Remember - blog posts migrate downward, so the most recent post is at the top; the oldest at the bottom.

Friday, March 24, 2017

R.I.P. ACHA

For the last couple of weeks – since the ACHA was introduced in the House of Representatives – I've been working with an informal group whose goal is to try and identify and define the effects of the ACHA on Otsego county – its citizens, its healthcare systems, and the County budget itself.

It's been a moving target, as you probably know. The impacts, as the bill has gone through three major changes, have become more intense. The biggest impact would probably be the massive restructuring of Medicaid into a state block grant.

Otsego County – and most, if not all, counties in America – is statutorily required to provide a wide variety of services to its citizens. In return, the County is reimbursed – by an insanely complex, draconian set of shifting equations and timelines – with Medicaid dollars. This exchange is at the heart of a great deal of the work that is done at the County level, including and especially through the Department of Social Services, which the Committee I chair (Human Services) oversees.

I am extremely happy, for many reasons, that the ACHA was withdrawn today and, if we can believe the President, will not be re-introduced. It is a very big win – bigger than most of us understand – for Americans in all situations – pretty much anyone who pays taxes or interacts with the healthcare system in any way. It is also a win for me, because I will not have to try and summarize the impacts the AHCA will have on County functioning. The initial number – an $800,000 budget impact – was just the beginning.

The ACA - “Obamacare” - seems to work just fine. It needs some tweaks and adjustments, but the Congress did not see fit to address any of that. We will continue with a sound but not perfect health insurance system, and continue to muse over the reasons why we continue to be the world's only industrialized nation without a robust system that works for everyone.

Monday, March 13, 2017

Recycling

It's occurred to me recently that, to the outside world, the topics we engage with on the County Board might seem pretty humdrum and trivial. The fact that the change in the hiring approval process, noted below, was such a big deal, probably comes as a surprise. Another issue that many of you might not think about all that much, an issue we discuss every month at SWEC, is recycling.

The County is statutorily responsible for recycling – as far as I know, another unfunded mandate – but we've been doing it a long time and we can get pretty enthused, in our monthly discussions, about the variety of items that can be recycled and how we go about doing that. Here are just some examples:

MATTRESSES: As you can imagine, a discarded mattress (usually accompanied by its boxspring) can take up a lot of room in a landfill. Consider that Otsego County has two colleges, two hospitals, and a very robust tourist industry, we generate a lot of mattresses that need to be disposed of (and boxsprings too, of course).

Triad is a recycling and energy company in the western part of the state, and it recycles mattresses. What this means is that they employ people to manually deconstruct each mattress and boxspring, and separate all the component parts for re-use. Steel, polyurethane foam, wood and fabrics are processed for reuse. They've got a trailer at the Southern Transfer Station in Oneonta; we fill it up, and they take it away. We charge $25/mattress, and pretty much break even; no mattress goes to a landfill. Learn more at their website.

AG PLASTIC: You've seen those white plastic-wrapped haystacks, ranked by the dozens, on the edges of fields, and the long bays of plastic-covered silage in horizontal silos adjacent to larger working farms in our County. Tons and tons of that plastic is used each year, and it's all trash when the feed is unwrapped and fed to the cows. In conjunction with Jordan Clements and the Otsego County Soil & Water District, we hold two ag plastic recycling days a year. Farmers bring us the plastic, we use a dedicated baler designed for just that, load the bales on a tractor-trailer, and ship it out. The bales take a long, circuitous route halfway around the world, and return to us as plastic grocery bags (more of that below). For about 40,000 pounds of trucked-in bales, we get about enough money to pay for the trucking.

PLASTIC GROCERY BAGS: If you're keeping up with this kind of thing, you'll know that there are initiatives all over the country to get a grip on the plastic grocery bag problem. They're ubiquitous, getting into every conceivable wastestream and littering our landscape more and more every year (and threatening many kinds of wildlife in the bargain). Some municipalities have banned them outright; others have imposed a five-cent fee for each one you use. New York City is working on a fee; some Legislators in Albany are looking at a plan to provide a three-cent sales tax credit for each reusable bag a customer brings in and fills with groceries.

There is, however, a way for each of us to address this right now. State law requires that larger stores that use plastic grocery bags provide a place for customers to return them for recycling. As it turns out, these bag recycling bins accept most 'thin film' products, including bread bags, those bags you use for your veggies in the produce department, drycleaning bags, ziploc bags, plastic cereal box liners, Tyvek, bubble wrap (you need to pop the bubbles – what a great excuse to have fun!) and most other thin-film plastic product wrap. There are bins in Oneonta in Hannaford, Price Chopper, Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowe's, for a start. So – something we can all do about all this plastic.

OCCA's EARTH FESTIVAL: April 22, at Milford Central School. I have to admit that the first time I went, when I first joined the Board, it was because I kind of thought I should. What a great day it turned out to be! I spent hours learning and talking and listening and looking at fascinating presentations. I also got rid of all the styrofoam I had been hoarding in the hope of finding someplace to recycle it.

So don't miss it. I hope to see you there, right after I drop off all the styrofoam (actually, expanded polystyrene) I've been collecting since the last one. Learn a whole lot more.

OK, I'm Back

And all of a sudden, it seems, there's a lot going on in County politics.

To start with, after years of being on four Committees and a Board, this year I'm on seven. And a Board. Here they are:
  • Human Services (chair)
  • Health and Education
  • Solid Waste and Environmental Concerns (SWEC)
  • Performance Review and Goal Setting (PRGS)
  • Administration
  • Strategic Plan Implementation
  • Budget
  • Community Services Board
I certainly can't complain about the added workload, because I've wanted to be on Admin and Budget for years – they are where the sausage is made, the sausage in this case being policy, procedure, permission and, of course, the budget.

With the invaluable help of County Attorney Ellen Coccoma and Commissioner of Social Services Eve Bouboulis, I've already been able to get Admin to end a hiring freeze, and allow Department Heads to fill vacant and funded and budgeted in about half the time it has taken in the past. The freeze was enacted in October of 2015 when there was some threat, real or imagined, regarding the ability of the County to pay its bills until the end of the year. As often happens when 14 laymen run a county with no CEO, the freeze process – all hiring requires parent committee, Admin and full Board approval – became the status quo. It could take two months before a Department Head could even begin the hiring process. Now all that is needed is parent committee approval (with signoff from the Treasurer and Personnel Director). This makes a world of difference to large departments with expensive turnover issues, like the Social Services.

Another pretty big deal is the County Strategic Plan, which has taken forever for our consultants to complete, and seems to me to be a little thrown-together and copy-pasted. Then it took forever to create and empower an implementation committee. But that's been done, and I'm on it. Looking forward to that.

More to come soon.