
Adkins, the man I heard moaning, has certain fascinations. He loves '60s music and television. He's a whiz at geography.
Like others at the center, he works at Goodwill, sorting clothes and arranging hangers. He makes a small living that, combined with his Social Security disability check, helps pay his way at Suncoast.
He doesn't yet know that his days at the center are numbered. None of the six adults who live there do.
