Funding for kids at center of standoff

Advocate wants vote now; Jacobs disagrees

Leaders of a campaign to beef up services for homeless, poor, abused and at-risk kids in Orange County are pushing to take their case to voters. But first they have to overcome an increasingly testy confrontation between grownups.

Dick Batchelor, chairman of recently launched Children’s Trust of Orange County and a Democrat, has accused Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs, a Republican, of trying to thwart a County Commission vote on the matter. Jacobs says Batchelor is impugning her character and that of her staff with “absolutely untrue” accusations that “appear to be politically motivated.”

Campaign supporters want a half-mill property-tax increase — $50 for every $100,000 in taxable property value, or $8 to $9 a month for the average homeowner — to raise $58 million a year for children’s programs. The Orange County Commission has to approve the initiative before it can be put on the ballot.

The confrontation has escalated ahead of two public airings of the issue. On Monday, the campaign released a study from University of Central Florida researchers showing long waiting lists for some children’s programs and the threat of worsening problems as the county’s population grows. Today, the County Commission will detail the money the county already spends on children’s issues.

“We don’t need anymore studies. We don’t need anymore task forces. We don’t need anymore assessments,” Batchelor said Monday. “We just need to go to the voters and say, ‘Here is the

state of children in Orange County. Would you like to change it?’ ”

Jacobs, who was not available for an interview Monday, said through an aide that the County Commission likely would not vote on whether to allow the issue to be placed on the ballot until “late summer, if at all” — which Batchelor said is too late to get the matter on the ballot this fall. In an interview in February, Jacobs said that she did not want to rush the issue onto the ballot and that she opposes on principle the creation of an independent agency to decide how tax money is spent.

Today’s discussion will be limited to a presentation by the county’s staff and, reportedly, to 35 people who have asked to speak on the subject.

Children’s trusts — sometimes called children’s councils — already exist in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Martin, Okeechobee and St. Lucie counties. Duval has a hybrid model that uses separate funding through the county but does not impose a separate tax. In Orange, the trust would be run by a group of appointees, including someone from the Orange County Commission and another from the county’s School Board.

Jacobs, who is term-limited as mayor, announced this month she is running to chair the Orange County School Board.

Batchelor’s group sent an email to supporters late last week saying, “It is … worth noting rather ironically that some members of the Orange County Commission are indeed running for elected offices in November, and as such, will ask the people of Orange County for their vote. And yet, these very same candidates for public office would not trust the people of Orange County to vote on such a critical matter as our children’s needs?”

Further, the email said, “… there are reports of Orange county staff reaching out to several non-profit organizations, many with smaller budgets and deeply dependent on county funding, suggesting that they not testify on behalf of the Children’s Trust at the April 24 workshop. They have encouraged these non-profits to appear and testify to all the good that the county is doing.”

In an email response, Jacob called on Batchelor to name names. “Words cannot express how personally disappointed I am in the tactics and dishonesty being employed in the name of helping children,” she wrote.

Batchelor repeated his claims Monday but said he could not identify the leaders in order to protect them from retribution.

“The data are here,” Batchelor said, referring to the UCF report. “We know in this community there are severely underfunded children’s needs. … We’re going to spend the money. But rather than spending it on the prevention side… you’re going to spend it on juvenile [justice], the judiciary and the criminal justice system. Is it fair to ask these children to wait?”

The report, prepared by researchers in UCF’s School of Public Administration, found 3,400 children on waiting lists for subsidized child care, 21,000 kids who lack health insurance and 10,000 childabuse and neglect investigations last year — the highest rate of any county in the state. The county also has one of the highest rates of family homelessness in the nation.

Lead author Thomas Bryer, a UCF professor and Fulbright Core Scholar, said some of the problems stretch back years.

Although his report was commissioned by the campaign, he said he was clear from the outset that he would not alter his findings and that he was not taking a position on whether the county needs a Children’s Trust to address the issue.

Several commissioners contacted declined to comment on the matter, but Commissioner Emily Bonilla said she had requested discussing the Children’s Fund issue at today’s meeting.

“That would have required open discussion,” Bonilla said. “I had also asked staff to do a presentation of all the services Orange County provides, so we’d have the information to decide if we wanted to put it on the ballot. But the mayor decided not to do [it] ... only to do the presentation. And according to the agenda, there’s not supposed to be any discussion [among commissioners].”

The Orange County Commission’s work session begins at 9 a.m. today at the county administration building.