by JEN BIUNDO
Residents of the Pinafore Park neighborhood just outside Buda aren’t happy that two sex offenders may soon be living in a group home for mentally disabled individuals in their neighborhood. But after a meeting this weekend with D&S Residential Services, they say some of their biggest concerns have been allayed.
“We were really on edge for a few months,” said Pinafore Park resident Liza Fuentes, a mother of two children.
Pinafore Park, a small neighborhood west of the Bonita Vista subdivision off West Goforth Road, sits just outside Buda city limits. Area residents received an alert in the mail in January notifying them that a sex offender had moved in to 500 Rebel Street, and in March, a website that tracks the locations of sex offenders showed a second individual at the same address.
Both men had convictions for indecency with a child by sexual contact and were listed as being a high risk for reoffense. Concerned that multiple sex offenders were living in the same house, residents contacted elected officials.
“No one’s excited about having a sex offender in their neighborhood, but this isn’t exactly what it seems to be on the surface,” said Pct. 2 Commissioner Jeff Barton, who helped organize the meeting at the Buda Library Saturday attended by D&S officials and about 80 residents.
Mickey Atkins, president and CEO of D&S Residential Services, said the meeting helped dispel some misperceptions.
“I think they misunderstood our program,” Atkins said. “They felt like we were a halfway house for people who are registered sex offenders. We were able to explain to them what our business was.”
D&S Residential Services was founded in 1993 and currently operates about 120 group homes in Texas, Atkins said, as well as properties in Tennessee. They purchased and opened the Rebel Drive property in 2003.
D&S works with individuals with mental disabilities, providing safe and monitored assisted living facilities. Typically, about four residents share a residential home, assisted by staff members.
“Our goal is to help people get out of an institution and get into a community setting,” Atkins said.
Though Atkins couldn’t comment on the status of individual residents, he said that to qualify for the assisted living facility, residents had to have an evaluation showing an IQ of less than 70, which is considered the boundary for cognitive disability. Many residents have other diagnoses such as Down’s syndrome or autism.
Atkins said the house was not specifically designated for sex offenders, but according to its contract with the state, they cannot turn away individuals that qualify for service.
“This is kind of a rare situation,” Atkins said. “We don’t have more than five to 10 sex offenders in our total program of 700 people. It just so happened that these folks picked this home.”
One registered sex offender recently moved into the home, and a second sex offender has lived in the home but is currently on leave. A third resident is not a sex offender, and the final room may soon be filled by another non-sex offender who has expressed interest in moving in, Adkins said.
Staffers are on schedule 24 hours a day, including employees who stay awake on an overnight shift, and the residents must always be in the line of site of a staffer.
“One thing that we were not aware of is there is somebody there 24 – 7,” Fuentes said. “We felt a little more at ease that there was someone keeping an eye on them. There are other sex offenders living in Buda who are wholly unsupervised.”
According to online registries, nearly 100 sex offenders live in the Buda, Kyle and Uhland areas, many concentrated in the lower income areas east of IH-35.
Barton said that there’s nothing the county could do to prevent the facility from operating. A city could create zoning ordinances that would prevent a residential treatment facility, though existing businesses would be grandfathered in, and the county has no such zoning authority.
“When you get released from jail or you go out on probation you have to live somewhere,” Barton said. “Even people who have committed crimes still have a right to live in communities.”
The upside to the situation is that the neighborhood residents have come together to focus on safety as a community, Fuentes said.
They’ve spoken to the Hays County Sheriff’s Office to get help starting a neighborhood watch program, and are compiling a list of neighborhood names and contact numbers. Additionally, the residents want to create “safe houses” along the streets where local children can go if they feel unsafe or need to use the phone.
“The neighborhood has pulled together,” Fuentes said. “It makes it nice that we can rely on one another.”
Though they’re not as worried as they were initially, Fuentes said local residents still plan on keeping an eye on the D&S property.
“The home is aware that the neighborhood is concerned,” Fuentes said. “They’d better be on their best behavior. There are a lot of people watching.”
