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Budget Subcommittees Hear About State's Failure to Fund County Social Services
Both Senate and Assembly Budget Subcommittees on Health and Human Services discussed the state’s failure to fund cost increases for county social services this week. Supervisor Roger Dickinson, Sacramento County, testified on behalf of CSAC and the Urban Counties Caucus on this issue.
While counties are legislatively mandated to administer numerous human services programs including Foster Care, Child Welfare Services, CalWORKs, Adoptions, and Adult Protective Services, funding for these services is frozen at 2001 cost levels. Failing to fund actual county cost increases for six years has led to a growing funding gap – currently $793 million annually. This situation puts counties in the untenable position of backfilling the gap with their own limited resources or cutting services that the state expects us to deliver.
Counties struggle to meet the needs of clients despite this gap. Some have partially offset the cuts using their own funds, but this is far from enough to fill the hole. As a result, the brunt of these cuts is borne by children, families, and elder and dependent adults who seek help from us every year.
In order to deliver legislatively mandated services to the most vulnerable Californians in the most effective and efficient manner possible, counties must recruit and retain a quality workforce. In doing so, counties establish salaries and benefits under collective bargaining laws, and ensure an appropriate work environment with the basic tools that enable staff to do their jobs. These are costs that any organization, public or private, must incur to deliver a service or product; they are sometimes referred to as the “cost of doing business.” These costs, like the cost of living, increase over time. Computers must be replaced; health coverage gets more expensive; and rent and utility costs increase. These are the costs that have gone unrecognized and unfunded since 2001.
Because counties must pay the cost of running their human services programs in today’s dollars, the cuts force us to reduce services or cut other programs to make up the difference. For example, the 2006-07 budget for Child Welfare Services assumes that counties can fund 10,285 full-time workers to serve abused and neglected children. However, since counties have not been funded for increases in costs for several years, the budget truly funds only 8,514 full-time workers – a 17% reduction.
This loss of 1,771 staff requires counties to either reduce services or figure out a way to fund additional staff from our own limited resources. Similar losses in staff can be calculated for every human services program where costs are frozen. To the extent that counties are only able to backfill a small fraction of the funding gap, the result is abused and neglected children suffering longer, needy children not receiving care for extended periods of time, and elder and dependent adults more likely to enter nursing homes.
Not funding county program costs strains the ability of counties to meet accountability standards and avoid penalties, putting the state and counties at risk for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal penalties. Freezing program funding also shifts costs to counties, increasing the county share of program costs above statutory sharing ratios and contrary to the constitutional provisions of Proposition 1A.
Counties are urging the Legislature to adopt placeholder trailer bill language to restore the process of budgeting human services programs based on reasonable current costs, with an appropriate phase-in period.
Assembly Members Patty Berg and Jim Beall questioned the administration extensively on this ongoing fiscal policy. Assembly Member Berg expressed concerns about the impacts that this policy has on rural counties that often do not have sufficient resources. Assembly Member Beall was interested in whether the state departments were subject to the same fiscal policy as county human services departments. Both houses held the issue open pending the report due at May Revise.
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION
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