Last, but not Least, DHS

The Department of Human Services, one of the most incompetent departments in state government, (in my opinion) is seeing a 10% increase in spending (on General Fund Spending) and an increase of 221 full-time employees. Overall, the budget increases by 2.7%.

The effort to privatize foster care failed. Progress was made in privatizing some of the juvenile justice services.

By the way, I do not fault the rank and file case workers in the department. Many, if not most of them do their best, but they work under poor conditions. They have bureaucratic leadership, terrible technology and red tape that makes their job very difficult to perform. There are too many chiefs and, as a result, not enough funding left for the important folks, the front line workers. Of the 221 new FTE's 150 are going to be caseworkers. I guess that means they need 71 more supervisors for the 150 caseworkers. Hmm...thats one supervisor for every two new workers. "Good enough for government work."