Vermont’s House Human Services Committee is pushing back on a $21.5 million contract the state signed with a Pennsylvania company facing serious abuse allegations, calling on Gov. Phil Scott’s administration to renegotiate the deal before lawmakers authorize any funding.
The contract, finalized in January by the state’s Department for Children and Families, brings Abraxas Youth and Family Services to Brattleboro to operate West River Haven, a three-bed residential care facility for youth ages 10 to 18 in state custody. The five-year agreement immediately raised concerns among child welfare advocates who flagged the company’s record in Pennsylvania.
Those concerns are not abstract. Pennsylvania officials revoked the operating license of an Abraxas facility last November, citing “gross incompetence, negligence, and misconduct.” Earlier this month, four men filed suit in Pennsylvania court alleging they had been sexually assaulted at the same facility years earlier, according to PennLive. The pattern of harm described in those reports is exactly the kind of institutional failure that devastates young people’s long-term health and makes any path to stability harder to reach.
Rep. Anne Donahue, the independent ranking member on the House Human Services Committee, said the price tag alone set off warning signs. The contract works out to roughly $4,000 per bed per day at West River Haven, regardless of whether those beds are occupied. By comparison, the Red Clover temporary care facility in Middlesex and the Retreat in Brattleboro each run about $2,825 per bed per day. The gap is significant, and Donahue made clear she noticed it immediately.
“What in the world?” she said, describing her initial reaction to the contract’s cost.
Beyond the daily rate, nearly $600,000 of the program’s requested $4.3 million budget for this year would go directly to out-of-state administrative overhead, according to Department for Children and Families estimates cited in the committee’s memo. That is public money leaving Vermont to cover the bureaucratic costs of a company already under scrutiny in its home state.
The committee’s majority-approved memo asks the Legislature’s budget writers to require the administration to renegotiate the contract before any funding moves forward. The committee also recommended cutting $288,000 from the state’s broader high-end youth care system.
The situation exposes a structural tension in how Vermont governs itself. The executive branch holds authority over state contracts, but lawmakers control the budget. That means the Legislature can withhold Department for Children and Families funding or decline to include the program in this year’s budget, but its direct power to mandate specific new contract terms is legally murky.
What is not murky is how the contract came to be. When the state first put out a request for proposals for the West River Haven facility, no one responded. The state eventually landed on Abraxas as the sole taker. Donahue said that original silence should prompt harder questions about whether the model itself makes sense.
“If nobody feels they can provide the service until you finally get one at an extraordinary cost,” she said, “maybe trying to do a two- or three-bed program just is not a viable model.”
That question cuts to the core of what good youth care policy actually looks like. Small residential programs can offer therapeutic stability and personalized support, but only when they are properly staffed, funded, and held accountable. A facility with a three-bed capacity, operated by a company with a revoked license in another state, funded at nearly twice the cost of comparable in-state options, does not obviously meet that bar.
For youth already navigating family instability and state custody, the quality of residential care shapes health outcomes for years. Trauma from institutional abuse compounds existing hardship and creates cascading effects on mental health, educational attainment, and long-term wellbeing. Vermont’s legislators are right to treat this contract as a public health issue, not just a budget line.
The administration has not yet publicly responded to the committee’s push to renegotiate. Budget negotiations will determine whether West River Haven opens under the terms currently on the table or whether Vermont insists on a better deal.
