NCIL 2013 Policy Briefing

NCIL 2013 Policy Briefing

Thursday, June 13, 2013

3:00 PM EDT

Transcript

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for waiting. Welcome to the NCIL policy briefing conference call. All lines have been placed on listen only mode. The floor will be open for questions and comments following the presentation. Without further ado, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Mr. Tim Fuchs.
TIM FUCHS: Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Tim Fuchs with the National Council on Independent Living in Washington, D.C. I welcome you to NCIL's 2013 policy briefing. This is our 8th annual policy briefing. We enjoy doing this call with you all to give everybody the talking points and issue briefs for our day on the hill in Washington later this summer.
I want to remind you all that a CART version of this presentation is available live on-line. That live captioning is available. That URL is a little longer than I can reasonably read out over the phone. But it was in the confirmation E-mail that was sent to you.
If you or any of your colleagues need or prefer the live captioning, you can access that from the confirmation E-mail.
In addition, please do make sure to open the policy priorities booklet that was sent to you with your confirmation. It is going to make the presentation easier to follow along with.
I want to give you all a heads up, that we will run through a number of different issues, but we will break for questions a bit after 4:00 so when we get through the book of our presentation. We will take a long Q and A break; make sure you all have a chance to ask the presenters questions about the issues, so that you are clear.
I'll turn it over to our host and moderator for today, Lou Ann Kibbee NCIL vice-president.
LOU ANN KIBBEE: Thanks. I want to welcome everybody to this afternoon's teleconference. We will be reviewing NCIL's legislative and advocacy agenda in advance of our July conference and hill visits. We hope to see everybody at the conference. However, we know and understand that some of you may not be able to join us for the conference.
Whether you come to D.C. or not, congress still needs to hear all of our voices. The goal of today's teleconference is to present information on some of NCIL's top policy priorities.
We will have a short Q and A, as Tim said. Please keep your questions short and concise as possible, so we are able to get as many questions in as we can.
After the Q and A, we will also have a couple of short presentations for people that are attending the conference, so we will ask if you are coming to the conference to please stay on to hear some additional preparation for attendees of the conference.
In that, Mark will present on presenting people with tips that will make it a safe and healthy event for all our participants and Shawn who is the Region 7 Rep will also do a short presentation on preparing for the hill.
In February, the NCIL board met in D.C. for our springboard meeting, as we do every year. We also had our Congressional briefing and our Hill visits.
Today we will review the NCIL legislative and advocacy priorities set by the membership and approved by the board.
I'll get to those in a moment.
We hosted our 6th annual Congressional briefing at the capitol visitors center in February, again we presented our legislative priorities to Congressional members and staff, NCIL members from the D.C. area and other national partners and interested entities.
This briefing was held in order to kick off our advocacy agenda, to advance the independence and rights of people with disabilities.
Our legislative and advocacy committee members our subcommittee members, the NCIL staff, regional reps, and our membership play key roles in getting us to this point. Our legislative and advocacy committee is comprised of subcommittee chairs, NCIL staff, Kelly Buckland, Austin Walker, and Thea Ervin, our president Dan Kessler, regional rep chair, Maureen Ryan and myself.
I'd like to thank all of our legislative and advocacy subcommittee chairs and the members across the country for all the work that they do.
Subcommittee chairs are, I want to name those, for the rehab subcommittee, Shannon Jones and Vicki, housing subcommittee, Brian Peters, ADA civil rights subcommittee, Mark Derry and Julie Alexander. Personal assistant services, Bruce Darling, healthcare subcommittee, Heidi Siegfried, employment and Social Security subcommittee, Brian McDonald, transportation subcommittee, Cliff Perez, technology subcommittee is John Nousaine, education subcommittee, Maureen Hollowell, veteran subcommittee, Steve Thovson, emergency management is Madonna Long and Christine Dunaway. These chairs do a lot of work throughout the year. Obviously it is all volunteer work for NCIL.
We greatly appreciate it on behalf of the membership.
NCIL surveys the membership to determine community needs to set our legislative policy priorities every two years.
The legislative and advocacy committee reviews the survey results and makes recommendations for priorities to the board.
NCIL board then reviews the recommendations and formally adopts NCIL's legislative agenda.
The survey was done last fall with the new agenda adopted by the board in February. NCIL adopted the following priorities as the foremost legislative issues to work on.
The top priorities which the board established a number of years ago, the top priority will always be for NCIL, reauthorization of the Rehab Act, and IL funding, obviously without these CILs and SILCs wouldn't be around.
It makes sense that this would be the top priority.
This year, NCIL also established employment as a top priority, employment has been a hot topic and a big issue, the national governor association has established it as a top priority, of employment of people with disabilities. There islots happening.
NCIL will also do advocacy to support ADA civil rights, healthcare and personal assistant services, transportation and housing, and then NCIL will also monitor and react to other issues that have an impact on people with disabilities, including but not limited to veterans issues, emergency preparedness and management, Social Security, education, and technology.
Before we move on to the subcommittee chairs, I want to touch on the CRPD, U.N. convention on rights of people disabilities.
Most of you should know and heard about this. There is also a piece in our policy priority booklet, as Tim spoke about earlier. As you know the CRPD was voted on in December, 2012 and failed on the vote in the senate unfortunately.
We don't know for sure, but we have heard that something may be happening while we are in D.C. for the conference on the CRPD.
We are not exactly sure yet what. But we really felt that it was important to give our membership a heads up and it's really important for all of us to reach out to our senators to encourage them to support the CRPD.
We did have some senators that had came out in support and for various reasons, the opposition is extremely strong, and apparently they were able to sway them back to voting against the CRPD, which was very unfortunate.
I wanted to make sure we got that piece in there. At this time, several of the legislative and advocacy committee members will make presentations on some of our most pressing issues. Obviously, we can't cover everything in the booklet. But I would encourage you all to read that.
Then again we will have the Q and A session for all of you to ask questions.
If for some reason we don't get to your question, you can send your question to Tim Fuchs at the NCIL office. His E-mail is Tim at NCIL.org. Someone will get back in touch.
Also the policy priority booklet that you got the link to, there will be some updates being made between now and the conference.
We didn't get it updated for this call, because we want to be able to have the most updated information for you at the conference.
There may be a few changes, when we get to the conference, but those will be presented at the L A update on the first day of the conference when we are there too.
Now, I would like to turn it over to Shannon Jones and Vicki, the chairs of the Rehab Act subcommittee.
VICKI HAWS: This is Vicki. I'm going to start off and turn it over to Shannon. She will finish up. I'm going to talk about what we are looking to include in reauthorization of the Rehab Act and Shannon is going to talk about our strategy for how we want to push it forward.
Most of you know, The Rehab Act is included in title 4 within the Workforce Investment Act. This has not been reauthorized for 15 years. This is true even though congress requires itself to reauthorize legislation every five years.
Rehab Act is critical to centers and SILCs because it directly impacts how we do things and what we can do. As we have seen over the last years, RSA has changed the way that they are interpreting the Rehab Act. The change in the interpretation of the Rehab Act along with some other problematic issues have led NCIL to suggest significant changes be made to the Rehab Act, and I don't have time to cover all of the components and all of the changes here.
I am going to encourage you to go to the NCIL website and also in the new, when the new policy booklet comes out, look there because you will find more information.
But some of the changes that NCIL is proposing is changing the funding formula. Currently, when new funds are appropriated for part C dollars that is dispersed -- disbursed based on population. That resulted in some states never receiving a single penny of increased funding for centers in our states.
That is just not appropriate. We are really missing the boat on making sure that all of our brothers and sisters are receiving funding to provide services to individuals with disabilities all across the United States.
The recommended change is that the funding formula be divided, that 50 percent of all newly appropriated funds would be equally distributed. Then the remaining 50 percent be distributed based on population.
That way, everybody receives an increase, but population-wise, if you have a greater population, you are still going to receive a greater increase than some states who has a smaller population.
Another change that we would like to see is allowing centers to be able to carry over their funding. Centers have to expend their part C dollars by September 30 every year. If you don't spend it or obligate it, you lose it.
That results in ineffective use of our dollars. We are requesting that that money be allowed to be carried over, so that we can make good decisions and use that money effectively to improve the services that we are providing.
We are also recommending adding additional core service for centers for independent living, and that would be transition.
Many centers are already providing various types of transition, whether it be use transition or transition from institutions into the community -- youth transition. Adding this transition as a core service will help us demonstrate the need and it may lead to additional, appropriations in the future for all centers to be able to provide these services and be able to afford to provide all the services that we are currently providing.
Another big change that we want to see in the Rehab Act is we want to clarify and expand the duties of the SILCs. Earlier I talked about some of the more strict interpretations that RSA has made of the Rehab Act.
What has happened is, there have been a number of states who wrote their state plan for independent living only to have RSA say no, you can't do this, because The Rehab Act says the SILC can only do these five duties and that is all you can do.
It is really limited, what SILCs are allowed to do. It has hampered some states' ability to make changes that would benefit centers for independent living as well as individuals with disabilities across their entire state.
And then probably one of the biggest changes that we would like to see included in reauthorization is elevating the independent living program from its subservient position within RSA to an independent living administration.
The reasoning behind this is that RSA's primary focus is employment. But we all know employment is only one component of life. You can't hold a job if you don't have accessible affordable housing or transportation.
Elevating the independent living program will ensure that people with disabilities will have all the tools necessary to live full lives, that will include being successfully employed, but not be restricted to looking at it through the lens of employment first and then all of the other components.
I think it is also important to point out, and we have talked about this over the years, there are two funding streams that fund independent living, part C dollars which go directly to the centers, and, sorry, part C dollars go directly to the centers and part B dollars go to the DSU, and potentially to SILCs depending how the DSU and SILC is set up in the state. We are recommending these streams stay separate, they not be combined together.
That was a big question a lot of people had in the past. We are not making any recommendations to change part B and part C funding streams.
At this point I'm going to ask Shannon to take over and talk about our strategy in how we need to move forward to get this reauthorized in this congress.
SHANNON JONES: Thanks, Vicki. Good afternoon, everybody. As Vicki just said, as it currently stands we know that the rehabilitation act is included in the larger bill, the Workforce Investment Act.
Last year, NCIL staff, Rehab Act committee, NCIL members worked aggressively with the health committee in the senate, that is the health, education, labor and pensions committee, it is chaired by Senator Harkin and last year it was senator Isaacson, senator Murray and invey that we worked to create a bipartisan draft bill that includes these changes that Vicki talked about.
That bill we have never dropped. Our strategy this year is to focus on the senate health committee.
We want this strategy to start now, and lead up to the 2013 NCIL conference.
If we focus on the Senate Health Committee - that is only 21 senators.
The message that we want to deliver is that NCIL wants the senate health committee to introduce and pass a bill out of committee in this congress that reauthorizes the Workforce Investment Act, similar to the previous senate draft version.
We know that WIA and the Rehab Act is going to require actions now and it is going to require action from all of our grass-roots network.
We haven't asked NCIL members to do this amount of heavy lifting for quite some time, but it really is a small target if we all participate and all take a piece of it.
So, what we have put up already on the NCIL website is the talking points that we are going to include in our policy booklet this summer that will help folks understand and convey why this bill is so important to get passed now. As we target those individual senators on the health committee, we want to ensure that everyone has a direct link and has a designated committee member.
Even if your senator or even if your state is not represented on the health committee of those 21 senators, you still, we are asking everyone to still contact the senator that is in your region.
For example, I live in Missouri. I don't have a senator, neither one of my senators are on that committee. However, I'm in region 7. I do have two senators from region 7, that are on the committee, that would be senator Roberts and Senator Harkin. I will definitely be contacting them.
Additionally, the regional reps have been very active, and have embraced the idea of making concerted efforts within each of the regions, at this point recruiting state coordinators as well, so we can keep track of who's been contacted, if they need more information, what additional information they may need.
The other thing that I think it is important to know, that as you know within these type of legislation, we can never be certain about the timing of the bill.
But we have it on good word that this could be moving very fast, very soon. We all need to be prepared.
The first step I would recommend to everyone on the call today, to familiarize yourself with the talking points, is to go to the NCIL website,
Right now, the talking points are up there. This coming Monday, we are going to have a chart of all the senators and all of their contact information and which regions they fall into. So it should be very helpful to all NCIL members for finding their senators, to send an E-mail, make a phone call and you will have access to talking points right there.