By Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — The Kansas Legislature’s budget negotiators abandoned plans to provide enough state funding to remove 320 to 500 people with intellectual or developmental disabilities from waiting lists for services.
The six-person House-Senate conference committee of four Republicans and two Democrats began with the Senate’s plan to reduce the waiting list by creating 500 new slots to people eligible for IDD services. The House’s original position would have delivered 320 additional slots to shorten waiting lists of Kansans who qualified for services, but couldn’t get assistance due to insufficient state investment.
On Tuesday evening, however, the GOP-led budget negotiating committee decided to open up only 200 new slots and allocated $4.25 million in the budget to raising payments to organizations delivering services to people with disabilities.
The budget adjustment would benefit InterHab member organizations involved in IDD services, including Big Lakes Developmental Center in Manhattan, Developmental Services of Northwest Kansas in Hays, Envision in Wichita, Johnson County Developmental Supports, New Beginnings in Chanute or Sunflower Diversified Services in Great Bend.
The IDD provisions were included in a sweeping spending bill subject to an up-or-down vote in the House and Senate with no opportunity for lawmakers to propose amendments to the deal.
Rocky Nichols, executive director of the Disability Rights Center of Kansas, said the Legislature’s maneuver to significantly lower new investment in the IDD waiting list came as a surprise.
Addressing waiting lists in Kansas for services to people with disabilities has been an area of strong bipartisanship. In the current budget year, the Legislature reduced the IDD waiting list by expanding access to 500 more people. Nichols and other activists had urged the Legislature to repeat that action by adding another 500 service slots in next year’s budget.
“We are frankly shocked and dismayed that the budget agreement has fewer slots to reduce the IDD waitlist than either the House or Senate versions of the budget,” Nichols said. “Instead, the agreement inexplicably decided to take money previously earmarked to reduce the IDD waitlist and to divert that money to provide higher reimbursement rates for providers.”
During the past six years, Kansas providers of disability services received $234 million in IDD rate increases and $31 million in funding for specific initiatives to improve IDD services.
In that same period, the state appropriated a total of $41 million to create additional IDD slots and to reduce that waitlist.
“This 11th-hour change in the budget both looks bad and is bad,” Nichols said. “It looks bad because the net effect is that providers will enrich their rates at the expense of Kansans on the waitlist. It is bad because people on waitlists will suffer, families will be forced into crisis, and lives will be lost, all simply to increase provider rates.”
The 2024 Legislature provided funding for 500 slots to shrink the IDD waiting list to no greater than 4,800 people. Under the pending 2025 budget bill, the waitlist could be reduced by 200 slots rather than 320 as envisioned by the House or 500 as proposed by the Senate.
House Speaker Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, in February praised members of the House Social Services Budget Committee for considering a plan to add 500 new IDD slots for the second consecutive year.
“This committee and the Legislature as a whole are hard at work for our Kansas IDD community,” Hawkins said in a social media post. “This continues our path to lower the waitlist.”
Sara Hart Weir, executive director of the Kansas Council on Developmental Disabilities, said the last-minute budget adjustment would delay completion of a proposed five-year strategy to eliminate the IDD waitlist in Kansas.
She said the Legislature, state agencies, disability organizations and providers should work toward this common goal.
“It’s disappointing that we are pinning Kansans with disabilities against rates for providers,” Hart Weir said. “We should be working together to increase funding for all aspects of the disability system.”
