Another Victory in South Carolina: Commission Survives Despite the Press

Another Victory in South Carolina: Commission Survives Despite the Press

The Braille Monitor

June 2003

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Another Victory in South

Carolina: Commission Survives Despite the Press

From the Editor: The

following vindictive little editorial appeared in the State newspaper

in South Carolina on Thursday, March 27, 2003. For well over a year the organized

blind have been engaged in a political fight to the death in the state legislature

to protect the separate agency serving blind South Carolinians. In August of

2002 the affiliate was driven to place two large paid advertisements in the

paper to counteract editorial attacks by the State on the commission,

its programs, and its supporters, particularly the NFB.

Since then Federationists

have been taking every opportunity they could make for themselves to explain

to legislators the importance to blind people of disability-specific rehabilitation

services. They cited studies showing that successful rehabilitations of blind

consumers as measured by good jobs occur much more often when rehab services

are provided by counselors in separate agencies. They told horror stories about

inadequate, inappropriate, or nonexistent services provided in states where

vocational rehabilitation services for the blind have been merged into larger

agencies.

According to Don Capps,

past president of the NFB of South Carolina, "This spectacular legislative

victory was due to the excellent work of the NFB of South Carolina, the effective

and logical arguments made by constituents around the state, and the validity

of the case for a separate agency." On March 18 the House Ways and Means

Committee voted to exclude the commission from a bill proposing departmental

reorganizations throughout state government. Following that fifteen-to-seven

vote, commission director Nell Carney characterized the committee's action as

a "stunning victory" for blind citizens.

For the third time in

ten years the NFB of South Carolina has successfully gone to the barricades

to fight for its commission. Let us hope that the opponents of this concept

of productive service delivery will now leave the blind in peace to get on with

effective vocational rehabilitation. The following editorial reported this amazing

upset in terms that can only be characterized as sour grapes:

You'll Never

Manage Government

If Each Agency Must Have a Single Task

by Cindi Ross Scoppe

No one with a passing familiarity

with the way things work in state government could have been surprised last

week when the single item that the Ways and Means Committee rejected in a wide‑ranging

bill to overhaul the state's health‑service agencies was the proposal

to merge the Commission for the Blind into the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation.

It's hardly the first time legislators have crumbled

in the face of opposition to the completely sound idea that efficiency and accountability

demand a more manageable number of state agencies and that this is one of the

agencies that needn't stand alone. The fight to preserve this tiny agency's

independence was, after all, the most emotional and draining in the entire debate

a decade ago over restructuring state government.

What was astonishing was the argument that won the day

this time‑‑and how easily it won.

While a few completely irrelevant ideas were thrown

in (my favorite, from Representative Bill Clyburn: "We should let them

remain a stand‑alone agency, simply because they want it to be . . . .

I think we owe it to them to let them remain independent and do their thing"),

the overarching argument was that the Commission for the Blind offers some services

that are not offered by Vocational Rehabilitation.

You can stop waiting for the rest of the argument. That's

it. Seriously.

Rep. Jim McGee proposed the cave‑in by telling

about an employee in his law firm who is blind and recounting how the commission's

services had taught this employee "life skills," as opposed to simply

job skills. "If you put this under [the Department of] Vocational Rehabilitation,

they're going to be doing a lot more than vocational rehabilitation," he

said.

Someone made the point that Vocational Rehabilitation

does a good job, and he wouldn't want to upset that balance. I didn't bother

taking notes on these extensions, because never in my wildest dreams did it

occur to me that this argument would sway anyone's vote.

The problem is that, once you buy into this argument,

you will never consolidate state agencies, which we need to do even more than

we need to give the governor control of agencies. If you could combine two agencies

without expanding the scope of the accepting agency, that would mean one of

them was completely redundant to begin with.

Once you buy the argument that agencies cannot be expected

to do more than one thing, the logical course of action is to actually increase

the obscene number of state agencies we already have. Saying you shouldn't ask

a Department of Vocational Rehabilitation to take in the Commission for the

Blind and handle its work because the two agencies don't do exactly the same

things is like saying every single program administered by the Department of

Health and Environmental Control should be a freestanding state agency.

The main problem with the restructuring proposals in

this bill was that they didn't go far enough. Not by a long shot. And that was

before the committee killed one of the two agency consolidations. (The other,

which puts the state office of the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse

Services under the Department of Health and Human Services, survived primarily

because it doesn't affect the local drug abuse agencies.) And in return for

eliminating one stand‑alone agency, the bill creates a whole new one.

Yet despite the fact that this legislation does absolutely

nothing to reduce the unmanageable number of executive agencies--at least eighty-four,

although nobody seems able to agree on the precise number--Rep. McGee actually

suggested that, if there were any problems with the way the Commission for the

Blind is operating, "the way to address that is through the board, which

is appointed by the governor. Give him a chance to do that." Sure. Right

after he comes up with a way to balance the budget and gets a handle on the

sixty or so other agencies he has some degree of control over.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the debate. Perhaps

legislators on the Ways and Means Committee didn't really buy the arguments

put forward for leaving the Commission for the Blind alone. Perhaps they, like

supporters of the change who didn't even bother bringing the matter back up

when the full House passed the bill, simply didn't want to have to deal with

the hassle of making the agency's supporters mad. I'll admit I hesitated to

put my name on a column about the topic because I know how persistent they can

be.

But if that's what drove

legislators, isn't it even worse? Isn't it worse to back down from a needed

reform because you can't stand having to listen to people who disagree with

you than it is to back down because you bought a lame argument? The latter simply

means you weren't thinking clearly when you voted. The former means you're afraid

to do your job. And if you're afraid of the supporters of the Commission for

the Blind, who else are you going to be afraid of? And how can you ever be an

effective legislator?

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