R.I. Tightens Controls In Wake Of Embezzlement Of More Than $220K In DD Client Funds

By Gina Macris

See correction at end of article

A now-deceased Rhode Island state employee embezzled a total of $220,602 from a checking account held in escrow for residents of the state-run group home system, the state’s Office of Internal Audit has reported. 

The employee, Kevin B. Ward, died Nov. 26 at age 60, a few weeks after the State Controller flagged a suspicious transaction from the client checking account Ward controlled on behalf of residents of RICLAS, or Rhode Island Community Living and Supports, a part of the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH).. 

Rhode Island State Police investigated a suspicious death of a BHDDH employee last November that was ruled a suicide, according to a statement a state police spokeswoman made to the Providence Journal Dec. 13. 

On April 8, the spokeswoman, Laura Meade Kirk, said State Police could make no additional comment apart from the fact that its investigation closed without criminal charges. 

State officials have described the situation involving Ward’s death as tragic

“While no RICLAS program recipients were directly affected, this is a tragic situation for many of our state employees who knew and worked with the late Kevin Ward,” said BHDDH director Rebecca Boss after the state Office of Internal Audit completed its report April 3. Ward had been a financial manager for RICLAS from February, 2005 until his death. 

The state has made good on the funds belonging to the RICLAS residents and has recouped more than $70,000 from its insurance company, according to a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The state also is exploring legal avenues to recover the rest of the money. 

The suspicious activity was discovered Nov. 2 by the state’s Controller, who, along with the Treasurer’s Office, was in the midst of a broader effort to tighten internal controls over the custody of state-owned checking accounts, the director of the Office of Internal Audit, Dorothy Pascale, wrote in an April 3 memo to Boss.

The OMB spokeswoman, Brenna McCabe, elaborated: 

Since November, the state’s Office of “Accounts and Control has worked with our finance units across all agencies to implement and reinforce measures to help prevent this from happening again.” 

Among other oversight and control measures, she said, new rules require two persons to sign checks and prevent those who signed the checks from cashing them. 

Ward had been authorized both to sign and cash checks on behalf of the State of Rhode Island.

According to Pascale’s memo, Ward transferred money from the RICLAS’ residents’ account to another, long-dormant, state-owned RICLAS checking account at Bank of America, and from there, to his own Citizens Bank checking account. 

Ward had complete control over the Bank of America account that paid directly into his own Citizens Bank account. He even received the account statements from Bank of America.  

Pascale said investigators found records of 21 checks totaling $220,602 payable to Kevin B. Ward that were deposited in Ward’s Citizens Bank checking account from August, 2011 to November, 2018. The check that triggered the investigation had been made out to Ward for $4,500 on June 20, 2017 but was not spotted for more than 16 months. 

On August 1, 2011, the state-owned Bank of America account had a balance of $38,476, but the bank does not retain records longer than seven years, so investigators were not able to gather evidence of account activity prior to that date, Pascale said.

Ward skimmed funds from a client account containing social security-related income used to help pay for the state’s cost of operating RICLAS facilities, in effect serving as contributions toward room, board, utilities and the like.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the purpose of the client account.

RI Project Sustainability's Plan For Enhanced DD Services Was "Cover" For Budget Cuts - Testimony

By Gina Macris

Louis DiPalma, Chairman of Project Sustainability Commission Photo By Anne PETERS

Project Sustainability, introduced in Rhode Island in 2011 as a method for enhancing individualized services for adults with developmental disabilities, instead has diminished the quality of their lives.

That assessment set the stage Oct. 9 for deliberations of a Senate-sponsored commission charged with studying Rhode Island’s past and present system of developmental disability services, with the aim of designing a better future.

At the same time, the chairman of the 19-member panel, Sen. Louis DiPalma, D-Middletown, emphasized that the purpose of the commission is not to assign blame but to learn from the past and present to figure out how to best move forward. The commission must report to the Senate by March 1.

Project Sustainability was “a well-manicured statement to cover up” cuts in funding and services, said Tom Kane, CEO of AccessPoint RI, one of three dozen private agencies serving adults with developmental disabilities in Rhode Island.

Kim Einloth Testifies

Project Sustainability had a “major impact on the quality of service we were able to deliver,” said Kim Einloth, a senior director at Perspectives Corporation, one of Rhode Island’s largest service providers. She said the community-based program of day services was forced to put people in large groups, lay off specialists like occupational and speech therapists and discontinue consulting services with physical therapists.

Gloria Quinn, executive director of West Bay Residential Services, said she noticed immediately that the disabilities system was “demoralized, decreased and degraded” when she returned to Rhode Island after a nine-year absence in 2013. When Quinn moved out of state in 2004, she said, Rhode Island was one of the top-ranked states nationwide for its programs for adults with developmental disabilities. Quinn sits on the commission.

In a meeting that lasted about 90 minutes, the commission covered a broad range of topics related to Project Sustainability and the controversies linked to it: inadequate overall funding, depressed worker wages, and an assessment used – or misused - to determine individual allocations for services.

The planning and execution of Project Sustainability has been well documented, primarily by Burns & Associates, healthcare consultants hired by the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH) in 2010.

DiPalma said that from what he’s seen, Burns & Associates was “charged with providing a plan, and the state chose to do something different.”

Rebecca Boss, the current director of BHDDH, reviewed the history of Project Sustainability, designed to bring uniformity to funding for specific services and enable families to make informed choices about services. Project Sustainability aimed to use data gathered through new funding methods to create incentives for services to be delivered in the most integrated setting possible, she said.

“Change is hard, and even with perfect planning, it would not result in everyone’s needs being met,” Boss said.

“I think everyone knows” that the current administration – including Governor Gina Raimondo, Kerri Zanchi, the Director of Developmental Disabilities, herself, “is committed to working with our stakeholders” to figure out “where do we go from here,” said Boss.

“Many may have different views of history, as is often the case,” said Boss, a commission member.

Kane, of AccessPoint, said he didn’t want his anger about Project Sustainability to reflect the way he regards the current administration. The working relationship service providers now have with the BHDDH administration, he said, is “better than we’ve had in a very, very long time.”

Tom Kane Chats After The Commission Meeting

The plans for Project Sustainability “talked about individualizing services and moving toward person-centeredness and all of the lovely buzz words,” said Kane, but the rhetoric really described “a system we already had that got dismantled.”

While Project Sustainability talked about individualization, inclusion and community support, the regulations governing developmental disability services “were always about center-based group activity.”

“Finally, under this administration, the regulations have been put forward that will put back the flexibility we need,” Kane said. The new regulations have passed a public comment period and are to be finalized by the end of the year.

Funding, however, has a long way to go to support the kinds of changes providers, families, and consumers want, by all accounts.

Commission member Andrew McQuaide zeroed in on historical funding of developmental disability services.

McQuaide said that developmental disability spending had been on a downward trend in Rhode Island since 1993.That was the year before the last residents left the Ladd School, the state’s only institution for those with intellectual challenges.

Citing According to Burns & Associates, McQuaide said:

• Between 1993 and 2008, Rhode Island’s expenditures for developmental disabilities decreased by 29.5 percent at the same time the national rate increased by 17.8 percent.

• Rhode Island is only one of 14 states to report a reduction between 2007 and 2009 in per-person expenditure, a decrease of 4 percent at the same time the national trend registered a 5.6 percent increase.

McQuaide also said that anecdotal information indicates about half the state’s private providers were reporting operating deficits in 2009, ill-preparing them to absorb the additional funding cuts that came along with Project Sustainability.

An overview prepared by the Senate Fiscal Office showed that actual spending on developmental disabilities, including both state and federal Medicaid funds, dropped $26.2 million in the fiscal year that began July 1, 2011 when compared to spending during the previous 12 months.

The overview shows that, adjusted for inflation, the current budget still has not caught up to the spending reach of the developmental disability system in the year before Project Sustainability was enacted.

Chart courtesy of RI SENATE FISCAL OFFICE

Prior to Project Sustainability, private agencies negotiated an annual sum for each individual in their care.

The new system generated standard reimbursement rates for each of 18 different services that agencies were authorized to provide.

Kane noted that from the outset, the funding for Project Sustainability was not designed to cover all of the actual costs of private providers, almost all of whom had submitted extensive financial data to the state.

A BHDDH memo for rate-setting that the department sent to the General Assembly noted that the reimbursement rates eventually adopted for Project Sustainability were 17 to 19 percent below “benchmark rates” which Burns & Associates calculated from the median wage for direct care jobs - $13.97 an hour.

The state could not afford more, the memo said, citing the poor economy at the time.

The memo said the lower reimbursement rates were calculated by reducing the allowances for fringe benefits for workers and in some cases, cutting transportation and program expenses.

Kane, who is familiar with the rates in the memo and other Burns & Associates documents, said providers were “actually told in a meeting, ’We’ll see what this (the benchmark wage) costs but we won’t actually bring this to the legislature because they’ll laugh at us.’

“I don’t understand why the expenditure of well over a million dollars on Burns & Associates wasn’t taken seriously enough” to put forward actual expenditures “and let the legislature decide whether it was appropriate,” Kane said.

McQuaide, meanwhile, quoted from the memo. “We did not reduce our assumptions for the level of staffing hours required to serve individuals. In other words, we are forcing the providers to stretch their dollars without compromising the level of services to individuals,” the memo said. See related article

McQuaide said the experience of the last seven years has shown that it was a “fiction” to think the system of private providers would be forced to implement Project Sustainability without compromising services.

The state has a separate system of group homes for adults with developmental disabilities which has not been subject to rules or the pay cuts that came with Project Sustainability. Instead, the workers are unionized state employees with full benefits.

Donna Martin and Andrew McQuaide

In the privately-run system, McQuaide said, the wages paid direct care workers still don’t reach the original $13.97 per hour “benchmark”, or median-pay rate, calculated by Burns & Associates.

The most recent data available indicates that the average entry wage for direct care workers is $11.37 an hour. It comes from a survey of member agencies of the Community Provider Network of Rhode Island (CPNRI) conducted last February, according to Donna Martin, executive director of the trade association, which represents about two thirds of service providers in Rhode Island. Martin said she is in the process of updating the figure.

Martin, a commission member, told the panel that CPNRI has met with the BHDDH leadership and representatives of Governor Raimondo’s office and the Office of Management and Budget to review current provider reimbursements in comparison to an extensive menu of rates envisioned by Burns & Associates in planning Project Sustainability. BHDDH, OMB, and the Governor have already planning a budget proposal for the next fiscal year.

DiPalma said Burns & Associates originally wanted to advance a “competitive” average wage of $15.46 an hour.

Addressing wage inequities will be a critical focus of the commission’s work, he said. Two years ago, DiPalma started a campaign to raise direct care wages to $15 an hour over five budget cycles. Massachusetts already pays its direct care workers a $15 hourly rate, and many Rhode Islanders find they don’t have to move to take advantage of these higher-paying positions at agencies that are an easy commute from their homes, DiPalma said.

Another source of rancor over the last several years has been the assessment used to determine individual funding levels under the terms of Project Sustainability – the Supports Intensity Scale (SIS), which was updated in November, 2016.

Kane has said data compiled by Burns & Associates indicate the original version of the SIS was used to cut individual funding. See related article

A. Anthony Antosh

Even though the SIS has been revised, the state’s top academic researcher in developmental disabilities, A. Anthony Antosh, told the commission that using the SIS as a funding tool violates the original intent of the instrument as an aid for professionals designing individual programs of support for persons with disabilities.

Antosh, a commission member, is the retiring Director of the Sherlock Center on Disabilities at Rhode Island College.

His comments apparently prompted Kane to recall another moment in a Project Sustainability planning meeting in which Burns & Associates’ human services partner praised the multi-faceted assessment providers were using at the time to figure out how much funding a particular person needed. In each case, the assessment took into account intellectual capacity, responses in various situations and potential risks.

That Burns & Associates partner, the Human Services Research Institute of Oregon, wrote a memo to the General Assembly saying that “ ‘resource allocation’ should never be thought of as mostly an exercise involving the assessment and simple service delivery.”

Policy makers should also take into account the goals of the programs, such as increasing community integration or increasing employment, before determining the array of services and rate schedules, HSRI said.

“Data collected by a measure such as the SIS is necessary,” the memo said, “but certainly not sufficient.”

The memo was condensed before it reached the General Assembly, and the recommendation against using the SIS alone to determine individual funding was eliminated,

RI DD Services Get A "Status Quo" Budget, But Can It Keep Up With Client Needs And Consent Decree?

By Gina Macris

With Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo signing the $9.6 billion budget bill into law June 22, the service system for adults with developmental disabilities averts a crisis in the fiscal year beginning July 1, and instead continues the status quo.

That is to say, the system is still struggling to meet the needs of some 4,000 Rhode Island adults with developmental disabilities, including those who are seeking services for the first time.

Higher-than-expected revenue estimates in May enabled the House and the Senate to restore a number of reductions in the human services which Raimondo had proposed in January, including about $18 million in developmental disabilities.  On June 20, the Senate ratified the House version of the budget and sent it to the governor.

Until the state’s intent to restore the funds for developmental disability services became clear in mid-May, an independent federal court monitor had been preparing to make recommendations to U.S. District Court Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. for an order to ensure adequate funding..

It was the second time since a federal civil rights consent decree was signed in 2014 that a court order, or the threat of one, has surfaced during the budget-making season at the State House. There’s no reason to believe that the monitor won’t re-visit that idea next year if funding for developmental disability services fails to keep pace with the stepped-up demands of the consent decree, which requires the state to shift from segregated services to those offering integrated, community-based opportunities by 2024.

One goal illustrates the challenges. The state is to have part-time jobs by Sept. 30 for all young adults who left high school between 2013 and 2016 and who who want to work, but with three months remaining until the deadline, those with jobs number 235, or 55 percent, of a population of 425, according to figures released last week.

The budget does include $1.5 million in technical assistance for private providers of developmental disability services trying to adjust to integrated services for clients, according to Carmela Corte, the chief financial officer of the state Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH). Those are federal-state Medicaid dollars that will be taken from the allocation for direct services.   

A relatively small number of adults with developmental disabilities who choose to use their funding authorizations from BHDDH for in-home care will be able to pay workers 10 percent more, which amounts to about $620,000 in the budget, Corte said.

By The Numbers 

The General Assembly also adjusted the current budget to close out the fiscal year, adding about $15.6 million to cover an operating deficit as recommended by Raimondo, who acknowledged the shortfall deficit as a one-time event.

The overall numbers in developmental disabilities:

•     $272.1 million for Fiscal 2018, which ends June 30    
• ·   $271.4 million for Fiscal 2019, which begins July 1

Administrators, however, tend to work on a day-to-day basis with an “operating budget,” which includes only federal and state Medicaid funds available for providing direct services.

For the current fiscal year, federal-state Medicaid dollars are budgeted at $269.8 million.  For the fiscal year beginning July 1, the federal-state Medicaid total is $269.2 million.

No Raises For Frontline Workers

One big-ticket item missing from the next budget is a pay increase for employees of private service providers who work directly with adults with developmental disabilities.  The underpaid workforce is sure to be a major issue for advocates when the General Assembly reconvenes in January.

Incremental raises for these workers during three budget cycles have allowed them to keep just ahead of the minimum wage, in a range which puts private service providers in competition with the same pool of workers as fast-food restaurants and other retail businesses. 

Including the most recent raises, in 2017, the average direct care worker is paid about $11.50 an hour. The minimum wage, which increased from $9.60 to $10.10 on Jan. 1, is due for another bump, to $10.50, on Jan. 1, 2019.

Before the General Assembly cut $26 million from the developmental disabilities budget in 2011, the average pay at some private agencies serving adults with developmental disabilities averaged close to $15 an hour, with comprehensive health insurance and other benefits.  Career ladders afforded front-line workers opportunities for advancement.

Since then, the workforce has become unstable, with employers unable to fill one out of six jobs, according to the Community Provider Network of Rhode Island, a trade organization. Turnover ranges from about 30 percent to about 75 percent, depending on the agency. In some cases, workers leave direct care work for other jobs with similar pay but much less responsibility. In other cases, they leave for the same type of work at better pay in Massachusetts, which is scheduled to offer a minimum of $15 an hour for such work July 1.

Budget Questions At Public Forum

The issue of worker pay surfaced at a public forum hosted by the Division of Developmental Disabilities (DDD) June 18 at the University of Rhode Island, with one parent lamenting the lack raises in the year ahead.

Kerri Zanchi                         Photo By Anne Peters

Kerri Zanchi, Director of Developmental Disabilities, and other staff of the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH), explained various aspects of the budget and outlined initiatives intended to help the service system in the long run.

Asked whether the “status quo” funding approved by the General Assembly would result in cost overruns in the coming fiscal year, Zanchi didn’t say.  Instead she emphasized that DDD must use its data “every single month” to support its projections and “really understand what our needs are going to look like.”  

But BHDDH projections of need for developmental disability services don’t figure in the semi-annual Caseload Estimating Conference that comes up with figures for Medicaid entitlement costs.

And the state Budget Office does not take actual costs into account in making recommendations to the governor, a spokeswoman said earlier this year.  Rather it uses “estimated growth rates in the cost of providing services,” according to Brenna McCabe. She did not say who makes the estimates or otherwise elaborate.

The new budget doesn’t allow for increases in individual funding authorizations – one of the chief causes of the cost overruns which prompted the BHDDH request for additional funding in the budget cycle now winding down.

The governor cited higher “acuity” in acknowledging that increased per-person costs fueled a projected $15 million deficit in developmental disability costs in the fiscal year ending June 30. That factor, however, was ignored in her presentation of Fiscal 2019 budget that begins July 1.

Ever since November, 2016, there has been an upward trend in individual authorizations, something  that is expected to continue for several years, until all clients have been evaluated at least once using a revised standardized interview that is considered more accurate than the previous one. Both the original interview, called the Supports Intensity Scale (SIS), and the revised one, called the SIS-A, were developed by the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.  

Budget Language Opens Door To Innovation

The budget contains language that responds in to a variety of concerns about who manages resources available to adults with developmental disabilities and how providers are paid. 

It gives BHDDH the required state legislative authority to apply for a so-called “Health Home” and an “Alternate Payment Method” to create pilot programs for changes in case management and provider reimbursement better suited to integrated, community-based services that are tailored to individual preferences and needs, as required by the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) hold that neither the states, as funding authorities, nor the services providers themselves can also be responsible for designing and managing individualized programs of activities without conflicts of interests.

States should have another disinterested party in the role of case manager, according to CMS.

The Health Home is the CMS name for the third-party case management organization that would oversee individual clients’ Medicaid and Medicare services, while the Alternate Payment Method allows states to explore changes to the usual fee-for-service reimbursement to private providers.

 Zanchi and Kimberly Reynolds, BHDDH administrator of financial management, explained the goals of the applications at the public forum June 18.

Reynolds described the Health Home as a “one-stop shop where individuals and families may get assistance in managing their services.  BHDDH has three health homes, mostly in the substance abuse and mental health areas.”

By way of background, Zanchi said that the idea for applying for a Health Home grew out of collective thinking in DDD during the last year about ways to put its clients in the driver’s seat in shaping their activities, or as she put it, developing “person-centered practice.”

For one thing, the system can’t be truly “person-centered” without case management that is free of conflicts of interest, Zanchi said.

She also said a pilot program for an Alternate Payment Method might generate solutions to problems faced by the current fee-for-service reimbursement system, which poses challenges to providers trying to get their clients into the community in meaningful ways.

The fee-for service system requires providers to bill in 15-minute increments, but only when a client is actually receiving services. It doesn’t allow providers to plan ahead, because reimbursement depends on day-to-day attendance at a particular activity, without exceptions for occasions such as client’s medical appointments, illnesses, or vacations.

As the state moves to a system with greater consumer control and consumer empowerment, Zanchi said, providers will need to be able to count on more staff to get their clients into the community.

Despite the consent decree, the reimbursement system is still geared to funding programs held in facilities like sheltered workshops and day centers, where one staff member can keep an eye on larger groups of individuals than is possible in the community.

Zanchi and Reynolds each said they want the public to participate in drawing up the applications for the Health Home and Alternate Payment Method.

“We have a lot of work to do in a very quick time frame, and like everything else we’ve done, we’re going to do it with our constituents,”  Zanchi said.

The state anticipates submitting the applications, receiving decisions, and beginning pilot programs by next Jan. 1, according to Zanchi. CMS would pay 90 cents on the dollar to support the pilot programs for a maximum of two years.

Flyers distributed at the meeting gave a schedule for public meetings on the applications, but the schedule was put on hold. Reynolds said she is the contact person for the Health Home. She can be reached at 401-462-3941 or at Kimberly.Reynolds@bhddh.ri.gov 

RI BHDDH Running Projected $34.6 Million Deficit; DD Services Account for $26 Million Of Shortfall

By Gina Macris

Rhode Island’s efforts to improve services to adults with developmental disabilities - spurred by ongoing federal court oversight – will result in cost overruns of almost $26 million by next June, the end of the current fiscal year, according to projections from the state Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals (BHDDH).

The projected $26 million shortfall is the largest in recent memory for developmental disability services, which typically have run $4 to 6 million over budget during a fiscal year.

In the first quarter spending report to the State Budget Officer, Thomas Mullaney, Rebecca Boss, the BHDDH director, said there are two main drivers of the projected deficit:

• Increased costs attributed to an updated assessment for clients of the Division of Developmental Disabilities, the Supports Intensity Scale–A, or SIS-A, which is generally regarded as more accurate than the previous version in capturing individuals’ support needs, particularly for those with complex medical and behavioral issues.

• An increase in supplemental authorizations that represent successful appeals of funding levels awarded through fiscal calculations made from the results of the original SIS or the SIS-A.  

BHDDH has asked the state Budget Office to consider a supplemental appropriation for the current budget cycle to cover much of the shortfall, with Boss saying the increased spending is consistent with current caseload projections.

But BHDDH also proposes cutting about $5 million from supplemental appropriations before next June 30. Boss has ordered officials to deny requests from individuals with developmental disabilities for supplemental funding, except in emergencies related to health and safety, including the risk of hospitalization. She also made an exception for any “court-ordered services” which may occur.

The order to hold the line on supplemental funds is likely to have widespread impact on individuals and their families, who must make the same request for extra money annually if they believe they have been shortchanged by the SIS or the SIS-A.  Alternatively, they may request a re-assessment.

In her letter to Mullaney, Boss said BHDDH is working to address the current year’s projected deficit and is determining “potential courses of action which would meet client needs, be accountable to regulatory entities, and meet fiscal constraints.”

The Office of Management and Budget is working with BHDDH to “thoroughly review its options,” a spokeswoman for Mullaney said Nov. 9.

BHDDH requested $22 million for supplemental payments in the current budget, according to testimony before the General Assembly last spring.

But in a recent corrective action plan, the department said it authorized over $28.2 million in supplemental payments – more than 10 percent of all payments to private providers - during the fiscal year that ended last June 30. Actual expenditures exceeded $22.3 million.

“The past volume and approval of supplemental authorizations is unsustainable,” BHDDH said.

The plan sets a limit of $18.6 million for supplemental payments in the current budget cycle and reduces the ceiling to $14.4 million in the fiscal year beginning next July 1, with the assumption that the number of requests for supplemental payments will decline as more clients are assessed through the updated SIS-A. 

The corrective action plan also notes that requests for supplemental funds that are denied by BHDDH may be appealed to the Executive Office of Health and Human Services.

The projected $26 million shortfall in the Division of Developmental Disabilities represents the lion’s share of an overall $34.6 million departmental deficit, based on first-quarter spending, which Boss outlined in an Oct. 27 letter to Mullaney, the State Budget Officer.

The state is under pressure from the U.S. District Court to improve the quality of its daytime services for adults with developmental disabilities by moving its system from isolated day centers and sheltered workshops to supported employment at regular jobs paying minimum wage or higher. Rhode Island also must increase the availability of integrated non-work activities. These mandates are spelled out in two agreements with the U.S. Department of Justice, in which the state must correct correct an overreliance on segregated facilities that violates the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The original SIS, accompanied by a $26 million reduction in developmental disability funding, was introduced by BHDDH and the General Assembly in 2011 as an equitable way of distributing available resources, although advocates complained that it was nothing more than a device to control costs, at the expense of some of Rhode Island’s most vulnerable citizens.

In succeeding years, that dollar amount was restored, but the service system was fundamentally altered, resulting in wage cuts, higher worker turnover, and a dependence on lower–cost services in segregated facilities that can be supervised with fewer staff.  The U.S. Department of Justice began its investigation into these facilities - sheltered workshops and day centers - in 2013.

On an individual basis, persons with developmental disabilities, their families, and service providers routinely appealed the funding awarded through the SIS, and at one point supplemental payments became routine.

In the meantime, there were were so many complaints about the SIS that the department ultimately decided to shift to the SIS-A.

But 13 months ago, when BHDDH submitted projections that ultimately went into the current budget, it had no experience with the SIS-A. The revised assessment was introduced in November, 2016. By springtime of this year, however, Boss had enough data to tell legislators that the SIS-A was resulting in higher per-person funding allocations. And she reported that the overall numbers of individuals using  developmental disability services was on the rise.

For the future, Boss envisioned a shift away from supplemental payments as the revised assessment tool better responds to individuals’ funding needs.

Of the overall $34.6 million projected BHDDH deficit, nearly $8.7 million can be attributed to staffing and overtime increases at the Eleanor Slater Hospital for stepped-up patient monitoring in light of a recent warning that the facility may lose accreditation because aging buildings pose too many risks that patients may harm themselves. A risk assessment for the Eleanor Slater Hospital is currently underway, and the results will inform a request for supplemental funding to remedy concerns of the hospital accrediting agency, the Joint Commission, Boss said.

Click here for the BHDDH first quarter spending report.

RI Direct Care Workers To See Raises in October Paychecks; Legislator Says They Deserve More

By Gina Macris

Raises for direct care workers in Rhode Island, including those who serve persons with developmental disabilities, are scheduled to show up in paychecks in October. But the increases are unlikely to fix problems caused by wages that many consider inadequate to stabilize a workforce plagued by high turnover, high vacancy rates, and high overtime. 

Even after receiving the pay hike, many workers will be forced to continue working second jobs to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, their employers will still have to scramble to fill vacancies, as Massachusetts prepares to pay $15 an hour for the same work beginning July 1, 2018.  Currently, one in six jobs goes unfilled, driving up overtime costs for developmental disability providers, according to the Community Provider Network of Rhode Island, (CPNRI), a trade association.  

Those who work with adults with developmental disabilities in Rhode Island make an average of $11.14 an hour, and an estimated increase of 42 cents would bring that hourly rate to $11.56. The exact increase is expected to vary from one agency to another, depending on benefits offered.

Unless the workers are single adults supporting only themselves, $11.56 an hour is not enough for a minimum subsistence wage – no restaurant meals, entertainment or savings accounts - that nevertheless avoids food stamps or other public assistance, according to the Living Wage Calculator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In Rhode Island, 41 percent of those working with adults with developmental disabilities have taken more than one job to make ends meet, according to CPNRI. The trade associaation presented figues to the General Assembly earlier this year that show 65 percent of direct care workers were heads of household in 2014, and 48 percent of them received public assistance between 2011 and 2013, the latest period for which data was available.

Entry-level positions for direct care positions at developmental disability service agencies generally hover a little above the minimum wage, currently $9.60 an hour. But the minimum wage is to get a 50-cent bump to $10.10 on Jan. 1 and another increase, to $10.50 an hour, on Jan. 1, 2019.

 In the current budget, $6.1 million in federal-state Medicaid dollars have been set aside for raises for those who provide direct care to adults with developmental disabilities, effective July 1.

Governor Raimondo also asked for a total of $5.2 million for increasing the pay of home health care aides, but the General Assembly delayed implementation of that raise until Oct. 1. House spokesman Larry Berman said that the way a similar increase was paid out to home care workers in 2016 made implementation problematic prior to Oct. 1 of the budget year and that issue was taken into account this year. The delayed implementation also saves more than $600,000 in state funds.  

Developmental disability service agencies also can expect to see higher reimbursement rates Oct. 1, but those increases will be retroactive to July 1, in accordance with language in the budget.

State Sen. Louis DiPalma, D-Middletown, who has led a call for improving the prospects of direct care workers, agreed that the direct care workers are treading water, in effect, relative to the minimum wage.  

He said he is well aware that raises enacted in 2016 and 2017 are not enough to compensate them for complex work that is often also physically demanding.

The new Amazon warehouse in Fall River is paying more than $12 an hour to start, he said.

In the fall of 2016, DiPalma launched a “15 in 5” campaign to increase pay of home health care aides and direct care workers to $15 an hour in five years – by July 1, 2021.

There appears to be broad sentiment in the legislature that direct care workers deserve better, judging from the number of bills introduced in the General Assembly earlier this year to speed up the climb to a $15 hourly rate. One measure, sponsored by the House Deputy Majority Leader, Rep. Jean Philippe Barros, D-Pawtucket, would have set Jan. 1 as the implementation date for a $15 hourly wage.

But the bills appear to have been more a gesture more than anything else.

DiPalma, first vice-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said that the state’s finances cannot support that kind of a boost immediately.

The state faces the prospect of a $237 million deficit in the fiscal year that begins next July 1, according recent memos from the State Budget Officer, Thomas Mullaney, and the Senate Fiscal Advisor, Stephen Whitney. And that estimateddeficit does not include $25 million in unspecified savings which the state still must trim from the current budget. Jonathan Womer, Director of the Office of Management and Budget,  has expressed skepticism that all the cost-cutting assumptions in the enacted budget can be achieved.

Department heads preparing for the next budget cycle are being asked to cut expenditures by 10 percent, with one exception being entitlement programs, like the federal-state Medicaid program, which funds the pay for home health care aides and developmental disability workers, among many other services.