Monday, June 15, 2009

UPEA's Involvement with DSPD

UPEA has had numerous conversations with DSPD employees who are members, legislators and DSPD administrators. Those who are receiving UPEA communiqués should know that UPEA has been involved since March 26th when DSPD Executive Director, Alan Ormsby, met with supervisors to address budget cuts. A day after that meeting, Ormsby issued a memo that detailed options for fixing the DSPD budget while maintaining services to DSPD clients. One of the key issues to emerge from that memo was a so-called last minute budget cut:

“Then the last day they decided to replace 2.5 million dollars in funding for the State Hospital. And the way they did that is they took that money out of the rest of the Department. So the Department got cuts--the Executive Director’s office got cut $650,000; ORS got cut about a million; Aging Services got cut about $265,000, and DSPD got cut $607,000. Legislators may not have recognized exactly what that meant. The way they made us take the cuts were pretty drastic. They took $106,000 out of administration (State Office), and then they took $501,000 out of support coordination, and they targeted it that way, and that is probably the hardest thing. If we could have balanced the $607,000 cut across USDC and across services, we could have handled that fairly easily. Cut was pointed. Some speculate it may have been a slap to Lisa Michelle Church, and others have speculated it may have been due to simple ideology. Rep. Dougal has always been for smaller government & may have thought he needed to do more to shrink Human Services.” (Excerpt from DSPD March 26th Memo).

Subsequently, UPEA began contacting allies in the Health and Human Services Joint Appropriations subcommittee. This committee is responsible for HHS budgets. We did not contact Rep. Christine Johnson because she does not belong to this subcommittee. We contacted Rep. Paul Ray, who said the committee would examine the issue. On Wednesday, May 20th, UPEA issued an email stating that funding had been restored, thanks to legislative allies. However, Ormsby contacted UPEA the next day stating that the funding restoration was to fix a math error. DSPD employees were in the same predicament of losing their jobs.

UPEA has played a direct role in representing DSPD employees to the legislature, news media and policy-makers. Members and non-members alike may meet with UPEA any time to discuss our measures and future options. If employees would like to meet with a UPEA representative, please call me directly to schedule a time: 801-264-8732 ext. 209.

Also, UPEA will be monitoring, among other issues, item 3 on the HHS interim meeting agenda for Wednesday, June 17th. Lisa Michelle Church is requesting policy guidance in light of budget reductions for DSPD. Here is the agenda: http://www.le.state.ut.us/asp/interim/Commit.asp?Year=2009&Com=INTHHS
I’ll issue a report to all members when I know more.

Thanks!