OURAY – County officials across the state, including the Ouray County Commissioners, are scratching their heads in disbelief and anger over an Oct. 1st Colorado Department of Health and Human Services recommendation of a state takeover of the human services delivery system.

Health and human services offices, which deliver food stamps, welfare benefits and child welfare to residents and families in need, have been operated locally by Colorado counties. Last week CDHHS Executive Director Karen Beye, who is the chair of the Governor’s Child Welfare Action Committee, recommended that Colorado should adopt a state-supervised, regionally directed system for the delivery of social services.

Under this recommendation, regional social services offices would be established and county offices would be established only in counties identified as eligible for them. The recommendation comes from the Governor’s Child Welfare Action Committee, which was charged by Gov. Bill Ritter with developing recommendations for how to improve the Colorado Child Welfare System. The committee concluded that the current system which is a state supervised and county administered system, creates challenges in ensuring that there is consistency across the state in decision making, supervision and training.

Allan Gerstle, the social services director for Ouray and San Miguel counties, said he is concerned that state-run, regionalized social services will not help but hurt those in need because it cannot give the personal care that county-run offices already do.

“It’s not a bad idea to review how social services operates in the state,” Gerstle said at Monday’s commissioner meeting in Ouray, “but they have taken off on a tangent for massive change without defining the need for massive change and small counties would be affected the most. When the state takes over we will lose services. There are people we know and care for and we help them receive that care.

“With this recommendation, the most fragile and needy clients will get hurt the most.”

Gerstle supplied the commissioners with a Sept. 28-letter sent to Ritter from Colorado Counties, Inc., the lobbying organization, which San Miguel and Ouray counties are members of, in opposition to the recommendation.

“This wide, far reaching recommendation proposes to fundamentally and radically alter the organizational structure for delivering child welfare and other human services in Colorado,” the letter to Ritter states. “Frankly, we are shocked at the secrecy surrounding the process and its outcome leaves Colorado Counties, Inc. in disbelief that your administration would operate in this manner.”

Gerstle said there hasn’t been enough conversation about the recommendation’s implications. One question is how legal issues would be addressed.

“If this is going to be a regional system and a state system, is it going to give the legal responsibility to the state attorney general’s office?” Gerstle said. Gerstle went on to say that he feels the recommendation is very “metro centric” because there was no Western Slope representative on the committee and that it had very few small rural representatives.

“I think we support your concerns and comments on this,” Commissioner Keith Meinert said. Commissioner Lynn Padgett agreed.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me,” Padgett said. “It’s not fixing the problem.”