MINUTES OF THE INFORMAL MEETING OF THE JOHNSON COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS:

JUNE 28, 2001

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chairperson Lehman called the Johnson County Board of Supervisors to order in the Johnson County Administration Building at 10:00 a.m. Members present were: Pat Harney, Mike Lehman, Terrence Neuzil, Sally Stutsman, and Carol Thompson.

 

DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES AREA ADMINISTRATOR CHERYL WHITNEY: OVERVIEW OF CHILD WELFARE FUNDING IN JOHNSON COUNTY (FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, AND OTHER FUNDING STREAMS)

 

Recessed at 10:00 a.m.; reconvened at 10:10 a.m.

 

Lehman: And our first item of business is, Cheryl Whitney here, Area Administrator from the Department of Human Services. Cheryl?

Department of Human Services Area Administrator Cheryl Whitney: Thank you. I wanted to try to give you an overview of our Decategorization Project, and how that fits with our child welfare funding, some county funding, and other types of funding that comes into the community. I gave you some handouts during break, and this spreadsheet-type handout, if you’d take a look at first. At the bottom of that, I have the background information to tell you about decategorization. Back in 1987, the General Assembly authorized DHS to develop a plan for new ways of financing child welfare services. We were very tied in to dollars having to go to very precise services, and not being able to move money around to best meet needs of kids and families. So, back then, for example, our budget, we might have enough money to place a child in foster care, but not enough money to provide in-home services for the child, and that could impact whether a child could stay at home or not. And that did not make any sense. So, anyway, the Legislature, at the prompting of Human Service folks, state officials, was interested in doing something different. So they gave permission for this 3-year demonstration project, which was implemented first through Polk and Scott and then Dubuque and Pottawattamie. And then, in 1992, it was codified in Chapter 232 of the Code of Iowa, and now, all counties in the state have become decategorized. People say, what does the word decategorized mean? It means that we can take our child welfare money, which used to come in very precise allocations, and essentially what they give us now is the State dollar amount. So, for instance, we get about 2.5 in State dollars each fiscal year to fund first our core services, which are family foster care, group care, we also call that residential treatment, family-centered services, and family preservation. Family-centered and family pres. are both in-home type services. So we get this 2.5 million dollars. We can then take those State dollars and move them into, kind of a variety of services, those core services, plus we can put them into what we call our decategorized services, or the services we develop locally to meet needs of our families. When we put those dollars into the core services, nearly all of those draw down federal money at different rates. So, for instance, family foster care draws down federal money at about 70%, whereas family-centered service more at a little bit less than 50%. So, our gross allocation, if you asked me what my gross allocation is, in terms of federal and State dollars, it will vary from month to month, depending on how we have to move money around. At the end of the year, I can tell you how much federal money we brought in. Then, with this concept, the State allowed us to do something that was a very new concept at that time, and that was to be able to carry money over. Always before, just kind of like with the County money, it went back to the General Fund, so it was gone to us. So there was not an incentive to provide preventative services; there was more incentive just to spend the money, and that was it. So this gave us the opportunity to not spend all of our money for core services, but to try to put money into other types of services that we can develop locally to meet the needs of our families and children. So that’s what decategorization is about. This next group of statements, we must maintain budget neutrality, we must assure funding for the core services, the unexpended money can be carried over into what I call our money in the bank. Then the law requires that this be a collaborative effort with county government, the courts, and DHS. So, on our executive board, we have a county official; Terrence and Sally are both on this year. I am on and my boss, Bill Gaurdem, is on the executive committee, and from the judicial department, Brandon Beaudry and Sylvia Lewis are on. So when we make official decisions with executive, there has to be at least one representative from each of those 3, or it’s not an official, we cannot make an official decision. We also have a planning committee that does a lot of the preliminary work. For instance, when we put out an RFP, when proposals come back, the planning committee reviews those, it’s pretty labor-intensive, does the scoring sheets, and that information that goes through executive committee. We have to submit a plan to the DHS Director for annual approval, and then all contracts are renegotiated annually. We cannot, really, we can’t make promises more than one fiscal year at a time, is about the easiest way to put it. And then I think it’s important to know what have we spent for administrative costs related to this. We hired the Decat Coordinator in FY 94, and over the course of 7 years, we’ve spent this about $215,000 for salary, benefits, travel, administrative costs. United Way is the employer of our person, so we pay them a small administrative fee that covers the costs that they have. So that has given us the opportunity to take these child welfare program dollars and invest them in our community in ways that our community decides, and that our executive committee approves. So you can see, through the years, this top line, core service carryover, prior years, and prior years Decat balance. This is kind of a running total. Don’t add those up, because that would be wrong. It’s not a gross dollar by adding them up, because the money moves forward. So, for instance, in FY 95, we were able to carry forward $737,000; that was a very good year for us, in terms of carrying forward. Then, in FY 96 there was money that was not expended for Decat services, about $500,000, and in addition, then, we carried over money from the current year. So, during those initial years, we were fortunate to be able to carry over a pretty large amount of money, and that has to do with some changes that the State was making in how they were financing child welfare services, and the fact that there were only about 5 counties in Decategorization, and back then we were able to receive more than just the State dollars. We were able to benefit from the federal money that some other counties drew down. So, anyway, we had some really nice years. Now, you can see that we’ve really leveled off, and so, at the beginning of this year, the money that we had in the bank, as I call it, was the $785,000. That money is in some State account somewhere; we have a person in revenue who keeps track of all of the Decat accounts, and each year sends us a statement about where we stand with that money, that we reconcile, then. One of the things that is happening, we can’t really talk about this without talking about what’s happening today… That is because of the shortfall in state revenue, we will not, the figure for FY 02, when we put that on there, will be considerably less, for a variety of reasons. That really impacts what we can do with Decat. We’re working on that with executive committee, and hopefully within the next couple weeks, we’ll know more precisely what we’re able to do with that. The next line, then, shows the County money, and originally County money was put in for home ties, which is a childcare facility for homeless children and at-risk children. Then, in FY 01, you see that the amount went up considerably, and money was put in, that $25,000, for resource centers in rural areas, and then the Juvenile Justice money, which I think was about $160,000 or so. The Juvenile Justice money actually doesn’t go into the Decat account, but it’s such a part of the funding for all of these things that we’re talking about, that I think it’s important to show it as part of that big picture. Then, if you go down into the next box, you see what we have done in terms of funding community services. If you look beginning in FY 95, that first year, we funded services to the tune of about $227,000. That increased, based upon what we carried over in those early years, we thought we were going to have a fair amount of money. Ever since then, we’ve been winding down, and you can see in FY 01, we were down to just under $300,000. What we’ve tried to do is kind of take a 2-year look, always, at our budgeting, because that gives us… When you don’t know, for instance, this year, we will not know our carryover until, it could be November, by the time they settle all those accounts. And so, in order for us to feel secure about spending money, we need to know that we can look out a couple years so that we don’t put providers at big risk, and all that kind of thing. So that’s kind of the philosophy that we’ve used from the beginning, and I think it’s worked well for us. But you can see that, in those years that we have then spent, that 3 million is fair to total. We have taken State dollars, that we have been able to carry over from our child welfare budget and reinvest into the community, and those have totaled 3 million dollars. Then, in addition to that, we, because we’ve had a Decat Coordinator, we have been able to apply for grants that Decat has administered, using our Planning Committee and Executive Committee. And you can say that we started out that first year with a $20,000 grant, and, in FY 01, we had several different grants that totaled just over $300,000. So, we have generated another 1.1 million in Decat grants, and that is federal, state, and foundation money. For instance, we have a KC grant. Then, our providers, one of the things that we’ve really worked hard with providers on, is, we give them… The first year as we’ve worked with them, we’ve tried to give them seed money, with the expectation that they will use that base to go out and try to pull in other funds, so that we don’t want them to be just dependent upon Decat money, because it’s 100% State money, it’s not going to last forever, all those kinds of things. And the broader funding base you have, the more stable your services are going to be. So, one of the things that Jan Peterson, our Coordinator, has tracked at the end of each year is, what have we leveraged in terms of other grants? That’s that 2 million dollars. UAY with the Teen Parent Program, has been working with Mercy Hospital, and Mercy can, with their… They have an assigned Pediatric Nurse Practitioner who’s able to bill Title XIX services for some of the well child checks that she does with our teen parents. So, that’s an example of drawing in other revenue. The neighborhood centers has a public health grant that, they use Decat money to leverage, for the local match. There’s a lot of those different things, but that gives you an idea about it. Then, the Empowerment funding, we received so far, just about a million dollars of Empowerment dollars. You see, for each fiscal year. And that, we wrote a grant, and were awarded money first in FY 99, and this Empowerment includes the school ready funding stream, in which we get about $300,000 annually, and then the early childhood funding stream, which is actually TANEFF money, so it’s federal money, channeled from the Department of Human Services into this Empowerment Fund. This year, we have about $131,000. Those funds, now, for FY 02, the school ready was cut 6%, as many State programs were. But the legislature has made a commitment for this Empowerment funding, and hopefully it will be relatively stable funding. So that kind of gives you a picture of our Decategorization project, how it fits with child welfare, how we’ve been able to, because of having a staff person, we’ve been able to draw in other money, and what’s it’s meant, really, to our community. This other packet is from our last year’s annual report, and it lists the services that we funded with Decat money, also it lists the grants that we applied for. And for each of these, it’s a really nice little summary that shows, for instance, Home Ties is the first white sheet. It gives a brief program description. It gives you the outcomes, expected outcomes and then outcomes achieved. The dates of operation, so you know when it was started. The number of clients served, the program budget, so you can see what we’ve put in for Decat, what other money we know was put in, and so then the total amount. And then plans for the future. So you can look, UAY Teen Parent Program, for instance, you can see that in FY 2000, over 100 pregnant parenting teens were served. Decat money was $28,000, but other money was nearly $76,000. These are all community services with our local providers, and they’re for either divergent services, to keep kids from a more restrictive level of care, or prevention type of services. One of the big things we’ve done with this is our whole community resource center approach, which then the County last year agreed to put that $25,000 into the County budget, and to match when local governments would put money in. So, for instance, North Liberty put about 17 in from their city money. The county then matched that, and that was the agreement. Hills put, I think, about $4,000 in, and Tiffin put in, I think about 3 or 4,000. So that has been a way that we’ve tried, then, to get local communities to buy into the need for Human Services, to recognize the need, and make an investment and develop some ownership.

Stutsman: I might add, yesterday we were working with a number of the agencies that are involved with Decat funding, and heard how appreciative the Family Resource Centers in Hills and North Liberty were of the county dollars that went into that, and we heard it from the school system. And they can see firsthand the impact that these kinds of resources have for the families in these communities, and what a positive influence it is.

Lehman: Looks like it would be a monumental task just putting together a budget, let alone try to monitor personnel, and these programs, and the effectiveness.

Whitney: Right. We get quarterly reports from all of these providers, and our planning committee reviews those reports. We divide them up among the Planning Committee, so each person takes 2 or 3, and then makes a presentation, so that everybody doesn’t have to read absolutely all of them. And then, of course, we get the annual report from them. Then we monitor, we have a system for going in and looking at the books, looking at the documentation, so we try to do contract management as well. Actually, we focus on those where we spend more money, obviously. And with that, we try, we don’t do it as a punitive thing, but, how can we make this a better service, how can we ensure that we’ve got the documentation that we need? It’s true, it’s not, you don’t responsibly spend this kind of money without a lot of effort and care. But, it’s really, when you look at what services we’ve provided, and what it’s meant to the community in terms of number of people served and dollar amounts… Sometimes, you go along and don’t realize, exactly, the impact and so, as I started to add these columns, it’s a significant contribution to people, I think, in Johnson County. The Board has been a part of that, the Board of Supervisors has been a part of that, and I appreciate the support from the Board, from our Planning Committee, from the Boards.

Neuzil: Well, it’s an investment, and it’s a prevention investment, in many respects. My concern is, and I’ve said this, and all the Board, everybody, is the fact that the State of Iowa isn’t behind this. It’s very concerning to this County that the Decat money’s not going to be there, or we don’t know. The uncertainty of it is just ridiculous, and, as you kind of look at your years past, have you ever had these situations before, where you didn’t really know what kind of budget?

Whitney: We never know.

County Attorney J. Patrick White: Every year.

Whitney: It’s sad, but.

Neuzil: In November, we’ve got programs that, we don’t have enough money to get through November.

Whitney: That’s why we’ve done that 2-year look ahead, because that was the only way that I could kind of sleep at night, with this kind of thing. And so, that has helped. The past 10 fiscal years have probably been pretty good for the State of Iowa. Revenue has increased, often years, more than anticipated. And that’s a wonderful cycle to be in, and we’re not there right now, and so, I appreciate that the Legislature had the confidence in us to take this money and do well with it. They have to make hard decisions when it comes to not having as much money to parcel out. DHS is extremely supportive to the Decategorization concept. It has really been something that, nationwide, we’ve received a lot of praise for. So, DHS has, I really believe, has supported us a great deal on this.

 

Stutsman left at 10:30 a.m.

 

Neuzil: Yes. Can you maybe just go over the process, just a little bit, in regards to the whole Decat, kind of the meetings we’ve had this week. I think it’s important for the community to understand, and I think that the organizations that we have funded really appreciate that we do have a little bit of reserve to kind of keep it going. But maybe talk a little bit about that.

Whitney: We know that we’re not going to have as much money as we had anticipated for the next couple fiscal years. We received, with the appropriations bill, our child welfare allocation was 2.7 million less, and that, because of the way we draw in federal money, that means about a 5.4 million setback for us. In addition to that, we always, the department draws down a great deal of federal money for our different programs, and we, we being folks in central office, have to make the best projection that they can on how much money that will be. We will not be able to continue drawing in the amount of 4E money. 4E is a section of the Social Security Act that allows us to draw in money related to kids in foster care, and it pays, it also contributes to all of our salaries, service salaries and some administration related to service. That money we will not have as much of as we had hoped. So that has an impact for our child welfare budget for what we will be able to carry over from this current year, FY 01, and then what we will have for next year to spend for core services as well as Decat services. And so, what the approach that our Decat group has taken locally is, we met this week, Monday morning and Wednesday morning, with all the folks who we had been funding, and explained where we were at, talked with them about their current budget situation, asked them in many situations to come back with some revisions to their budget, kind of what’s the bottom line, talked about what they needed. We don’t want to leave anybody in the lurch, because, obviously, they were planning on, because we hadn’t given them notice otherwise, they were planning to be able to provide services July 1. So we need to figure out how we can cover their expenses a reasonable period of time, until we can give them some assurance of what happens next. That’s basically what we’ve been doing this week. And then we have had people who have very much had said, we really appreciate your doing this, it gives us the chance to communicate with you about our process, what we need so we can continue to leverage this other money. It helps us balance the needs of the community. I think our Human Service providers have a strong network, realizing that, what impacts one is going to impact another. So, we might as well all try to work together the best we can. It’s painful, sometimes, but it’s…

Neuzil: Certainly, the effects at the State level are starting to ripple down our way.

Whitney: Yes.

Thompson: Cheryl, this money has grown to an amount that, realistically, needs quite a bit of administration, more than we’ve ever budgeted for it. And when you were in for your budget hearing last year, you talked a little bit about your plans to accommodate that. Do you want to talk more about that now, or do you want to wait until later?

Whitney: Well, we can talk a little bit about it. We’ve had a Decat Coordinator all these years, and Jan is leaving that position and going to a position at United Way. And so, executive Decat will have to make a decision about how we will, what we will do about that, what we can afford. Along with that, we have been working with Empowerment since the beginning. Decat was very involved in developing the grant proposals, and so we’ve been talking with them about some joint administration, and had hoped to be able to… Jan has been a full-time Decat person. We’d hoped to be able to have money in Empowerment to be able to hire an administrative person, such that between our Decat Coordinator and the administrative staff with Empowerment, we could do the necessary RFPs, write the contracts, do the contract monitoring, all those things that we talked about. And so, we’ve been working on how we can find the administrative money. Actually, I did bring Empowerment budgets, and if we have time, I want to talk about it. It’s fine with me. This is a complicated budgeting process. The school ready money that we get from the state allows us 3% that we can use for administrative comps. So, 3% of $300,000 is roughly $10,000. Then, the TANEFF money, or the early childhood money allows us 5%, which, 5% of $131,000 is about $6,500. This was set by the Legislature. Originally, School Ready money did not allow anything; it was 0 for administrative. And there was enough crying to legislators that the next year, when they went back, they did allow 3%. But again, to administer $300,000 with administrative money of about $14,000, is not very feasible. So, we’ve been trying to figure out how we can make this work. I guess I feel the need to kind of explain why. My understanding from the legislators who were really instrumental in this, their belief is that local communities should contribute to this effort, and that, if they were going to give state money to local communities, then local communities should come up with some money for administrative costs. And they should make an investment, which is kind of the same thing we told our resource centers. And so, while we don’t like it, you can’t really argue with that principle, I think. So anyway, what we’ve been trying to do is figure out how we can come up with administrative money so we can implement these programs, because we have not implemented at the speed in which we would like. Last year, when I talked with the Board at budgeting time, we had the vacancy in the Volunteer Center. So we agreed that we would not fill that, and we would take the $18,000 to use for Empowerment administrative costs. Then, over the course of this year, we’ve also talked about $20,000 that is actually from the Childcare line item, that we can use for administrative costs because what happened is Empowerment agreed to fund, actually, at $40,000, a program that the county was very interested in establishing. So you can see on this first page, at the very bottom, the administrative budget, which is pretty much still in draft form, but anyway, we’ve got the TANEFF, at 5%, so we’ve got 65, 84, 18, and 20.

Thompson: And is that for next year? How is that going to be available for next year? How are you going to keep the 18 and the 20 from going back to the General Fund? Does it carry over because it’s in Decat?

Whitney: No. We did claims for the end of the year for that, and that money, then, is budgeted in next year’s budget, in FY 02, and then when we come in to have budget discussion for FY 03, certainly, I expect to ask for that, again.

Thompson: OK. Thank you.

Neuzil: So we have about $52,000 to administer Empowerment?

Whitney: And that needs to cover all administrative expenses.

Neuzil: Right.

Whitney: Board expenses, anything that is not program-related.

Neuzil: Sure. And then the Decat position, where does that money come from?

Whitney: See, that money has been all from Child Welfare.

Neuzil: That’s from Child Welfare.

Whitney: Right. Which, now…

Neuzil: We don’t know if we have, anyway.

Whitney: Right.

Thompson: So we used to have money for administration for Decat and not for Empowerment; now we have money for administration for Empowerment and not for Decat. That’s kind of the bottom line, right?

Neuzil: That’s kind of how, that’s how I see it too. And the question is, is there a possibility of both out of that?

Whitney: How do we coordinate that effort?

Neuzil: Yes, particularly if Decat dwindles anyway, and there would be less responsibility, maybe.

Whitney: Right. And I think, in the past, during the past year, we’ve had at least a couple of meeting between Empowerment Executive Group and Executive Decat, and I think, when the dust settles here in the next couple weeks, I hope, that we be able to have more discussion on this. It’s really tough to know at this moment, for me to be able to think very creatively of how to do that. But hopefully, we’ll get past, and be able to do that. Because the process is very similar, the RFPs, the contracting, all that administrative process. So you can see, these budgets, then, on the next page, the Early Childhood, it shows each fiscal year, 99, 2000, and 2001, how money was budgeted, how it was or will be spent. So there’s Early Childhood, then there’s School Ready, and then the last page is administrative cost. And these services, the Early Childhood can be used for childcare-related services for young children. We’ve prioritized infant to 3, the Empowerment legislation allows us to go up to age 5. The School Ready money, we use a fair amount of that money for parent education through our Family Resource Centers, so family-support activities and parent education. There will be, for instance, hopefully there will be an annual report prepared for Empowerment. In order to get our money for next year, we have to do that. Then, we would hope to have some of the information like we have on this Decat. How we accomplish that, I’m not positive at the moment.

Thompson: With that non-existent coordinator?

Whitney: Right.

Lehman: Sounds like it’s in good hands. It’s mind-boggling trying to track all this, and you do a heck of a job, and…

Whitney: Thanks.

Lehman: …you need administration to help do that.

Neuzil: And the Empowerment money, how long do we have that? Where do you think the future is, there? Are we in the same boat with Decat? Or, who knows, I guess?

Whitney: Yes, they did cut it the 6%, the School Ready money. The TANEFF money is very close to the same for next year. It really probably just depends on how bad the State budget is next year. The legislature made a big commitment; they realize they need more money in early childhood services, to have kids prepared when they enter school. So, it’s hard to predict. I think there’s a lot of support, though, still, for Empowerment.

Neuzil: Yes. You see the legislature approve or help out, and say they’d do all this stuff for education, and then you hear that Grant Wood AEA is going to be cut, just our local AEA is going to be cut a million dollars. Imagine the impact, there.

Whitney: There’s lots of cuts, right now.

Thompson: To me, the important thing about Decat is that it’s several million dollars that would have gone back to the State General Fund, has been spent here, locally. I think the theory was that if we spent money on prevention, we might lower the need for the core services, which are more expensive. I was talking to Brandon this weekend; the County funds a Detention Alternative Program which, when we started it, we were very concerned because our detention usage was skyrocketing, and he said that, not only has that program been full and successful, but that our usage of detention has actually gone down over the last year. So, I think we can see results here, with this.

Whitney: Right. You know, community-based services for delinquents have really increased in the past few years, and having this money has been absolutely essential for us.

Neuzil: That’s the scary thing about this whole scenario here, is, as we talk about budget cuts this year, it’s the impact next year and the year after and the year after, as far as what’s going to happen to those core services, and those mandated responsibilities, and how many more numbers we’re going to see because we’re not providing these prevention programs.

Whitney: Yes.

Lehman: Good discussion. Thank you for that report. Somebody has any other questions, Cheryl is very willing to meet with you and help in explain in more detail.

Harney: Thank you.

Lehman: Thank you, Cheryl. Supervisor Stutsman had another commitment, so she has left.

(Continued in Part 2)