AUGUSTA — Establishing a fair rate for the amount a homeless shelter can charge and who should pay it were among the ideas discussed by a group tasked with finding $500,000 in savings in the Maine Department of Health and Human Service’s General Assistance program.
The panel was appointed by the Maine Legislature as a result of legislation passed earlier this year. A sub group on Tuesday reviewed a list of findings and recommendations dealing with the homeless and homeless shelters.
General Assistance, a program aimed at providing limited help to those in financial crisis, is run by local cities and towns and funded by state and local resources.
The nine-member panel has been meeting since June and is honing its recommendations, which will eventually go before the Legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee.
The amount the state has spent on the program grew from $7.8 million in 2003 to $14.2 million in 2012.
General Assistance became an issue during the state’s budget process in 2012 when Gov. Paul LePage line-item-vetoed about $5 million from the state’s portion of that budget.
The cut would have cost Lewiston about $1.6 million in state revenue but the money was later restored in a supplemental budget that reduced the amount the state spends on MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program.
Maine’s largest cities, including Portland, Lewiston and Bangor, may have the most at stake under any changes to General Assistance laws. Those cities receive the most in state funding for their programs and provide the largest number of services to impoverished individuals.
LePage wanted stricter controls on GA spending and more efficient use of the money. Lawmakers passed a law creating the working group that’s tasked with “examining the current structure and recommending methods and standards to improve accountability, cost- effectiveness and uniformity.”
The panel includes representation from Maine’s cities and towns, advocates for the impoverished, DHHS officials and a representative from the Maine State Housing Authority.
Lewiston Director of Social Services Susan Charron, who serves on the panel, said during a meeting in August that most seeking help through the General Assistance program are truly needy and vulnerable, but there is a small segment of the population that has created “a lifestyle” on the program.
Charron also shared with the panel examples of how GA rules between the state and federal government often leave a city no option but to provide General Assistance.
In August, she spoke of cases in which felons who fled other states were eligible for General Assistance, especially if their home states were unwilling to extradite them.
She also spoke of how people who become ineligible for other forms of state benefits, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, because of fraud or overpayments can still be eligible for General Assistance.
Lewiston Mayor Robert Macdonald has been an outspoken critic of abuses of the GA program and has taken to detailing the amount the city spends on a weekly basis. In a weekly column in a community newspaper, Macdonald has been detailing each week how many people no longer eligible for TANF are signing up for General Assistance.
The panel on Tuesday discussed how some towns pick up greater costs for homelessness than others. Cities use General Assistance funding to pay for those staying in homeless shelters.
Suggested law changes included requiring the city or town in which a homeless person had previously lived to pick up shelter costs, provided the individual intended to return to that town.
Panel member Shawn Yardley, director of health and community services for the city of Bangor, said he had seen cases in which a person came to Bangor for a single night and the town they came from expected Bangor to pay for their costs or that town would haggle over a $4 prescription for a homeless person who was staying in Bangor to be close to medical treatment.
Discussion included the fairness of that change and whether the state should set a flat reimbursement rate for a night’s stay in a homeless shelter. Other panelists suggested that while the state has a responsibility to help the homeless, General Assistance may not be the best model.
The panel, which has three sub groups, has until Dec. 1 to present its findings and recommendations to the Legislature.
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