Ken Kusmer has a good article on Mitch Roob and the changes at the Family & Social Services Administration.
My sense before the article has been that no part of state government was more need of change than FSSA. I’m not sure that Roob’s approach is the best one, but it might be worth a try. He wants to change FSSA’s role into one of merely paying for assistance to the needy, privatizing the analysis of who qualifies and delivery of services to private contractors. At the moment, I think the problem with the approach is that Roob and the Daniels administration are the ones attempting to implement it. With the recent Richard Rhoad scandal, we’ve seen that Roob & co are not above using privatization as a pretext for padding their cronies nests while firing and cutting the compensation of frontline workers.
One of the greatest challenges to privatization, particularly in the area of social services, is the need for absolute trust that safeguards will be in place to ensure that tax dollars are being used to provide services to those in need and not to enrich those who are already well off. Mitch Roob and Richard Rhoad have violated that trust. No matter how well implemented their privatization scheme may be in reality, citizens can not feel secure that their money is being well allocated as long as those two have a role in the allocation. (And that already diminished sense of security is in no way enhanced by the fact that FSSA allowed public input into the privatization scheme only under pressure. Initially, a public hearing on the privatization contracts was not going to be held until after the contract had been awarded — similar to the process used in the Toll Road privatization. Now, the public hearing will be held 5 days before the contract is awarded. I leave it to the reader to decide how much influence public comments will have on the award of the contract.)
I read that as “Boob” changes and thought, All right! Doug’s getting with the program!
Check out the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette’s editorial column this a.m. for the same topic. (http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/editorial/14575159.htm)
And Advance Indiana has an interesting piece from 5/13 re: further conflicts of interest @ FSSA.
I have never understood why the legislature thought it was a good idea to create a behemoth gargantuan bureacracy like FSSA to begin with. Yes, it makes sense to have social services consolidated, but holy cow. They were asking for inefficiency and increasing the potential for fraud. Every couple of years someone introduces a bill to break up FSSA but it never goes anywhere.
Privatization is simply an excuse for a failure to manage. That agency is too big – and a leader would address that directly. But the history of privatization across the board shows: (1) It costs more money over the long-run; (2) It decreases public service; (3) It decreases accountability of government for expenditures and service; and (4) It converts career-track jobs with decent benefits into low-pay, dead-end jobs — driving the economy further into the basement.
On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with the goal of running government as efficiently as possible. But when it comes to the delivery, administration and/or financing of social services, efficiency is a false god. The current FSSA mindset makes a fetish of bean-counting, to the detriment of those who deliver and need social services. That is unconscionable.
Why don’t you look in to the trvesty of the FSSA dismantling of the First Steps program that serves disabled children from birthto age 3.
They took the Fort Wayne region cancelled a contact awardedit to an unknown company called Acheiva in Muncie. Overnight the local First Steps staff was told the no longer had jobs at the end of the day as well as no benefits.
They turned over the telephone access number. And told if they wanted their old jobs, they could reapply for a 90 probationary period and they would be earning just less then two thirds of their former pay. The Service Coordinators in this program will go from avg income of approximately $35,000 to $20,000 for carrying twice the caseload and with no hope of the fantsy high paid Rood * Rhoader using any of their privite industry knowledge to use technology to make the workload requirements doable in the long term. They must have been to the same marketing school as our man Mitch where even he could come up with sloagn like just do it or something.
Instead they inseted three “supervisors” to supervise the faily activities of a small group of Service Coordinators who needed no direct supervison. Based on the average salary of $34,000 for each of the 12 or so, this expense to supervise seems excessive.
I say they should have performed file audits on these providers and got rid of bad performers if there where any. That money spent on supervisior could have been used to provide a living wage to a group of dedicated workers, obviously not been paid on the Rhaod scale of government pay. Obviously as most college educated Social Workers are in Indiana they are motivated by money but rather by service to children and families fighting a daily battle just to live.
Roob who said he would be lost without Rhoad, will be really lost when these dedicated Service providers in the First Steps program exit to a more stable employer who actually care about the people.