Spare the children, gov
Just when the city’s child welfare agency is making two big breakthroughs transforming kids’ lives for the better, Gov. Cuomo is balking at continuing to pay the state’s share of the bill. Stand down, governor. In jurisdictions all across New York, state funds pay 62 cents on the dollar, and localities 38, for services that help protect children in troubled homes from abuse and neglect. That split has been written into law for more than 15 years.
Now, for New York City and only New York City, Cuomo would impose a hard cap — forcing city taxpayers to foot the entire bill for every penny spent over $320 million, which could add up to $129 million in the coming budget year. Seriously? The maneuver is especially nasty because it risks hitting the city’s Administration for Children’s Services just as it’s beefing up child welfare prevention work and investigations following a wave of terrible abuse deaths, in partnership with a state-appointed monitor.
In other words, the city is doing exactly what the state rightly wanted.
Double-whammy to ACS: Cuomo is calling for the state to bail out entirely from Close to Home, a juvenile-justice success story that since 2012 has let hundreds of detained youth stay in New York City, in touch with family, improving their schooling and ready to get their lives back on track.
Cuomo enthusiastically teamed up with former Mayor Mike Bloomberg to create Close to Home to get 12-to-17-year-olds out of the state’s own juvenile justice hellholes — and the state funded the program every year until now. What could the governor possibly be thinking? Well that’s no secret. Whether the subject is NYCHA or the MTA or CUNY, Cuomo sees de Blasio as too stingy with city funds and too profligate with scarce state dollars.
On this we agree: Cuomo has shown discipline de Blasio desperately lacks in putting government finances on a healthy diet, and he’s trying to balance a budget in Albany that’s out of whack. But boy, did Cuomo pick the wrong agency to mess with at the wrong time to make his point.
One year into the job, ACS Commissioner David Hansell has made impressive strides in repairing a broken child welfare system — progress confirmed by the monitor hired last year on the orders of Cuomo’s children’s services commissioner.
Hansell has done it while driving the number of kids sent to foster care to their lowest in memory — by turning to the preventive family services, such as counseling and drug treatment, that Cuomo just got stingy about. Meantime, were Hansell to shut down Close to Home, it would again fall to the state to detain them.
Not only does the state Assembly’s budget plan recognize the two programs’ necessity; even the usually city-hostile state Senate “urges the Executive, in the strongest terms, to reconsider these misguided actions.”
Exactly.