Holladay settles with group home

HOLLADAY — In a settlement with Holladay, a company that runs group homes for young offenders has agreed to keep out teenagers with violent histories and sex offenses.

Futures Through Choices, which operates a string of group homes throughout Utah, settled parts of a year-old lawsuit filed against the city when Holladay denied it a business license in November 2004. The company sued in federal court, saying the city had violated federal fair housing laws by denying the license.

In this settlement, which allows Futures Through Choices to have a business license, the company and the city agreed that no juvenile sex offenders can be placed in the five-person group home. Additionally, no teenagers with histories of using weapons for crimes or those with predatory practices will be allowed.

The company's original proposal would have allowed young men between 16 and 21 with sex offenses, predatory tendencies and violent histories, but CEO Jerry Jefferies argued that it would be nearly impossible that all five residents would have been sex offenders.

Some of the Holladay residents who objected to the group home still aren't happy with the settlement.

"We don't trust the state in terms of who they're going to place in this group home," said Brandon Baker, a member of Concerned Citizens for Safety in Holladay. "We don't trust them one bit. The whole group home concept to me is not a very comforting one."

The citizen group had fought the home's placement, arguing that the offenders could target neighborhood children and that state rules would be difficult to enforce there. Their claims were unfounded, Jefferies said, because the company has to follow the rules of the settlement or else lose its business license and state license for the site.

"It's a pretty significant penalty," Jefferies said.

Concerns about the site's residents also are overblown, he said, because the state would not have ever placed sex offenders at the site. Now, with the settlement terms, the company absolutely cannot place them there.

"The state wouldn't place somebody like that anywhere," Jefferies said. "The chances of that category of youth or somebody being placed that represents a risk to the community cannot happen. The state cannot place people like that."