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“A society will be judged on how it treats its weakest members”.
Dear Representative_________ Senator_______________
ISSUE: APD proposed elimination of private support coordinators
Question: Should the legislature vote to eliminate the contracting out of support coordinators and hire an additional 650+ new state employees instead?
ANSWER: NO ! PLEASE DO NOT ADOPT THIS APD PROPOSAL.
I realize you have difficult budget decisions to make. But please DO NOT ADOPT the APD recommendation to: require all support coordinators to be state employees, reduce support coordinators compensation by more than half, and increase their caseloads to 50. The John Hall study on caseload size indicates that the ideal is 26 consumers, not 50. State workers will get paid every month despite the quality of their work, whereas my support coordinator is required to perform monthly face to face visits and secondary contacts. As a result, he is always taking action on the issues that concern me.
How can APD actually expect the quality and time investment to be the same? And why would you entrust APD with more responsibility when they recently miscalculated their budget by 150 million dollars?
If you still are inclined to vote to go with this larger state government proposal, please first do a pilot study in a small area to see if it actually works. Make sure this proposal is proved before inflicting this drastic change on 30,000 people with disabilities. Or instead of cutting the smallest ongoing support area, why not reduce the most expensive support areas, such as RH or ADT? Or simply reduce all APD services across the board by 4%.
I am asking for you to take action on the following:
1. Have support coordinators remain independent contractors and not become state bureaucrats or be forced to join a large support coordination agency.
2. If a reduction must be made, take it across all APD support services including all state employee salaries. Everyone should feel the pain.
3. Don’t increase case size from 36 to 50, which would lower quality.
4. Don’t allow APD to transfer cases to different support coordinators based on zip code. This would limit both choice and the competitive spirit of providing the very best service to consumers.
Thank you.