State and City Budget

State and City Budget Info

State Budget Priorities for 2012-13

The Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies (COFCCA) is the membership organization for most of the not-for-profit agencies that provide child welfare and juvenile justice services across New York State.   Our 100 member agencies are committed to providing high quality services and achieving good outcomes for children and families.

In this difficult budget year, we thank the Governor for the five-year reauthorization of child welfare financing that includes uncapped preventive services with 62% state reimbursement to counties, the foster care block grant  and full funding for medical services to children in foster care and for the Bridges to Health (B2H) Medicaid Waiver for children.

There are some areas of the Governor’s OCFS budget that are of serious concern to our member agencies and the families they serve.  We ask the Legislature to make the following changes to the proposed budget:

Child Welfare Financing

  • Allow counties to use 15% of their preventive services as community optional preventive services (COPS), with performance measures and OCFS approval of new programs.
  •               Allow counties to use private donated funds for up to half of the local share for COPS programs to promote public-private partnerships in service delivery.
  • Reject the Governor’s proposed change to statutory authority to reduce the state reimbursement rate from 65% to 62% so that as the economy improves, statute supports a return to an actual reimbursement rate of 65%.
  • Remove subsidized kinship guardianship from the foster care block grant and align it with funding for adoption subsidy.

 

Juvenile Justice Reform

  • New York City’s Close to Home Proposal
    • We support keeping youth as close to home as possible but have many questions about implementation details.  We urge the city and state to bring provider agencies to the planning table immediately as they will be the front-line providers of services.
    • We have concerns that as OCFS continues to close beds and facilities, including the shift of several hundred beds to NYC, that upstate youth also be kept close to home and that upstate counties’ costs do not increase.
  •  OCFS Juvenile Justice Community Reinvestment programs:  We urge restoration of $4 million for these seven programs newly created in 2011-12.  These programs are perfectly aligned with NY’s juvenile justice reform agenda:  they provide community-based services to younger youth at risk of juvenile justice placement in the specific zip codes with the highest rates of juvenile justice placements.  Having just started up this year, programs show early positive results.   Terminating these contracts after one year is wasteful and short-sighted.

Additional Concerns

  • While mindful of the state’s fiscal situation, we urge the Legislature to make the following key restorations:
    • Community Reinvestment contracts  (see above)
    • Safe Harbor funding for sexually exploited youth
    • Funding for Settlement Houses
    • TANF Preventive and post-adoption program funding

 

Structural Issues

  • Human services COLAs are needed to offset fixed cost increases that are beyond the control of agencies, including health insurance, certain retirement costs, food, gasoline, etc.   Without COLAs to offset increases in fixed costs, agencies must make cuts and the only areas left to cut involve direct services to families.
  •  Cap on administrative rates within the Executive Compensation language
    • We support efficiencies within administrative costs but need consistent definitions across state agencies as many costs currently counted as administrative are actually program-related.  We urge involvement of the nonprofits and private CPA firms familiar with our sector in revising these definitions.
    • Ever increasing new state mandates only serve to increase demands on agencies’ administrative functions.

 

 

 

Comments are closed.