ITASCA, Ill. (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Chicago’s largest nonprofit mental health and substance abuse treatment center has filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against the Village of Itasca, alleging village officials and some residents were “intentionally discriminatory” when they thwarted its expansion efforts into the northwest suburb.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Haymarket Center accused Itasca of violating federal civil rights laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, when it denied the creation of a 240-bed treatment facility at the site of a former hotel.
“The intentional and orchestrated discriminatory conduct across Itasca’s key governmental entities is designed to interfere with the rights of Haymarket Center, the people with disabilities it serves, and their families,” said Mary Rosenberg, an Access Living senior attorney who’s part of the team representing Haymarket Center, in a statement. “The concerted actions to delay and refuse operation of Haymarket Center’s health care facility have had, and will continue to have, devastating consequences to people in need of treatment for substance use disorders.”
Haymarket Center’s initial proposal in 2019 to build a large rehab facility that would provide full continuum care for adults 18 and older in Itasca was met with pushback from village officials and residents, who worried the treatment center would cause an increase in crime, exhaust its emergency medical services, and affect tax revenue.
The 84-page suit accused Itasca officials and residents of pulling “their forces together” to “drive out Haymarket and the people with disabilities.” They did this by holding an organized march in September 2019, creating a Facebook page called “No Haymarket Itasca” and displaying “No Haymarket” signs in their yards, according to the lawsuit.
“Defendants strategically fostered, intentionally contributed to, and were unduly negatively influenced by this ‘not in my backyard’ opposition,” the lawsuit alleged.
The suit claims this was done out of “discriminatory stereotyping of Haymarket’s mission and the patients it would serve.”
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Haymarket President and CEO Dan Lustig has said since the Itasca Village Board rejected Haymarket Center’s request to retrofit a former hotel into a 240-bed treatment center, the deck was stacked against his proposal from the very start.
"Even though we went through over 30 zoning hearings, 35 zoning hearings, it was very clear from the beginning that they were going to deny the application," Lustig said.
Lustig said the need for a new rehab center is great. Haymarket said nearly 2,000 people from DuPage and other collar counties needed its services at Haymarket Chicago between 2017 and 2018.
Haymarket Center claims it had tried to find common ground with Itasca over certain concerns, such as the facility’s impact on the village’s emergency medical services. Haymarket Center agreed to contract private ambulance companies to serve its center, which was proposed to be built on a 7-acre property at 860 W. Irving Park Road.
Lustig said Haymarket is not trying to bully its way into Itasca and DuPage County, only that it recognizes just how badly the need is for an in-patient addiction treatment center.
"What we have learned early on, which is why Haymarket Center thought very, very hard of coming out to DuPage was that very few opportunities were there, was a residential program were beds available for individuals to receive treatment," Lustig said.
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U.S. Attorney John Lausch launched an investigation last month into the village’s decision to reject the center and whether it was in line with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found more than 1 million people have died of drug overdoses since 1999. Last year saw a record high of fatal overdoses as the nation saw an estimated 100,000 people die — a 30 percent increase over the prior year.
In DuPage County, where Haymarket Center proposed its newest treatment center, 112 people died from an overdose in 2020, a 17 percent jump from the previous year.
In a statement ahead of Tuesday morning’s news conference outside Access Living, Haymarket Center President and CEO Dan Lustig noted that the stigma around substance abuse is one of the “biggest hurdles” his team faces in addressing the issue.
“It prevents those who need it from getting treatment and stands in the way of making more life-saving treatment available,” he said. “Expanding immediate access to care for people with substance use disorders regardless of ability to pay has been Haymarket Center’s mission for more than 46 years. We are committed to bringing a new comprehensive treatment center to a region that faces a significant lack of treatment beds and programs while the need for these services continues to rise.”
Itasca officials are not commenting on the lawsuit.
(WBBM Newsradio and the Sun-Times Media Wire contributed to this copy.)