County approves creation of panel to oversee HSC transition

On a 16-2 vote last Tuesday, the Oneida County Board of Supervisors voted to create a tri-county panel to oversee the transition of services now provided by the Human Services Center to another delivery structure.

The county’s partners in the Human Services Center (HSC), which provides behavioral and developmental health services, were expected to follow suit. Oneida, Vilas, and Forest counties are ending their contract with the HSC at the end of 2024 and are now studying options for how they will deliver those statutorily mandated services starting in 2025.

According to the resolution, the county board chairperson of each of the three counties will make appointments to the new panel. Oneida County will get four slots; Vilas County, two; and Forest, one. Those slots are based on the proportional amount of funding each county currently provides to the HSC.

While the resolution directs the respective chairpersons to find representatives who have knowledge of human services, law enforcement, finance, or human resources, it also prohibits the appointment of any current or former members of the HSC board. The alleged dysfunction of, and lack of cooperation offered by, that board is one reason the counties are moving to end their relationship with the HSC.

Among other things, the newly created oversight panel will compile an inventory of the HSC staff, assets, liabilities, contracts, and obligations. It will also require that any new contracts be approved by the oversight panel.

The resolution also takes steps to, in the resolution’s words, ensure that “the interests and assets of the Tri-County Human Services Board are preserved for the counties.” 

To that end, the resolution directs that the HSC board approve no expenditures or transfer of funds unless the expenditure is in furtherance of existing services and programs. It also directs the HSC board to apply for any and all grants available to it and to receive approval from the oversight panel prior to not submitting an application for an available grant.

In addition, it directs the HSC board to continue the recruitment and hiring of direct service staff or staff that administer programs that are included in the 2023 HSC budget. The resolution alleges in its preamble that the HSC board “has initiated a hiring freeze, even when such staff is a grant-funded position.”

This week HSC subcommittees approved a recommendation to the full HSC board to adopt retention and severance packages for staff, but the county resolution requires that any such packages be approved by the three counties prior to being implemented.

The resolution also incorporated a county oversight panel procedure to guide its functioning. That procedure directs the county chairpersons to make their appointments to the panel within 15 working days of publishing the enacted resolution. It also requires panel members to be active employees or elected officials of the participating governments.

While the resolution directs the HSC to undertake certain activities such as applying for grant funding and to gain approval for new contracts, the procedural attachment deems the panel to be advisory in nature without any authority to encumber funds of any of the related counties or of the HSC.

The panel does have the authority to compel any member of the HSC board or legal advisors or HSC consultants to attend panel meetings and provide necessary reports and communications.

According to the procedure, the essential function of the panel is to assess the HSC’s status in various areas, including the sufficiency of funds to meet binding obligations; the making and execution of contracts and leases and assessing how those will benefit the transition of services to a new structure; and ensuring sufficient staff levels to maintain service delivery. 

A board’s eye view

At last week’s county board meeting, Oneida County board chairman Scott Holewinski said he anticipated that Oneida County’s members of the oversight committee would include the county’s sheriff, social services director, and finance director. He said he had had discussion with sheriff Grady Hartman and social services director Mary Rideout and that all agreed “something had to be done at this point to oversee what’s going on.”

However, supervisor Tony Rio questioned why the resolution prohibited current or former members of the HSC board from serving on the oversight panel.

“We’re talking about bringing services on from the Human Services board, but we’re not seemingly including people who are pretty intimately aware with how that operates and how they work day to day,” Rio said. “I just want to make sure there’s not a loss of knowledge there by not having those individuals on that or eligible for that.”

Supervisor Linnaea Newman, who is a member of the HSC board, observed that the resolution refers to a hiring freeze at the HSC imposed by the board and she wanted to clarify that, in her view, that did not explain what was actually going on.

“It sounds like they’ve stopped hiring people,” Newman said. “What that means is, they’ve stopped hiring full-time people at full wages and benefits because there is no knowledge yet about what the new structure is going to be. So if you have a professional coming in to be a caseworker who’s expecting to know what kind of structure they’re being hired into, we don’t have that yet.”

The HSC has started hiring limited term employees (LTEs), Newman said, and she said that is how they intend to fill positions until it becomes clear what the new structure will be. Newman then lamented the whole process of separation, saying she had received a text from an HSC employee who was so uncertain about the future that the worker was clearing all the worker’s personal things out of the office.

“I can’t tell you how sad that makes me,” Newman said. “It’s all well and good that we create a new and better structure, but the way that it has happened, the employees and the management of the Human Services Center and the board are out of the loop. People are asking me and I can’t tell them what the structure’s going to be. They can’t hire people without a structure to explain to them what they’re being hired into. And so we’re doing stop gap methods as well as we possibly can.”

The HSC is down 10.5 positions, Newman said.

“So we’re down about 14 percent of the staff now and that’s not going to get better,” she said. “Until we have something concrete to tell them, it’s going to get worse and everybody, every one of the employees and everybody on the board, is terrified because we as much as all of you want to make sure that the clients are the ones taken care of.”

Newman said staff could not answer the clients’ questions about what it all means.

“We can tell them ‘yes, this is mandated, yes, there’s always going to be a service,’” she said. “We can’t tell them if they’re going to keep their caseworker. We don’t know if they are going to stay on or, as some of the employees who have left have said, it’s become a toxic situation.”

Nothing ending, Fugle says

Corporation counsel Mike Fugle said services were not ending and he pointed to a letter sent earlier this month by the counties to the HSC staff that underscored how the staff of the Human Services Center has a great relationship with their clients.

“The idea I think behind this resolution is to ensure that December 31st, 2024, is not an end,” Fugle said. “It is going to continue thereafter and I can’t say every person who works for the Human Services Center today is going to be employed in January 2025, but I’ll be surprised at those that aren’t because one of the things that I think brought this forward from the three counties, from the staff of the three counties bringing it to the chairs, was that the clients, the people weren’t getting what they needed from the current structure. And so that’s what created this impetus to look at the structure and make it better.”

The idea of the resolution is to ensure that there is a plan for January of 2025 and moving forward, Fugle said.

“So this is to make sure that the county staff are involved, understand and are able to ensure that it continues on,” he said. “And I’ll note that this doesn’t invest the panel with monetary oversight, that monetary decisions are left to the three county boards.”

Newman persisted in her criticism, saying she wasn’t concerned about the money.

“The money will be taken care of,” she said. “I’m concerned about the clients who don’t feel heard, who don’t feel answered and I feel my heart breaks for the staff who are getting up every day to do a difficult job, not knowing what the future structure of their organization is going to be and still doing it day after day after day.”

Holewinski asked social services director Mary Rideout to address the letter sent to HSC staff because he said it contradicted what Newman said about uncertainty about the future.

“We‘re not reducing staff, we're not reducing services,” he said. “This whole thing about, ‘I’m worried about my job.’ They have jobs and it will probably continue. We have to supply the services. So can you touch on this?”

On a clear day you can see …

Rideout concurred.

“The letter I thought was pretty clear that we want to increase services,” Rideout said. “We’re really not looking at reducing services and in order to provide services we need staff and certainly the staff at the Human Services Center have the knowledge of the programs that they administer, plus they have the relationships, as we’ve talked about, with the people that they serve, so they’re valuable employees.”

Rideout said everyone is aware how difficult it is to find good employees these days.

“So certainly it would not be in the county’s interest to not look at staff that are currently providing those services,” she said. “… Every year after the budget I go, ‘okay, good for another year for all of my staff.’ We can’t guarantee employment. No county can and I think that that was part of the letter, but no county can say you are going to be employed for the next two years because we have a budget, we have services, they change, things happen.”

That said, Rideout continued, there have been no major changes in programming except for to increase services. 

“So therefore we could possibly need more staff, but certainly aren’t looking at major staff reductions,” she said.

Supervisor Steven Schreier, who is also on the HSC board, took issue with only hiring LTEs.

“I did not support that,” Schreier said. “… You’re basically telling the people that are there that if you lose this person that’s in a cubicle next to you, we’ll just bring in some temp to make it through to the end of next year. I don’t really see honestly why the messaging that’s coming from the HSC board is the way it is and I disagree with a lot of the decisions that have been made.”

But the hiring is one of the more fundamental ones, Schreier said, because a contract is in place through the end of next year.

“That means any and all services, any and all employees at the Human Services Center are more or less guaranteed a job through the end of next year,” he said. “No one has been told at any point that, ‘well as things progress we may start letting people go, we’ll start cutting services, we’ll start doing this.’ They [the HSC board] keep talking about shuttering the place, closing the doors and I’m not sure, I don’t understand where this is coming from. I really don’t, other than it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy for me when I’m sitting at that service board and hearing these things.”

No comment

Schreier referenced a vote by subcommittees of the HSC board to recommend to the full HSC board the adoption of retention and severance packages for employees. Retention has been a broad concern for everyone, Schreier said, but other agencies haven’t adopted such payouts.

“[The sheriff’s department’s struggle to hire and retain employees] has been ongoing for I don’t know how many years now, especially in corrections,” he said. “There’s no retention plan for corrections. There’s no severance plan for the people that work in the jail system. … So what is it we’re telling to the 300 people who work for the county in regards to, well maybe we need a retention severance and package for everybody.”

Schreier also said the messaging is the responsibility of the HSC board, and, while those seeking change had tried to be open and transparent, that board did not help matters when someone such as Rideout attended a meeting and were not allowed to address issues or concerns, he said. 

“I literally asked, ‘can we have a public comment period during our meeting so employees or clients or anyone else can speak to the concerns they may have,’ and it was ‘no, we don’t see any value in having a public comment. We’re not going to include it.’”

Who is to blame, then, now that this level of anxiety is now reaching a crescendo? Schreier asked.

Schreier did say he was concerned about what authority was being invested in the oversight panel and whether it conflicted with any state statutes.

“I don’t want to create another level of folks telling other folks, ‘now you don’t know what you‘re doing’ or ‘don’t worry about it. We’re the ones in charge now,’” he said. “So I guess I would like to start with that. I would like to know what is it that this oversight panel has as far as authority in regards to the Human Services Center board?”

Fundamentally, Schreier said, with the creation of the oversight panel, just what purpose did the HSC board serve?

Fugle said the panel would not oversee the HSC board.

“This is not oversight for the board as much as it is to provide the counties which will be continuing with the Human Services Center structure in some way, shape or form with the understanding of what is occurring so that it is not walking in on the 1st of January 2025 and figuring this out,” he said. “There’s a concern that grants that would extend beyond December 2024, that those wouldn’t be applied for because that’s not the Human Services Center. The counties want to ensure that that grant funding continues beyond December 2024.”

The part of the resolution referencing hiring is to ensure that the HSC does not continue to hire just limited term employees: “The counties are interested in having people who are employees so that that can continue after that date,” he said.

Fugle also said the county’s control of retention and severance packages was to ensure that it was uniform across the counties and consistent with what the counties want. 

“And frankly retention through December 31st, 2024 doesn’t benefit the counties at all,” he said. “Retention of employees through 2025, 2026, 2027 is what ensures that those services can continue.”

Rideout also said she saw the entity as more of a transition panel.

“We’re going to be transitioning from whatever structure we have now to whatever structure that we have and I see that panel being somebody really overseeing that transition,” she said. “How is that transition going? What does it look like going from December 31st to January 1st? If the counties decide to go with a human service department structure, actually it is recommended that you have a panel that’s overseeing that process and this panel could be used for that.”

The glass is half full

Supervisor Robb Jensen said he hoped employees were being told that the glass was half full, not half empty. 

“This is a great opportunity to tell our clients it’s not going to change,” Jensen said. “Change is difficult, but I think the sentiment right now far exceeds the reality of what’s going to happen and this committee is hopefully going to make sure those messages are going to our clients. Things will be okay if we tell them they’re going to be okay. If we tell them the sky’s falling, they’re going to believe it.”

But supervisor Ted Cushing, also a member of the HSC board, expressed bitterness and said the creation of the panel could wait until after the anticipated hiring of a consultant made a report to the county board. Right now, he said, there were no answers, there was no plan in place, “nothing.”

“What do we need this for until we find out what recommendation, what the consulting firm comes up with,” Cushing said. “I made a motion [at a previous meeting] to include the head of Human Services Center on the consulting and it was voted down. I don’t know why the hell we don’t want to use any of the knowledge that people have. … It just doesn’t make sense. There is a concern about the clients. There is a concern about families.”

Supervisor Billy Fried said the panel would be an important tool, but he also said he had listened to the HSC meetings and the counties’ messaging was not being received or perceived in the way the county means.

“That’s where it starts, communication, because something’s wrong there because you have an administrator in a public meeting saying the world’s coming to an end when, like Steven said, there’s a full year of employment guaranteed,” Fried said. “These services are mandated. The people are always going to need these services. We need to start guaranteeing not only the people that are working there that we’re going to still have these services moving forward, but the people that use it. It is ludicrous to me that they think everything’s going to be out.”

The reality is, Fried said, that perception needs to be fixed, and the new panel would help do that. 

“This is where we’re at,” he said. “I’m an optimist. We need to start portraying a more positive thing. We have very good people. … This is a time for leadership to shine, not to sit there going, ‘oh woe is me.’”

The resolution creating the oversight panel passed 16-2, with Cushing and Newman opposed.

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.