 Hi, we're here with a member highlight and I'm sitting with Ray Nagel, who is the Executive Director of Independence Association, which is an agency in Brunswick that provides support services to people with intellectual disabilities. And Ray is here to talk about a piece of legislation that's coming up this month that directly impacts people with intellectual disabilities. Ray, could you just give a little background about this legislation and how it affects agencies that serve people? Sure, Tom. It's LD 967 and I'll spare you the lengthy title of the bill. It's essentially a bill to adjust the rates for people with developmental disabilities, intellectual disabilities, and restore them back to their 2007 baseline and then adjust up by 10%. We have received significant cuts in that rate, which was established in 2007. So that's why we chose 2007 as the baseline date and we would like to go forward with those rates so that we can pay our direct support professionals a better and more livable wage. The direct support providers are the people who actually work one-on-one or one with a group of people to support them in their homes, in the community, on job sites, wherever they are and these people have been, you know, you're trying to pay these people a competitive wage with less and less money every year. That is correct. The state of Maine is actually one of the leaders in the developmental disabilities industry or intellectual disabilities industry throughout the state. And in 2007, they tried to make the rates equitable amongst all provider agencies and after a prolonged five-year study, the state came up with a rate that was essentially $25.37 an hour, okay? Not adjusted for inflation. That rate now is $22.64 an hour or about 11% less despite the fact that 10 years have gone by. And when you say that the rates were $25 an hour, that's not a $25 an hour. That doesn't reflect what you pay the staff. That's your overall daily rate, right? Daily rate for everything that you provide. So that has to get divided up among not just the people who provide the direct services but all the other costs of providing those services. That is correct. That's the programmatic cost for providing the service. So that includes the total benefit package for staff at all the programmatic costs for those individuals, the non-billable planning and coordination of services for those individuals which has impacted the ability to recruit and retain quality staff. Even people who stay in those jobs with those lower rates have to work with less staff than they should. In fact, they're working overtime, they're working with less support, they might have another person work with them but they're not there. They get discouraged and there's burnout, so then they leave. So even though you have really good people left that are willing to accept lower wages, they eventually leave and it gets just downward spirals. Isn't that kind of the consequence of this whole thing? Burnout rate is really high. We have over 35% turnover rate of our direct support professionals. That's significantly high. Second, it places the people we serve at great risk, both from a safety perspective and also a quality of life perspective. One old piece of legislation comes up like this that impacts a specific population like people with intellectual disabilities. The parents know about it, maybe the providers know about it, but it doesn't get out beyond that sometimes. People who are watching this may say, well, how does this affect me? But you actually provide those, when you are well funded enough, you actually provide support service to people going out and getting jobs, working in the community, doing things in the community, living more or less on their own or learning to live on their own and spending money in the community. So it does have a ripple effect, doesn't it? It sure does. We provide services to a very large continuum of people. Some people are very independent and for those people, we place them in jobs and they're very involved in their communities. And then we have on the opposite end of the spectrum, people that don't have that level of independence and they require much more intense staffing. The people with higher independence are able to get out into the community more often, but they still need that staff supervision. How much support do you perceive there is for this bill? Both the Republicans and the Democrats are united in their support for people with intellectual disabilities. I think that the bill has been met favorably. It right now, it went through health and human services unanimously to go back to the original rate with a 10% increase and it right now is in appropriations. So if people are just finding out about this and start to get concerned, what can they do and how can they get more information? I would urge people to contact our legislators and say, hey, we support LD 967 and we support people that are working with people that have intellectual disabilities, namely direct support professionals, to get an increase in their wages so that it's livable. Great. Well, thanks for clarifying all this. I think a lot of people who might be watching this learned a lot and are much more better prepared to call the legislators. So thank you for coming in and talking about it. Thank you, Tom. I really appreciate the opportunity.