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Questions pursue mental health region decisions

Webster County will stick with CSS this year

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
Webster County Supervisor Mark Campbell, from left, former Supervisor Clark Fletcher, Bob Lincoln, County Social Services chief executive officer, and Supervisor Merrill Leffler talk mental health treatment regions after the board of supervisors meeting Tuesday morning. The supervisors took no action on a proposal to leave the CSS region by July 2019.

Will Webster County seek to join a new mental health region this year after all, after previous discussions implied it would take a full year to research options?

The answer is no, following a decision from the Webster County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday.

But the question resulted in an unusually full board room as about 30 people, including service providers, packed in to have their say at a roughly 90-minute meeting.

Alison Hauser, Western Quadrant supervisor for County Social Services, said she felt at times like she had to fight to defend herself instead of working for patients.

Some supervisors, meanwhile, said they had been unable to get numbers or information about what CSS was doing for months now.

Providers who spoke voiced concerns that services would be cut if the county switched to another region.

Related: Professionals worry services, staff could be cut if region changes

County Social Services is the name of the 22-county region which includes Webster. Mental health treatment regions were created in 2012 in a statewide redesign so each county wasn’t handling its own mental health treatment.

The supervisors Tuesday considered whether or not to send a letter to CSS announcing Webster County intended to leave the region by July 2019.

“I don’t understand what the motivation behind this is, and why we aren’t waiting until next year like I requested so we have time to look into it,” said Supervisor Bob Thode, who represents Webster County at CSS board meetings. “On the 25th of September, I requested a letter be signed to Cerro Gordo County to request they would hold off so we have an opportunity to look at the other regions, because we wouldn’t have time before the November deadline.

“Now all of a sudden we’re two days from the deadline and this shows up on the agenda,” he said.

Cerro Gordo County, Winnebago, Worth and Hancock Counties (WHW), and Kossuth County all made plans to join other regions. But because regions have to be contiguous, this would have cut off Webster County from CSS and required it to join a new region.

The supervisors did send that letter on Sept. 25, and later Cerro Gordo did withdraw its application to join a new region.

Kossuth is unable to join a new region at the moment, pending the resolution of a payment disagreement, Hauser said.

Changing regions isn’t easy to do, Hauser said. The region is created by 28E agreement, which is a contract between all counties, so adding a county to a region requires new contracts signed by all the counties. Before that, there are meetings with executive committees and administrative committees.

Different regions do not provide the same services, Thode and Hauser said, and could require Webster County to cut mental health staff.

“I’m concerned that this has been extremely disruptive to the employees of CSS in our region, and in our quadrant,” Thode said. “We had problems, it was it last year, when we ended up laying a lot of people off because we lost case management through the insurance companies. We’ve had a lot of disruption from WHW, who hasn’t made up their mind; they want to go but yet they can’t go.

“As you can tell, they’re sitting here very concerned about where their jobs are,” he said.

Supervisors Mark Campbell and Merrill Leffler said it’s been hard to get meaningful information.

“That’s the problem, from my standpoint. You have four members on here who are so in the dark on what’s even going on here,” Leffler said. “We’ve asked and asked and asked the questions.”

It’s Hauser’s job to keep the board informed, Campbell said.

“Besides the last three or four weeks of having (CSS Chief Executive Officer Bob Lincoln) come, we haven’t known anything,” Campbell said. “It’s communication, transparency, so we can see what’s going on. You have a lot of successes that we can’t share. … We should be your biggest supporters.

“If we don’t see it and we don’t hear about it, and then people ask us, we have to say we don’t know. It makes the whole operation look bad. There’s got to be a better method of communication between us.”

By the end of the meeting, Supervisor Keith Dencklau said, “I think this is a great conversation. I would have liked to had this three weeks ago or four weeks ago. We were coming up on a date here, and we asked for things and we got put off.”

Thode disagreed.

“Mr Lincoln was here one day, and no questions came off this,” Thode said. “We had to bring him back a second time so we could get more questions. They’ve both been here. If you had questions, that would be the time to ask them, instead of what we’re doing today.”

Thode pointed out Brittany Baker, service broker for CSS, who he said has been in meetings for weeks now and could have answered questions.

“My gut instinct has been we may be moving a little fast,” said Supervisor Nick Carlson. “If we withdraw from the 28E agreement it doesn’t sound like it will be a fast process anyway.”

Leffler said other counties leaving the region threw up red flags.

“Why are they leaving? We weren’t getting any answers as to what we should be looking at,” he said.

“It has more to do with a personality issue, probably more than what we are doing,” Hauser said. “When WHW was asked why they were leaving, it wasn’t because of CSS — they knew they were leaving the best service provider in the state. It was because they didn’t get along with Mr. Lincoln.”

In a Sept. 24 letter, Hancock County supervisors named transparency, accountability, staffing and funding as the four reasons they were withdrawing.

Cerro Gordo County Supervisor Chris Watts said in September that “we have lost faith, basically in our leadership in the group.”

When the time came to vote Tuesday on whether to send a letter withdrawing from the region, none of the supervisors would make the motion, so the action was not taken.

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