Board waiting on other counties before moving ahead on 12-county merger

Published 8:43 am Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The Mower County Board of Commissioners needs to know how many counties will participate in the 12-county human services merger and redesign before deciding whether to proceed with the plan.

The board heard from Mark Howard of Accenture Consultants at its meeting Tuesday on the Southeast Minnesota Redesign Project, specifically on how each county could have a say and what steps the board needs to take to become part of the merger.

Mower County officials said the county was projected to save about $1.5 million in human service costs in an initial study commissioned by the project. Overall savings from that study would come from reducing the 940 employees currently employed in the region to 705. The study claimed the 705 employees could be just as effective. The report said that savings could possibly come from reduced staff — by attrition or job cuts — and from technological advances such as telecommuting and online paperwork filing, which would eliminate some job duties in each county.

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Whether Mower County may lose human services jobs remains to be seen, as counties have until the end of June to decide whether to tentatively be part of the project.

County commissioners said during the meeting that having a service center and keeping human services jobs in Mower County would be a priority should Mower be part of the redesign.

“We don’t want to lose any jobs in the county,” Commissioner Ray Tucker said.

While the process — which would include a governing board with seven elected members and an executive board in which each county is represented with weighted votes according to cost burden — has yet to be enacted, commissioners and county employees had questions about what the redesign could mean for Mower County.

“We’ve come so far with the redesign project, we don’t want to turn back,” Commissioner Jerry Reinartz said.

Commissioners hope Mower County would have its own service center, meaning a human services hub for residents to take their concerns. Howard said a study of each county’s human service needs, which would include more information should commissioners ask for it, would determine where human service centers would be located. However, he said “the probability of a county without a service center is very low.”

County employees were concerned about whether a service center would be in Mower County, as well as what the redesign efforts would mean for Mower since the county’s health and human services departments combined last winter.

Howard, Human Services Director Julie Stevermer and County Coordinator Craig Oscarson said many of those questions would be answered once each county — Mower, Steele, Dodge, Rice, Fillmore, Houston, Olmsted, Winona, Wabasha, Goodhue, Freeborn, and Waseca — decides whether to proceed with the redesign.

“We don’t know how many counties are going to commit,” Stevermer said.

Oscarson said each county’s commissioners would examine the issue in coming weeks, first deciding whether to tentatively join the agreement, join the agreement on certain conditions, or withdraw from the redesign. Counties will then decide to what extent they’ll help fund studying, planning and implementing a redesign, and then finally commit to the plan.

At least one county has already signaled it will not be part of the merger. Freeborn County commissioners are expected to vote to withdraw from the project in the next several weeks, most likely before the project’s county administrators have a formal resolution drawn up for consideration. Goodhue County’s Human Services Board recently voted 4-3 recommending that county’s board of commissioners to walk away from the project as well, according to Oscarson. Goodhue’s county board will have final say over the issue.

Yet some counties, like Dodge, are wholeheartedly accepting the merger without stipulation.

Talk of the redesign comes in response to a push from the state for counties to meet certain standards on human services and a growing need for costly human services that stems in part from the aging baby boomer population.

—Jason Schoonover contributed to this report.

Correction: This story was updated to include the correct title of County Coordinator Craig Oscarson.