Fear And Budgeting in Sacramento

Thursday, March 25, 2004

Page 7

IN MY OPINION (Column)

Fear And Budgeting in Sacramento

By RAY HAYNES

(The writer represents the 66th Assembly District which includes portions of western Riverside County and northern San Diego County.)

What a field day for the heat. A thousand people in the street. Singing songs and carrying signs. Mostly say, “Don’t you dare cut any of our programs!”

With apologies for the Buffalo Springfield song I ripped off above, the annual summer budget fight has started early in Sacramento. Welfare mothers, students, and a myriad of others are showing up at the capitol, and begging for money.

Except that the story is mostly false. Most of these people are scared into protesting by people who make money off of the system. Welfare bureaucrats, union bosses (who make money off of the dues that public employees pay) and “service providers” make money off of the system, sometimes really good money, and they want that flow of money to continue. The program becomes their excuse to make a profit at the taxpayers’ expense. Worse than that, they will threaten to take stuff away from people who are really hurting in order to make sure that they keep making their $100,000 a year salaries.

Take the Department of Developmental Services budget as an example. The DDS deals with those who are developmentally disabled, some who need a wheelchair, some with mental challenges, all needing government to help them. California provides a myriad of services to those who have these disabilities, and every time someone suggests we look at these services, these craven administrators try to protect their phony-baloney jobs by hiding behind the wheel chairs.

This year, the governor proposed changes to how the state deals with the disabled, and now the capitol is filled with very frightened people in wheelchairs. No one, however, wants to throw them out of their wheelchairs, but they are being scared by the administrators, who are the real targets of the spending controls imposed by the governor.

Here are the facts: In 1998-99, the state spent $9500 on each person with a disability served by a Regional Center. Today, it is $13,400. In addition, in ‘98-’99, the state spent $124,000 on each person who has to live in state-run disability facilities, called Developmental Centers (DCs). Today, it is $205,000. In addition, the DCs are running a 20% vacancy rate. We could close down two or three DCs, deliver the same quality service, and save money.

As for Regional Centers, they are a mess. At least one lobbyist has privately indicated that, of the 21 Regional Centers, 7 are adequate, 7 are bad, and 7 are evil. They have become dominated by the providers who make money off the system, and have moved from a service center to a profit center, at the expense of the disabled. They have approved house additions at taxpayer expense, and have talked about approving expenses for “dolphin therapy,” that is swimming with dolphins like you can do in Hawaii for $300 per hour.

Another DDS program recently attracted a lot of negative attention, when it was discovered that through a “Sex Offenders Active Reorientation System”, the DDS and the local regional center were attempting to place four sex offenders in a home together in a community in Southern California. On the one hand, they claim that these sex offenders are no danger to the community. But if that is true, why were they going to need full time supervision and security at a cost of almost $600 per pervert per day, at a total cost of over $800,000 to house these four for a single year!

At that price, it would be just as cost inefficient to just keep them in the state hospitals they came from without disturbing innocent families in the Phelan area. This specific project was stopped, but look for more of these coming soon-possibly to a neighborhood near you!

With all due respect, cutting out those services and controlling bureaucratic expenses is not going to end up throwing the disabled out of their wheelchairs. It may cost a bureaucrat or two their jobs. Since those bureaucrats, however, are the ones who draw up and approve the budgets, they just can’t see the wisdom of eliminating their jobs, so they scare poor, frightened disabled people into protesting. It is shocking, it is distressing, but it is true.