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SC agency for people with disabilities may be restructured because of frustrations

State - 3/16/2023

In an effort to address what critics call a years-long mismanagement problem, lawmakers are looking to restructure the agency responsible for overseeing services for residents with disabilities and special needs.

A Senate panel on Wednesday voted to advance a bill that would reshape the Department of Disabilities and Special Needs by placing the agency in the governor’s cabinet and eliminating the current governing seven-member commission. The governor would appoint a director to run DDSN upon the advice and consent of the Senate.

“Keeping DDSN under the commission is failing the people who rely so heavily on this agency for their livelihood,” said Kimberly Tissot, president and CEO of Able South Carolina, a nonprofit disability-led organization that seeks to make the state a national model of equity and inclusion for all people with disabilities.

The agency currently is governed by a commission, which is appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the Senate. The commission hires the executive director.

“This commission is preventing the agency from thriving, and we are in crisis in South Carolina because the DDSN is not functioning adequately and even resulting in abuse, neglect and sometimes death,” Tissot said.

Several years ago, The Greenville News reported on numerous problems in the agency, including a waiting list for services totaling nearly 8,000, and increasing rates of allegations of abuse, exploitation and neglect.

In addition, some lawmakers say that the commission has routinely mismanaged DDSN and inappropriately meddled in the day-to-day operations of the agency.

Still, critics of the measure say eliminating the agency’s commission would greatly reduce oversight.

“There is really no oversight because one person would have complete authority over everything to do with the agency,” said Barry Malphrus, who has served as a member of the DDSN commission since 2020. “The governor doesn’t have a lot of time to oversee this person. So, to me, the point of the commission is oversight.”

Tissot said that the issue of oversight is exactly where the commission has fallen short.

“Providing oversight is really the issue that we’re seeing (at DDSN) because the staff are not able to really fix the issues that the consumers are experiencing.”

Management of the agency, which oversees the care of tens of thousands of South Carolinians with intellectual disabilities, autism, and brain or spinal injuries, has long been a political issue as governors have attempted to grapple with problems at DDSN.

Malphrus maintains that the commission has indeed improved services for people with disabilities, and has greatly improved the agency’s financial situation by increasing its general fund “from $159,000 to over $100 million.”

But state Sen. Michael Johnson, R-York, pushed back on that figure, causing Malphrus to appear uncertain as to exactly how the commission grew the DDSN general fund by that much.

“COVID was a big part of it,” Malphrus said. “But in years past there’s been a lot of waste and inefficiency at DDSN” that the commission recognized and corrected.

This isn’t the first time senators have tried to place the disability agency under the governor’s control. In 2017 legislators attempted to do the same but got hung up on details surrounding the relationship between the state and local disability boards, which contract with DDSN to provide services but are made up of local employees overseen by local boards.

The current proposal comes with amendments that are aimed at dealing with the local board issue, which would essentially terminate contractual agreements between DDSN and local boards, allowing the local boards to operate as true private nonprofits, apart from the DDSN name.

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