The Effects of Ecomonic and Demographic...

Building Strong Communities: Crafting a Legislative Foundation

The Finance Project

December 1996

Preface/Introduction

Preface

Public financing for education and an array of other children's services has become a topic of significant interest and political concern. Growing skepticism among a critical mass of American voters and taxpayers has fueled doubts about the ability of government to solve social problems and provide basic supports and services that enhance the quality of life in their communities. Many believe government is too big; it's too expensive; and it doesn't work very well. Despite steadily increasing public expenditures for health, education, welfare, human services, and public safety over the past two decades, seemingly intractable problems persist. Nearly a quarter of U.S. children are poor and live in families and communities that are unable to meet their basic needs. Schools have become increasingly expensive. But student achievement hasn't matched the rising costs, and drop-out rates remain unacceptably high. Health care costs continue to go up. Yet, many Americans can't get the services they need, and with each passing year their health care dollars buy less. Criminal justice demands a dramatically increasing share of public dollars—for police officers and judges and jails—but neighborhood streets aren't safer.

Voters have spoken clearly. They want more for their money. They have called for more and better services and a sharper focus on economic development and job creation, but they also have demanded balanced budgets and cuts in income and property taxes. In this time of big public deficits, they want government at all levels to operate more effectively and efficiently. They also want it to invest wisely and live within its means.

Across the country, there is mounting evidence of efforts to reform and restructure education, health care, and other community supports and services in order to improve the lives and future prospects of children and their families. Among the most promising of these are comprehensive, community initiatives that have fundamentally reoriented supports and services by creating infrastructures that link resources from many parts of the community. Though widely varied in their form and content, these initiatives are based on several basic premises: 1) that children and families have multiple needs that are best met in a comprehensive, coordinated manner; 2) that family and neighborhood influences shape individual outcomes; and 3) that responsibility for the design and operation of public programs and services should reside at the neighborhood or community level.

Comprehensive, community support systems have generated significant interest among policy makers, politicians, and public and private sector funders in recent years. Whether or not this interest will be sustained and whether successful initiatives will become models for more ambitious systemic reform depends to a large extent on their costs and benefits relative to more traditional categorical approaches to service delivery and community revitalization. It will also depend on the ability of state and local leaders to create the governance structures and marshal public funding to support activities that do not fit the narrow definitions and criteria of established categorical funding streams.

In the wake of federal welfare reform, these questions take on special importance. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 will consolidate numerous categorical public welfare programs and provide aid to states in the form of block grants. States will have much greater discretion to decide how services will be configured and how federal aid will be spent. Beyond funding programs to assist poor children and families, they are expected to place much more attention on workforce development and the creation of new jobs. In this context, many states will see welfare reform and the new flexibility it offers as an opportunity to advance their efforts to create more comprehensive, community support systems.

Critical to the success of these reform efforts, however, is state legislative action to present a vision of how current support systems will change and to establish the necessary governance structures and financing mechanisms that will make it happen. This toolkit is intended to assist state and local leaders who are writing bills and formulating legislative strategies to create state/community partnerships that will facilitate the development of comprehensive, community support systems.

The legislative toolkit is a product of The Finance Project's Working Group on Financing Comprehensive, Community-based Support Systems, under the leadership of Judy Chynoweth. Over the past two years, this interdisciplinary development and design team has conducted an ambitious agenda of policy research and development activities to increase knowledge and produce policy tools to strengthen the capability of state and local governments to improve outcomes for children, families, and communities through more coordinated and collaborative services. Its analysis of the barriers to financing comprehensive, community support systems highlighted the extent to which statutory restrictions frequently overwhelm efforts to link schools, health care, and other social services, as well as the informal helping networks that are so important in the daily lives of children and families. While new state legislation to create state/community partnerships will not ensure the creation of effective community support systems, it can establish the necessary statutory foundation and climate conducive to reform.

This toolkit is the product of many people's contributions. Special thanks are due to all the members of the Working Group on Financing Comprehensive, Community-based Support Systems for their help in conceptualizing the project, giving it direction, and reviewing successive drafts of the sample legislation and the tailoring guide. Thanks are also due to all those who played a role in drafting the sections of the toolkit. Lynn R. DeLapp, a child and family policy consultant, took the lead in drafting the sample legislation and the tailoring guide. Thomas Woods, a graduate student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, prepared a detailed review of existing federal and state legislation. A summary of findings from that study are included in the toolkit; the complete paper, including abstracts of more than 30 federal and state statutes, was produced as a part of The Finance Project's Working Papers Series. Cheryl D. Hayes, The Finance Project's Executive Director, prepared the introduction. Anna E. Danegger, Research Associate, prepared the annotated list of resources and managed the production of the entire toolkit. A preliminary draft of the sample legislation was shared widely with federal and state leaders, program developers, front-line service providers, educators, and children's advocates. We are enormously grateful to all these individuals for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. Their help was invaluable in crafting a final product that we hope will make the task of many state and local leaders across the country a bit easier.

Introduction

Across the country, state and local leaders are under growing pressure to improve their education, health care, and human services systems, and to make communities safer, better places for families to live and raise their children. In response, a number of states have initiated dramatic changes in the way supports and services are provided, and in the way they are financed. The hallmark of these reforms has been a shift toward greater local involvement in the design and delivery of services and greater local accountability for achieving improved results for children, families, and their communities.

In August 1996, Congress passed and the President signed legislation to overhaul the nation's welfare system. Experts and advocates will continue to debate the effects of the new law on poor children and their families. But few would disagree that it holds the potential to shake up a deeply entrenched and highly categorical system of public funding and service delivery. Welfare reform will also accelerate the shift in decision making authority to lower levels of government. The creation of block grants gives states a much larger role in the design and operation of programs to meet the needs of their low-income families. [Cheryl D. Hayes, Rethinking Block Grants: Toward Improved Intergovernmental Financing for Education and Other Children's Services (Washington, DC: The Finance Project, April 1995).] In turn, many states are devolving more authority to counties and cities. The big question is whether the new law and the reductions in federal aid that are expected to accompany it will strengthen or overwhelm innovative efforts already underway in a number of states and communities to fundamentally reform their education, health care, and human services systems.

Community engagement is a strategy for improving supports and services; it is not an end in itself. Simply moving decisions downward is no guarantee that public investments will be more responsive to community needs and priorities. Creating community support systems that are comprehensive, family-centered, and that effectively draw on both informal helping networks and professionalized services requires better decisions, not just decisions that are made by different people. [Center for the Study of Social Policy, "A Legislative Strategy to Support Local Governance." Draft background paper for the Changing Governance Strategies for Action Working Group. September 1996.] The aim is to engage communities directly in planning and setting priorities, allocating resources, and maintaining accountability for achieving results. To do this, legislative action is needed to establish the statutory framework and climate for reform in which effective state/community partnerships can take shape and prosper.

Legislation needs to:

Articulate a new vision for comprehensive health and human services delivery;

Create new collaborative state and local governance structures (or vest new authority in existing ones);

Create a new flexible financing mechanism to provide start-up funds and, over time, to enable more decatigorized funding for community-based supports and services;

Present a new approach to accountability that requires states and local communities to focus on to achieving desired results for children, families, and communities.

Mandate a review of the adequacy of existing administrative and management systems and processes (e.g., management information, agency structure and personnel, training, procurement) and authorize investments in retooling.

A number of states have already enacted legislation as a foundation for creating and financing comprehensive, community support systems. In others, legislative and executive branch leaders are working on bills that will put into place the essential components of this kind of reform. Some have initiated dramatic approaches to systems change. Others have taken incremental steps, with a series of more modest legislative actions rather than one all-encompassing law. What is clear is that there is no single legislative formula or prescription that will fit the needs, priorities, and conditions of all states. Leaders in each jurisdiction will need to tailor statutes to take account of their own special circumstances.

Devolution: The Context for Reform

The shift toward a stronger local role in the design and delivery of supports and services for children and families is part of a larger movement to shift power and responsibility to lower levels of government. As several observers have noted, devolution in the domain of social welfare has several antecedents. [Ibid.; Cheryl D. Hayes, Rethinking Block GrantsOp. Cit.]

The first is widespread recognition that many U.S. children and families are faring poorly. They are growing up unhealthy, uneducated, and unprepared for the responsibilities of work, family, and citizenship. Their families lack the economic, social, and emotional resources to care for them. Their neighborhoods are unsafe and unwelcoming places. While these problems are most pronounced for children and families living in some of the nation's large urban centers, they are not confined to any single geographic location or type of community. Nor are they limited to any single racial, ethnic, or economic group. And despite steadily rising public expenditures for health, education, and human services, as well as recent improvements in the national economy, many of these problems have proved highly resistant to change.

Second, a significant portion of the American public does not believe that government policies, programs, and institutions to support and serve children and families work very well. Whether the focus is on schools, health care systems, child welfare, employment and training, housing and community development, or public safety, there is great skepticism about how much government can really do to solve persistent social problems.

Third, there is a pervasive belief that local leaders know best what is needed in their communities and could achieve better results if they had more control over programs and budgets. Highly categorical programs and funding streams do not accommodate the kinds of variation and customized approaches that local leaders often want. They are organized to provide standardized responses. They make it difficult to coordinate assistance to children and families whose needs do not easily fit narrowly-defined eligibility criteria. Moreover, they rarely build on the informal helping networks that are important resources in most communities.

Finally, state officials who are under pressure to solve complex social problems with fewer public dollars are looking for partners outside their own agencies and programs. More and more, they recognize that some goals, such as increasing family self-sufficiency, reducing teenage pregnancy, and enhancing school readiness cannot be achieved by the actions and investments of a single agency or program. They require mobilizing resources across several agencies and programs and linking them effectively. As a consequence, many state officials are more eager than they have traditionally been to collaborate with colleagues in other agencies and with leaders in local communities.

Taken together, these factors have contributed to a growing consensus: improving results for children, families, and communities requires engaging communities themselves much more directly in decisions about how public dollars are invested, who benefits, and how supports and services are organized and delivered. Linking multiple programs and services to help address children's and families' needs is most effectively done at the community level. Drawing upon the informal helping networks that exist among families, friends, and community groups is more easily accomplished in neighborhoods than in state agencies.

Yet, as several observers have noted, local decision making is only one key element of reform efforts aimed at creating more comprehensive, community support systems. Developing a stronger focus on achieving agreed-upon results is also important. So is establishing more flexible financing systems and strategies that link funding to results. Moreover, a commitment to improving the quality of services and ensuring that they are connected, individualized, and family-focused is essential to building more effective and efficient support systems. [Center for the Study of Social Policy, "A Legislative Strategy" Op. Cit., Mark Friedman, A Strategy Map for Results-based Budgeting: Moving from Theory to Practice (Washington, DC: The Finance Project, September 1996).]

Perhaps the greatest challenge for reform-minded leaders, however, is redefining the roles and responsibilities of state and local governments in providing and paying for services. Education has a long history of local governance and financing. In contrast, health care and human services have traditionally been dominated by federal- and state-funded and directed programs. Efforts to effectively link schools, health care providers, child protection, and family support services, as well as informal helping networks, will require sorting out these complicated intergovernmental jurisdictions and developing more collaborative approaches to community engagement and oversight. As the Center for the Study of Social Policy noted:

"While this complicates the task of local governance, it is central to its promise of success. If the process of establishing local governance can increase agreement among state and local governments on the results they want for families and children, and on their respective responsibilities for achieving results, it will have accomplished a lot." [Center for the Study of Social Policy, "A Legislative Strategy" Op. Cit., p. 6.]

Why States Need New Legislation

Whether or not they have begun to shape a reform agenda, most states will need new authorizing legislation to enable them to spend federal funds they receive through the welfare block grants. [Council of Governors' Policy Advisors, "Preparing for Block Grants and State Autonomy on Social Welfare Programs: A Survey of How the States are Planning for the Devolution Revolution" in The States Forge Ahead Despite the Federal Impasse (Washington, DC: Council of Governors' Policy Advisors, February 1996).] In contrast to traditional categorical program grants, block grants consolidate a number of categorical funding streams and provide aid in the form of lump sum payments with many fewer conditions on how funds are used. [Cheryl D. Hayes, Rethinking Block Grants Op. Cit.] As a consequence, states will need new statutes to delineate how federal funds will be allocated among agencies and programs and who will have the authority to decide.

Some state leaders will undoubtedly conclude that the best course of action is to continue to serve low-income children and families as they currently do—albeit less well with less money when there is an economic downturn and poverty increases. For states that have set a reform agenda, however, welfare reform may present an opportunity to expedite changes that the governor, his or her cabinet, and the state legislature are already pursuing. For other states, it may create an impetus to reexamine the effectiveness of current systems, initiate reforms that redefine state agency roles and responsibilities, and build more effective state/community partnerships.

Formulating an agenda for change is challenging. But making it happen is even more difficult. Deeply entrenched bureaucracies, rigidly categorical programs and funding streams, budgets that are based more on traditional funding patterns and political negotiations than on needs and effectiveness, and parochial, turf-conscious service professions all present impediments to reform. [Martin E. Orland and Ellen Foley, Beyond Decategorization: Defining Barriers and Potential Solutions to Creating Effective Comprehensive, Community-based Support Systems for Children and Families (Washington, DC: The Finance Project, April 1996).] Overcoming these barriers depends to a large extent on the ingenuity and hard work of committed policy makers, program developers, educators, service providers, and community leaders, as well as parents. In most cases, it also requires legislation that articulates the vision for a new community-based system, establishes new governance structures, creates a flexible financing mechanism, and authorizes investments in building the administrative and management capacity at the state and local level to make the new state/community partnerships work.

Across the country, there are a multitude of exciting community initiatives underway. [Cheryl D. Hayes, Elise Lipoff, and Anna E. Danegger, Compendium of Comprehensive, Community-based Initiatives: A Look at Costs, Benefits, and Financing Strategies (Washington, DC: The Finance Project, July 1995).] They represent creative efforts to address citizen needs, capitalize on community assets and resources, break down categorical barriers, and focus attention on the whole child, the whole family, and the whole community. Most thriving comprehensive, community initiatives can trace their success in large part to the heroic efforts of a visionary leader and at least one high-level government protector, who has helped them negotiate the shoals of rigid government bureaucracies and narrow categorical funding streams. All too often, however, local initiatives that are begun with great enthusiasm, founder when their own charismatic leaders are gone, their champions in the state legislature or the governor's staff move on, and the structural hurdles become just too much to overcome. [Martin E. Orland and Ellen Foley, Beyond Decategorization Op. Cit.]

Depending on the particular history and circumstances of the state, legislation can foster reforms in several ways. In some states, it presents a way of institutionalizing new ways of doing business that have developed quietly over several years, through the creative efforts of policy makers and local program developers. In others, it can add momentum to a process of change that has begun and is building steam. In still others, it can be the clarion call around which consensus about the need for change and the directions for reform can be formed. As the Center for the Study of Social Policy suggests, "In order for the �new way of doing business' to become �the way of doing business,' it must be backed by a clear public mandate and by the authority that comes with such a mandate." [Center for the Study of Social Policy, "A Legislative Strategy" Op. Cit., p. 6]

Developing a Legislative Strategy

There is no set formula for writing a bill or developing a legislative strategy to support the creation of comprehensive, community support systems. The statutory language and approach will vary depending on a state's political traditions, legislative history, constitutional constraints, and professional service culture. Nevertheless, there are several general principles that should guide state and local leaders who are engaged in the process of crafting and enacting legislation for this purpose. [The Center for the Study of Social Policy provides a good discussion of these principles, "A Legislative Strategy" Op. Cit.]

First, although leaders in some states may follow Nebraska's example and enact a single piece of legislation that mandates very wide-ranging systems reform, experience suggests that most take a more incremental approach to change. The elements of a new system are put in place over time in a series of statutes and amendments to existing health, education, and human service authorizations.

Second, legislation to create effective state/community partnerships presents the broad dimesnions of of a new system. It does not prescribe exactly how the law will operate in each community. Legislation to create new categorical service programs specifies in detail the rules and regulations governing the programs. Yet statutes to establish a legislative foundation for new community-based supports and services should create the necessary governance structures and financing authority, leaving it to local leaders to determine how the decision making process will work and how supports and services will be configured.

Third, legislation to create state/community partnerships usually affects the operations of a number of state and local agencies and service programs, and it crosses the jurisdictions of several legislative committees. To proceed smoothly, it must attract champions in several places—including both the state executive branch and the legislature.

Finally, unlike legislation to create a new categorical program, legislation to establish a statutory foundation for state/community partnerships is likely to evolve over time as a new system takes shape and as the distribution of program responsibilities, planning and budgeting authority, and accountability for achieving results is adjusted and readjusted. As the Center for the Study of Social Policy has noted, states might first write legislation to encourage innovation and authorize local pilot initiatives. As these new models of decision making and financing are refined, second generation legislation could authorize their expansion throughout the state. [Ibid.] Demonstrating how systemic change works in a few communities can encourage more significant departures from traditional practice and provide a boost to taking model initiatives to scale.

In sum, legislation is intended to launch the change process and create the conditions to support reform without prescribing precisely how it will work in every community.

The Sample Legislation Toolkit

This toolkit is intended to assist state and local leaders who are engaged in crafting legislation to facilitate the creation of comprehensive, community support systems. It is also a useful tool for those who are trying to decide whether legislative action is needed to advance their efforts to improve supports and services for children and families in their communities. It presents sample state legislation and a guide for tailoring bills to fit states' particular needs and conditions. It also provides a review of other existing state legislative initiatives and a list of other relevant resources.

Sample legislation. The sample legislation offers a vision, written in statutory language, of a new way of supporting the needs of children and families. In a composite bill, it presents a framework for reform and the several legislative components that are needed to create state/community partnerships. It is not intended as a prescription or a "standardized" approach to building community support systems. Instead, it offers a menu of essential elements that may be enacted in this form or some variation, singly or as a package. We expect that as policy makers proceed, they will see the sample legislation as a place to begin, and will adapt it to reflect their states' own circumstances and preferences.

Tailoring guide. The tailoring guide, which accompanies the model legislation, is intended to assist state and local leaders in adapting the components of the sample legislation. It is organized so that each section of the guide cross-walks to the sections of the sample bill. It highlights issues that are raised in the legislative language and, in many cases, offers alternatives to suit the conditions of states with different political cultures, legislative histories, and constitutional constraints. Throughout the guide are examples of how these issues have been addressed in practice.

Legislative review. The review of legislative examples examines a number of existing pieces of federal and state legislation that are aimed at accomplishing all or part of what is presented in the sample legislation. It provides useful background for state and local leaders who want to take account of the legislative experiences of other states and the Congress as they have tackled this task.

Additional resources. This list provides an annotated bibliography of other sources of information and insight that may help state and local leaders as they set the directions for change in their own states and craft a legislative vehicle and strategy for accomplishing them.

Conclusion

The approach to providing and financing supports for children and families envisioned in this sample legislation is very different than the traditional top-down categorical system that has been in place for several decades. It is premised on a belief that over the long-run, fragmented, standardized services administered by state agencies will not solve many of the complex problems that threaten children, families, and the communities in which they live. What is needed is much greater community involvement in the design and delivery of services and in decisions about how limited public resources will be allocated. States and communities must be partners. Support systems must be comprehensive, community-based, family-centered, and they must link both the formal services and informal helping networks that are so important in the daily lives of children and families. Across the country, there are plenty of promising models that embody these characteristics. But without fundamental changes in the governance, financing, and administrative systems that underlie public programs, these initiatives will never be more than promising models.

Achieving better results for children, families, and communities ultimately requires doing business differently. Enacting state legislation that creates the foundation on which this change can take shape and flourish is one critical step in that direction.