Before the new fiscal year begins Tuesday, Gov. Martin O?Malley plans to ask the Board of Public Works today for more than $50 million in spending reductions ? less than two-tenths of 1 percent in a $31.2 billion budget.
“I don?t think there?s going to be anything dramatic,” said Warren Deschenaux, the legislature?s chief fiscal expert, who hadn?t seen the numbers.
“This is what we told them to do.”
The cuts to the fiscal 2009 budget were part of the deal struck when the legislature repealed the $200 million computer services tax and added a temporary new tax bracket for millionaires to raise another $100 million.
However, these reductions pale in comparison to the ongoing spending the board is being asked to approve, including $214 million for residential child care for 3,345 foster children, which is an average of $52,000 to $79,000 a year per child, depending on the setting.
In one long-running case, the state is proposing to spend $590,000 next year on one child.
He is a “severely disabled and thus medically fragile” 15-year-old Anne Arundel boy, according to the board agenda.
In 1995, a judge ordered the county Social Services Department to provide round-the-clock, private nursing services for the child while leaving him in a permanent foster care facility.
“Unfortunately, I?m not allowed to comment about any particular case,” said Anne Arundel County Social Services Director Marci Kennai.
“Whenever a child is in care, the court can order us to pay for services that are rare and unusual, and if that is so ordered, we put things in motion to comply with those court orders.”
Kennai and Elyn Jones, a spokesman for the state Department of Human Resources, said the residential care contracts for which the state pays an average of $79,000 per child per year cover a wide range of services for youngsters who are physically handicapped, developmentally disabled or emotionally troubled.
“We try to keep them in family homes, rather than placing them in institutions,” Kennai said, but sometimes that is not possible.
“One of the things we are trying to do is step back from these kind of treatment facilities and step up” to more placements in private homes at a much lower cost, Jones said.
