As parents plead for disability funding, Republicans blame the governor

As families anxious that they’ll lose vital services for their kids with disabilities at the end of the month gathered at the Capitol, Republican Rep. Neal Carter told them that Republicans are “on their side.”

That was right after he compared the impending funding lapse at the Arizona Division of Developmental Disabilities, which could leave families broke and their kids institutionalized, to a person having their car repossessed because they couldn’t handle the monthly payment.

Some of those families laughed after Carter then described GOP lawmakers as the “adults in the room.”

Even as the Republicans on the Ad Hoc Committee on Executive Budget Mismanagement promised their support, they didn’t propose any legislation or take any action to fund DDD, but they did blame the shortfall on Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs.

“Today’s hearing is not just about financial figures. It is about the families who rely on Arizona’s developmental disabilities program,” said Committee Chairman Matt Gress, R-Phoenix. “These are families who provide extraordinary care for their loved ones, who navigate complex systems daily and who deserve stability not uncertainty. They should never have to fear that the services they depend on will be jeopardized by financial mismanagement.”

But lawmakers didn’t hear a word from those families who Gress said should be at the center of the hearing because he didn’t allow them to testify. Instead, the GOP lawmakers heard testimony about DDD finances and spoke at length about how the entire situation was Hobbs’ fault.

Gress, the former budget director for Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, accused Hobbs of putting the entire DDD budget at risk when she expanded the Parents as Paid Caregivers Program after the legislature refused to explicitly fund it last year.

The Parents as Paid Caregivers Program was implemented in Arizona in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when parents couldn’t find in-home workers to care for their children with disabilities.

The program, which was initially completely federally funded, pays parents to provide care to their own children, but only if they require “extraordinary care” above and beyond typical parenting tasks. That might include things like assisting a teenager with bathing, dressing and eating. But that enhanced federal funding has run out, putting the state on the hook for around 35% of the program’s costs.

If lawmakers don’t pass legislation to provide more funding, it won’t just impact the caregiver program, but all DDD services. The department won’t be able to pay its care providers, potentially putting them out of business and making what seemed a temporary problem permanent.

Since January, when Hobbs requested an additional $122 million to cover the shortfall in DDD funding, Republicans have accused her of bankrupting the division by expanding the scope of the Parents as Paid Caregivers program.

The Democratic legislators assigned to the panel skipped out on Thursday’s meeting, calling it a “shameless political stunt.” Instead, they held a press conference alongside advocates in the DDD community who have been begging the legislature to pass a supplemental funding bill for months now. The advocates staged a protest prior to the committee meeting and many of them attended the meeting afterward.

“We’re being cornered into institutionalizing our children or going broke trying to keep them safe at home,” Brandi Coon, an advocate for the PPCG program said. “This cannot continue. We are not going away. We believe in fiscal responsibility and we believe that every person who qualifies for services deserves to receive them at home and in their community.”

Many of the children whose parents care for them with help from the PPCG program can’t be left alone, and their parents cannot care for them while also holding a job. That means parents might have to make the painful decision to institutionalize their children if funding for the program isn’t restored.

But they’ve also said they want to cut the program — with the GOP head of the budget committee in the House saying he’d support slashing its funding by up to half.

Jamie Kelly, the mother of a child who she said requires hospital-level care at home, accused the Republican legislators of displaying their priorities by delaying funding for DDD just weeks before it lapses.

“Why should I, as a conservative, adoptive mother, have to come to the Capitol daily and plead with the very legislators I voted for to do their jobs?” Kelly asked. “Why must I continually remind them that there is nothing fiscally responsible about the dismantling of support systems for individuals with disabilities?”

During the hearing, Gress said he was disappointed that Democratic legislators, as well as the agency directors of Arizona’s Medicaid program and the Department of Economic Security, did not attend at Hobbs’ direction.

“This Legislature asked for answers. The Governor responded with a tantrum,” Gress said in an emailed statement. “What she calls a ‘political stunt’ is actually legislative oversight — a constitutional duty that we will carry out whether she likes it or not.”

Supplemental funding

Since January, Republican legislators have been criticising Hobbs’ request for supplemental funding and accusing her of fiscal mismanagement. Costs for DDD have increased substantially over the past year, but that change is due to multiple factors, including growth in the PPCG program, increased payment rates to providers and larger than expected enrollment in DDD services overall.

Hobbs initially requested just $4 million in January 2024 to replace the lost federal funding for the PPCG in the 2025 fiscal year, but updated that estimate to $57 million last fall. In late January, the total ask for supplemental DDD funding grew to $122 million.

Gress and other Republicans on the committee have hammered Hobbs for delaying a rule set to go into effect in October that would cap the PPCG program at 40 hours per child, per week. Now, that cap is set to take effect in July. A spokesman for Hobbs didn’t respond to a question about why the implementation of the cap was delayed.

Democrats pointed out that Republicans reacted differently when Ducey requested a total of more than $3 billion in supplemental funds during his eight years as governor.

In 2024, the legislature approved around $274 million in supplemental funding for the Republican-backed universal school voucher program, another program that grew much more quickly than predicted in original budget estimates.

During the Thursday meeting, Republican legislators turned to advice from former Idaho Majority Leader Megan Blanksma, who told the lawmakers via video call that they should require any Medicaid waiver requests that would increase state spending — like the one that gave the go-ahead to continue the PPCG program — to be approved by the legislature.

Blanksma sponsored a bill last year doing just that in Idaho, which the state’s Republican governor signed into law. But Idaho Gov. Brad Little later said that the bill could cause disruption in Medicaid services if waiver renewals are necessary when the legislature isn’t in session.

Gress and others who praised Blanksma’s waiver-approval fix, spurred by skyrocketing costs in Idaho’s own version of the PPCG program, didn’t mention that the Gem State plans to end that program.

Stadium funding frustration

With the future of DDD funding still up in the air, advocates planned to attend an April 1 Senate Appropriations Committee meeting to protest House Bill 2704, which would provide $500 million in state tax dollars for updates to Chase Field. The stadium is home to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the state’s professional baseball team that has an estimated worth of $1.6 billion.

Coon told the Arizona Mirror that the bill was removed from the agenda when its backers learned of the protest plans.

A spokeswoman for the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce told the Mirror that discussion of the bill was postponed as negotiations on its final form are worked out.

Coon said she thinks the fact that the stadium bill is still on the table is an indicator of where lawmakers’ priorities lie.

“Legislators are more concerned about funding their friends and their donors versus funding the essential services that children and disabled adults need,” she said

The bill passed through the House Feb. 26 by a vote of 35-25, with a mix of Republicans and Democrats voting for and against. Gress was one of the Republicans who voted in favor.

source https://www.rawstory.com/as-parents-plead-for-disability-funding-republicans-blame-the-governor/