Cut the wait

With approximately 200 people per year being added to the list of mentally retarded adults waiting for day and residential services in Maine, two legislative committees this session properly endorsed additional funding for these programs. The challenge now is twofold: Keep the added $5 million in the budget as it makes a final pass through the Appropriations Committee and, long term, establish a regular budget line for the services.

The day and residential waiting lists currently include about 400 names each, about where they were nearly three years ago when lawmakers approved $8.8 million to eliminate them. That money helped significantly, finding care and training facilities for hundreds of people. But with about 125 young mentally retarded adults leaving the school systems each year and in need of services and others who have been living at home seeking services, the total number has hardly diminished at all.

Without the added $5 million unanimously supported by Health and Human Services and Appropriations committees, the number on the lists will be near 1,000 by the next time the Legislature has an opportunity to consider the issue. The King administration says it is open to hear proposals but hasn’t taken a position on the $5 million, submitted as an amended version of LD 2536 by Rep. Randall Berry of Livermore. Gov. King should support the measure, both as a way to provide these important services to Maine’s mentally retarded and as a stop gap in the larger issue of the coordination of services under the Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services.

Under a consent decree, the department has a strict legal obligation to deliver services for people who lived at the former Pineland Center, a large institution for the mentally retarded in Pownal that was shut down in 1996. While that provides services to those people, it leaves fewer options for the department to help others. Particularly difficult is the transition from school to adult services. Clients stuck on waiting lists and spending their time doing limited activities at home risk losing the skills they have learned and the momentum toward the goal for many — independent living. Smoothing out that transition, adequately distributing services and, especially in this economy, raising wages for people who work with the mentally retarded remain important issues for the department.

Maine is not alone in having waiting lists; most or perhaps all states do. But by not establishing an ongoing funding plan for reducing these lists, Maine risks approaching this problem with an air of crisis. Lawmakers can take a longer view of the problem by, first, passing the $5 million request this year and urging the King administration to include the funding for this problem in its next budget.