To the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services:

I'm alive today because of an Oxford House. I lived in one myself, and I'm writing because I know from the inside what makes them work, and I don't want this proposal to take that away.

I'm not against oversight. These recovery houses should be held accountable but a lot of what's in this proposal reads like it was written for a house with paid staff and a company behind it, and that isn't what an Oxford House is. There's no employer, no employees, no business running things. It's the residents themselves — voting on who joins, splitting the bills, holding each other accountable in a way I never got from a hired staff member anywhere else I stayed. That accountability, from people who were living the same thing I was, is what actually kept me sober. I'm asking for three things to be changed.

The rules keep referring to a "staff member" — someone to field complaints, someone to be the point of contact with neighbors, someone to walk residents through the handbook. Oxford Houses don't have staff. The proposal says so itself, calling them "self-governed and unstaffed." Those two things can't both be true. Let the members or their elected officers carry out this work instead, the same way we did in my house.

The proposal also never says who the "operator" actually is, even though the word carries a lot of weight throughout. As written, it's the property owner or someone the owner appoints. But no one in an Oxford House owns the house. We rented it. Without a clear answer here, residents could end up responsible for obligations that were never theirs.

Last, the proposal asks these homes to carry business insurance and register with the State Corporation Commission, as if they were companies. They aren't. They're people sharing a house and splitting the cost of it. Please don't require business paperwork for something that was never a business.

An Oxford House gave me my life back. I'm asking you to make these homes safer without turning them into something they were never meant to be.

Sincerely,
Evan