SRS announces plan for paring waiting list numbers

TOPEKA — State welfare officials today said they expect to soon begin funding community based services for an additional 143 people with developmental disabilities.

"We’ve started notifying the CDDOs, already," said Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services Secretary Don Jordan, referring to the Community Developmental Disability Organizations that assess the needs of people seeking services.

"I suspect things will start moving in the next week or two," he said.

Jordan said after Oct. 1, SRS also expects to move 153 people with physical disabilities off the agency’s waiting list for services.

"At that point we’ll go to what’s called a rolling waiting list," he said. "That’s when one person goes off the waiting list when two people leave the program."

Currently, waiting lists for services for both groups are frozen except for people in crisis.

Jordan announced plans for reducing the waiting lists during a Tuesday "stakeholders’ meeting" with long-term care providers and advocates. The meeting was jointly sponsored by SRS and the Kansas Department on Aging.

Last month, Jordan warned that programs for the physically and developmentally disabled were costing more than projected and that SRS might have to move fewer people off waiting lists than some legislators were expecting.

The moves announced Tuesday, he said, will allow the two programs to stay within their respective budgets.

Advocates for people with physical and developmental disabilities welcomed the news, noting that movement on the waiting lists has been stalled for several months.

"No one is going to call this a monumental success, but it’s a step in the right direction," said Tom Laing, executive director at Interhab, an association representing most of the state's programs for people with developmental disabilities.

"Given the atmosphere we’re in, this is the only reasonable thing SRS can do short of having to cut people from the program and nobody wants to see that," said Shannon Jones, executive director at the Statewide Independent Living Council of Kansas.

The additional moves are not expected to put much of a dent in the waiting-list numbers, which as of this week included:

2,108 people with physical disabilities receiving no services;
2,414 people with developmental disabilities receiving no services;
1,024 people with developmental disabilities receiving partial services.

KDoA Secretary Martin Kennedy said his agency was adjusting for $2 million in cost overruns left over from the fiscal year that ended June 30.

At the same time, he said, past cuts to in-home services were expected to result in more Medicaid-funded nursing home stays, increasing the department’s costs.

"At this point," he said, "we don’t have good choices."

Kennedy said restoring cuts to in-home service would the department’s “top priority” when it proposes its budget for fiscal 2012.

Kennedy and Jordan praised their boss, Gov. Mark Parkinson, and the Legislature for passing a one-cent sales tax earlier this year. The tax is expected to raise about $300 million.

Without the $300 million, Jordan said, SRS would have had to make "draconian cuts," resulting in some assistance programs for the poor being dropped altogether.

"After a while you get to a point where with some things it makes more sense to stop than it does to keep going," he said.

Kennedy said the tax increase would allow KDoA and SRS to restore the 10 percent cut in Medicaid reimbursement that were ordered effective Jan. 1, 2010.

"We are one of very few states – in fact, we may be the only state – that’s restored its cut in Medicaid reimbursement from earlier in the year," he said. “That’s a great thing.”