"Where Olmsted County News Comes First"

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Olmsted County has decided to pull out of a proposed 12-county human service delivery authority (SDA), a measure that was intended to cope with increased demand for services in the face of shrinking government funding.

Analysis of the plan showed that the county creating its own SDA would be more cost effective, and an internal reorganization will be considered in the near future. Olmsted County currently has agreements with other counties regarding the delivery of social services.

Among other changes, the redesign would have decrease the amount of human services staff in the region by attrition, used technology to check in on less resource-intensive cases, while employing teams of specialists to concentrate on those who need more help.

“There’s going to be some definite changes in our region,” said Paul Fleissner, Olmsted County director of human services. “We shot high, but it didn’t necessarily play out the way we originally had thought.”

Commissioner Dave Perkins asked Fleissner to continue to study building an internal SDA, informed by what had been learned in the multi-county planning, and report back to the board in three months.

“We are not going to back off looking at ways to provide human services, it’s the most important part of our budget,” Perkins said.

In addition to the cost analysis for Olmsted County, the issue of control over administration was at issue. When Rice County withdrew early on from the redesign, Olmsted County would have accounted for more than half the human services spending in the region, and there had been a push among the less populated counties to each have an equal vote.

“We were put in the position of having a lot of responsibility with no authority, and that’s a recipe for dysfunction,” said Commissioner Stephanie Podulke.

Perkins suggested that the county instead offer to sell to smaller counties some of the systems and technology that it implements as a result of its internal redesign.

“I think we’ve learned a lot from this study. The year was not wasted,” he said. “We won’t have our hands tied with 11 other counties telling us how to manage our business.”

The effort to coordinate county governments, paid for largely by foundation grant dollars, was viewed as a potential model for cooperation between local governments, throughout the state and nationally, to follow in order to continue to provide quality social services on a smaller budget. The ambitious regional approach has been studied for more than two years.

The withdrawal was made official by a 6-0 vote with Commissioner Jim Bier absent. Commissioner Paul Wilson called to amend the language of the resolution withdrawing the county from the effort, by making the language more clear that the county may be open to future redesign models involving other counties. The amendment was embraced by the board.

With Olmsted County out of the picture, other surrounding counties may pursue the creation of smaller SDAs. Board chair Ken Brown encouraged them to do so and noted the difficulty creating by having a larger county attempting to collaborate with many smaller ones. Perkins noted the complication caused by the difference in philosophies that counties have in targeting their human service dollars. Olmsted County and others in the region tend to focus on prevention, while others seek only to meet state mandates.