Thursday, March 30, 2006 10:00 PM CST
Expert urges community leaders to seek decentralization
By NATHANIEL WEST, Staff Writer
FINDLAY -- With no end to their financial constraints in sight, local state-funded agencies and organizations instead must find a way to use what money they do have more wisely, according to health expert Peter Tracy.
And that means pushing for the decentralization of human services authority at the state level, which would afford greater involvement by local agencies and individual residents in the decision-making process, Tracy told community leaders participating in the two-day “Helping Our Children Reach for the Future” summit this week at Eagle Creek Resort.
“One of the problems in this state is that we’re too highly centralized,” said Tracy, executive director of Champaign County’s Mental Health Board and Developmental Disabilities Board, during his keynote address Thursday.
“But I think that the communities know best. We need to have structures that support more consumer and family input.”
One of the many fiscal challenges faced by Illinois and other states is declining federal Medicaid funding, Tracy said.
“The ripple effect of what’s happening at the state level on local communities is what I describe as ‘funding blackmail,’” he said. “It puts us in positions where our priorities are secondary to the state’s priorities.
“The pressure on the state will have a huge impact on human services budgets. (And) the result of these decreases is there has been a lot less collaboration between agencies on a local level.”
Tracy compared the hierarchal Illinois structure with the decentralized system in Michigan, a state that gives almost $6 million more than Illinois each year directly to local community human services agencies.
Michigan’s structure incorporates representation from individual counties, Tracy reported. “They require all counties to be involved,” he said.
“It’s driven by the needs of the communities.”
But in Illinois, he added, “We have a top-down system that tells the community what is going to happen.”
Tracy concluded, “In Illinois, we must be more skillful about how we spend money.”
Meanwhile, the summit -- sponsored by the Lumpkin Family Foundation -- concluded Friday after the 70 community leaders formed into half a dozen small groups based on the issues about which participants were most concerned.
“One group had a passion around making sure that a family could access services more directly, that they could find everything in one place,” said Bruce Karmazin, foundation executive director.
“Another group formed around enhancing the communication between and among agencies, and also between and among people who need their services.”
The groups conceived projects, which will be announced later this spring, to address these concerns, Karmazin said.
Summit participants represented nine different disciplines (such as education, health care, religion, etc.) from 15 area counties.
Overall, according to Karmazin, “They talked about (ways) they can work together.”
Contact Nathaniel West at nwest@jg-tc.com or 238-6860.
Add your comments
Not already registered?
Then click Here.
Comment policy:
JG-TC.com encourages readers to engage in civil conversation with their neighbors. Comments that are submitted are not posted to the site immediately. They go into a queue to be moderated and may take several hours to be reviewed. Comments posted on Saturday may not be reviewed until Sunday afternoon.
In order to keep the page a set width, long lines (mostly long links) will be chopped. Try putting spaces in your links or consider using tinyurl.com to make a smaller link that you can include.
We will never edit or alter your comments, but we do reserve the right to remove comments that violate our code of conduct.
No comment may contain:
* Potentially libelous statements; such as accusing somebody of a crime, defamation of character, or statements that can harm somebody's reputation.
* Obscene, explicit, or racist language.
* Personal attacks, insults, threats, harassment or inciting violence.
* Commercial product promotions.
If you have any questions, please contact our moderator.
|
|
|
