 In the 1980s, then Governor Michael Dukakis decided to try an experiment in changing the way we organize human services and social services here in Massachusetts. That was the period when we were going through de-institutionalization. You'll remember the Northampton State Hospital, the Belcher Town State School. Our examples of institutions locally that were really warehouses for the mentally ill and the developmentally delayed. And Governor Dukakis, as we were de-institutionalizing and preparing the way for moving people into the community, felt that we needed more small community-based services and small community-based institutions. And that the folks who worked in those institutions should principally and significantly be private employees, not public employees. And so this started a network and a trend in the Commonwealth of human service organizations that spread from border to border here in the Commonwealth. And over the years, literally thousands and thousands of small organizations were developed to provide services, to provide residential opportunities, work-related training and work opportunities. So basically it was a decentralized system of small community-based organizations that would be staffed by local folks. And as a result of this, we ended up creating a bifurcated system where some agencies would have some of the same people doing the same work as a state employee making more money than a person who is doing it in the community. And some of these folks who are working these social service agencies are working with some of the most needy people and some of the most challenging circumstances. And the lower-waged workers in these agencies were struggling so much that they were entitled to things such as food stamps and to receive daycare vouchers for their children because their salaries were so low that it really was not a living wage for them. So one of the projects that I undertook as the chair of Ways and Means in my first budget in the mid-1990s when I served as the chair of the committee, I took the opportunity to set up a special reserve for salary increases for low-wage workers in the community-based programs in social services. And it was a very, very hotly contested issue in the conference committee. The conference committee is the three state reps and the three state senators that work out the difference between the two budgets, the House budget and the Senate budget. And so it was in the Senate budget but not the House budget. So we had to fight in the conference committee to keep that. And as a result of the successful effort, we were for the first time able to provide, through a human services salary reserve, modest salary increases for all of the people who were in the lowest-paid jobs in the community provider system. That account actually was funded virtually every year from the mid-1990s until 2008 when we hit a bad patch again in the economy, went into recession and at that point, unfortunately, the account disappeared. That was three years ago. But we are resolved to try to put that back into place so that we can once again provide these modest salary increases to very hardworking people working under extremely difficult circumstances so that they can support themselves and their families in a better fashion than they would otherwise be able to do.