Yolo County sharply disagreed with elements of a recently released grand jury report on the county’s child welfare services program, calling the report’s linkage of six recent child deaths to the county’s data systems sensationalized and inappropriate, and “without any supporting evidence,” in a statement released Friday.
Also on Friday, the city of Davis issued a response to a separate grand jury report on public pensions, outlining efforts the city has taken to deal with pension and retiree health benefit costs as well as efforts made to educate the public on these issues.
Both government agencies will submit formal responses to the grand jury reports as required by law.
Where blame lies
The grand jury report released on Thursday contends the county’s child welfare system, as well as county supervisors, will continue to be blindsided by reports of sudden crises involving abused and neglected children — and will be hampered in their ability to prevent such crises — unless the county improves its data analysis resources.
The report recommends that the Yolo County Board of Supervisors fund a data-analytics unit in the Child, Youth and Family branch of the Health and Human Services Agency that would give social workers the information they need to proactively prevent child maltreatment and reduce safety risks in children’s homes.
But the report also cites the deaths of six Yolo County children since 2015 as evidence that the county has not done enough in that regard.
The county disagrees, saying in a statement issued Friday that the report “tends to sensationalize the grand jury’s findings and recommendations by inappropriately and without any supporting evidence, implying that the county’s child welfare services staff somehow failed to prevent the murder of six children by their fathers in three separate 2017 incidents.”
Those cases, which followed the highly publicized death of 19-day-old Justice Rees in Knights Landing in 2015, include the September 2017 asphyxiation deaths of three West Sacramento siblings; the November 2017 sexual assault and drowning death of a 4-year-old Winters girl in Winters’ Putah Creek; and the New Year’s Eve 2017 deaths of two sisters whose father set fire to his car in a West Sacramento parking lot.
There is no link, the county contends, between those fatalities and the “continuous quality improvement and data collection findings and recommendations expressed in the report.”
“The report contains a good discussion of the seriousness of child abuse and neglect and its consequences for both children and their communities as they mature. That text is sufficient to express the important context for the grand jury’s findings and recommendations, and there is no need to refer also to six fatalities unrelated to any substantiated failure of the county child welfare system,” the county says.
“None of the six 2017 victims were involved in any way with the county’s child welfare system. Despite this, the report presents each incident as a ‘case’ in bulleted text. Presenting information in this matter seems to imply at least a degree of formal agency involvement with each family, an implication that the report encourages by stating ‘even though some of these children died before their families came to the attention of the child welfare authorities …’ The facts are simply that none of these children were involved with child welfare with the sole exception of (Justice Rees) in January 2015.”
The county further argues, “there is no verified factual basis to support the statement that ‘each death represents a failure of the system.’
“The child welfare system simply was not involved with any of these children or their families. It thus cannot be faulted for these fatalities. The report’s suggestion that ‘sometimes … inadequate communication and coordination between social services and law enforcement’ contributed to these deaths is similarly baseless to our knowledge.”
“For these reasons, the county respectfully disagrees with those specific discussions in the grand jury report believing they are unnecessary to support the grand jury’s findings and recommendations and are not supported by credible evidence.”
City issues
Meanwhile, the city of Davis has responded to another report released by the grand jury last week.
That report, on the pension crises facing the county’s four cities, recommended that cities educate residents about the impact of the pension crisis, and take additional steps to deal with it.
In response, the city of Davis released a statement of its own Friday:
“While the city of Davis will provide a more thorough formal response to the report, as required by law, once staff and the City Council have had adequate time for review, and while we wholeheartedly concur with the grand jury that transparency is critical to the public discussion on this topic, the city does believe that the issue has been a significant part of the public discourse over the past few years. The city is likewise committed to ensuring that the discussion continues into the future.”
The statement outlines some of the steps already taken in that regard, including the development of a long-term fiscal model that shows the effect of pension and retiree costs over the next 20 years as well as multiple public meetings before the City Council and the Finance and Budget Commission where the city’s pension issues have been discussed.
Additionally, as part of the fiscal forecast model starting with Fiscal Year 2017-18, the city added an entire chapter to its annual budget document specifically on forecasting. The chapter details the issues surrounding increased costs related to pensions.
City staff and City Council members have spoken about pension costs at organizational meetings, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary and the Kiwanis, and Mayor Robb Davis has written several articles over the past four years addressing pensions and post-employment benefit costs.
The City Council also has been working to educate and inform employee groups during labor negotiations and has reached cost-share agreements with several groups.
“As mayor, I have written and spoken frequently about these issues and they have been dealt with openly in at least 10 publicly noticed meetings in the last two years alone,” Davis said in response to the report.
“Starting in 2016, in several articles published in local news sources and public presentations to the Chamber of Commerce’s State of the City event and local service clubs, I laid out the challenges Davis is facing vis-a-vis pensions,” Davis said.
In addition to outreach, the City Council has been making efforts to reduce city obligations, the city’s statement said, including a $2 million payment from General Fund reserves in 2017 to pay down a portion of its unfunded liability for retiree medical costs.
The council also has negotiated with labor groups so that employees pay a larger percentage of costs than is typical for other California cities.
“Both fire and police employees contribute 12 percent of salary to cover their shares of retirement costs, 3 percent more than is required by CalPERS,” the city says.
“Two other labor groups have just agreed to pay in excess of the required 8 percent of salary if PERS costs increase beyond what is currently expected over the next few years. And, of course, employees new to the PERS system since 2013 receive reduced retirement benefits, as per the requirements laid out in the California Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013, also known as “PEPRA.”
“Each of these actions serves to address the city’s ongoing pension liabilities,” the city statement said.
The city’s statement notes that “rising pension costs are a real issue.
“It is also a complicated issue statewide that takes time to address. The City of Davis and its City Council agree that transparency and outreach are crucial and look forward to continuing and intensifying our engagement efforts with the broader community, amongst other leaders throughout Yolo County and across the state.”
June 23, 2018
Davis Enterprise
By Anne Ternus-Bellamy
No comments:
Post a Comment