By JOAN JACOBSON
The scathing op-ed by Peter Sabonis, of Maryland Legal Aid, about understaffing in Maryland human services agencies resonated, with at least one fed-up Baltimore County supervisor. Legal Aid has posted his anonymous, but quite compelling, letter.
Usually when someone from the public or media publicly criticizes a bureaucracy, the government response is to circle the wagons, blame the messenger and deny the accusations. But Sabonis, acting chief legal counsel to Maryland Legal Aid, received an unusually frank and sobering ‘thank you’ letter to his Sun Op-Ed piece of 2/13/09.
Sabonis shed light on the dire understaffing at the state’s human services agencies, where a seven-year hiring freeze has left fewer bureaucrats to handle everyday caseloads. Now they are even more ill-equipped to process the unemployment insurance, health care and food stamps that are likely to increase from President O’Bama’s stimulus package.
The thank you letter came from an unnamed supervisor (and 30-year veteran of social work) at the Baltimore County Department of Social Services.
“As you point out we have tried to follow all the cute catch phrases, ‘do more with less’ ‘work smarter not harder,’ wrote the supervisor.
“We are now facing ‘do everything with nothing’ phase. I often try to be supportive of my staff by pointing out even if the Ravens had the best designed playbook, but took the field with 6 players instead of 11, their success would be minimal.”
The supervisor also raised the question of why only the human service agencies have a hiring freeze, and keep losing their staff to jobs in other state agencies without hiring limits – even at the Maryland State Lottery! Too bad that somebody’s food stamp application, or child abuse report gets delayed. Maryland has more pressing priorities – like keeping those lottery machines well-oiled.
If the Governor and General Assembly do nothing about the understaffing, we could easily have a state scandal on our hands by next year; Maryland could be sitting on millions of unspent stimulus dollars because there weren’t enough bureaucrats to give out the money.
