Gov. Katie Hobbs signs a bill to provide $122 million in emergency funding for the Division of Developmental Disabilities, avoiding an end to services for some 60,000 disabled Arizonans. Photo courtesy Arizona Governor’s Office
Arizona’s developmentally disabled community breathed a collective sigh of relief Thursday, as a bipartisan solution to an impending budget cliff was finally signed into law.
The agreement to supply the Division of Developmental Disabilities with $122 million in supplemental funding to get it through the end of the fiscal year passed through the state House of Representatives Wednesday evening and was approved by the Senate on Thursday. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed the bill into law Thursday afternoon.
Kathleen Muldoon’s 11-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy and is blind and deaf, relies on DDD services. She said she ran around her house in celebration after the vote on Wednesday. Muldoon is a mother of three and a full-time medical school professor, but still trudged to the Capitol twice a week for the past few months to fight for the developmentally disabled community.
“I feel relieved, and I also feel unsettled,” she told the Arizona Mirror.
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The approval of House Bill 2945 came after months of political fighting and accusations between the Republicans who control both chambers of the legislature and Hobbs, who they accused of causing the funding gap through fiscal mismanagement.
The bill headed to her desk after bipartisan votes of 48-11 in the House and 28-1 in the Senate, with only Republicans — most of them members of the far-right Arizona Freedom Caucus — voting against it.
Legislators, who are constitutionally responsible for funding the state government, have had since January to negotiate a supplemental funding bill. But they fought for months to come to a solution that would get through both chambers without getting a veto from Hobbs.
Muldoon and Michele Thorne, cofounder of the advocacy organization Care 4 the Caregivers, both said they were thankful for support from the community and for the legislators who worked behind the scenes to make sure they didn’t face devastating service cuts.
But they’re also walking away from the last couple of months of intense advocacy at the Capitol with resentment for the political showmanship that some Republicans displayed throughout the process.
“I hope that, in the future, if they want to have negotiations with us that they actually do it in good faith and they don’t play politics with this community ever again,” Thorne said.
The funding bill takes effect immediately because it had emergency language and passed with a two-thirds majority in both chambers, allowing it to bypass the normal 90-day delay from signature to implementation. Getting that supermajority on board was crucial, since DDD was expected to run out of money May 1, meaning that the nearly 60,000 Arizonans with conditions like cerebral palsy, autism and other developmental disabilities would lose access to services they depend on.
The Parents as Paid Caregivers program, which was responsible for the majority of DDD’s budget deficit, trains parents and then pays them to provide in-home care to their own children — instead of third-party caregivers — but only if they require “extraordinary care” above and beyond typical parenting tasks.
The PPCG program expanded over the last year from about 3,000 participants to around 6,000, even after Republicans in the legislature refused to provide specific funding for it. They accused Hobbs of executive overreach for allowing the program to balloon without the necessary funding to pay for it.
In the end, the final version of the funding bill that passed through both chambers included the $122 million that Democrats and advocates had begged for to keep DDD solvent. But it also places tighter restrictions on the PPCG program.
And the bill allocates $355,000 for a special audit of the program, something that Republicans pushed for to ensure that parents aren’t abusing it.
Muldoon said that some House Republicans treated the parents who use PPCG like they were “draining money from society,” even though many of those parents had to quit their jobs to provide full-time care for their children.
Muldoon was struck by House Republicans’ decision to walk out of the chamber while DDD parents shared their personal stories last month. Thorne agreed that GOP legislators’ efforts to block advocates for the disabled community from sharing how proposed cuts to the PPCG program would impact them was distressing.
“I was shocked by the lengths that, especially the House, went through to silence the caregivers, and to ensure for a very long time that we didn’t have a voice in the hearings,” Thorne said.
And she thinks there’s a simple explanation for House Republicans’ repeated refusal to allow the advocates to speak during public hearings where they discussed their gap funding proposals: The optics wouldn’t be good for them.
“They would have looked really bad,” Thorne said. “Our stories are impactful. The way we live our lives does make an impact and motivates people to act for the right reasons.”
After voting to pass the gap funding bill, legislators from both parties thanked one another for their efforts to finally come together to reach a solution that didn’t leave the DDD community in crisis, but Thorne said she wasn’t buying that warm sentiments that some of the legislators expressed for those who rely on PPCG.
Particularly disingenuous, Thorne said, were what she called a “victory lap” from Republican Reps. Matt Gress and David Livingston, who had spent months pushing for cuts to the program.
Thorne and Muldoon both said that Reps. Nancy Gutierrez, a Democrat, and Julie Willoughby, a Republican, are the legislators who deserve praise for working behind the scenes to ensure that a compromise was reached.
“I think she’s a really brave person,” Muldoon said of Willoughby, who took a stand against her own party last week when they pushed to cut the PPCG program in half, risking her own political career in the process.
Both advocates also reserved praise for all of the members of the developmental disability community and their supporters for their constant presence at the Capitol to push lawmakers to do the right thing.
“I’m so proud of our community,” Muldoon said.
But even though they seem to have won this battle, it hasn’t been without consequences. Many families lost nurses and outside caregivers as the deadline to fund DDD got closer and closer and those workers sought jobs with a more certain future.
“We really need to look inward. We need to do better. This entire process was a disaster,” Democratic Sen. Analise Ortiz, of Phoenix, said Thursday morning, before voting for the gap funding bill.
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This post was originally authored and published by Caitlin Sievers from AZ Mirror via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
