Regional centers are private nonprofits that contract with California's Department of Developmental Services to coordinate or provide services for people with developmental disabilities. The 21 regional centers help disabled people and their families find and access a variety of services.
Emily Alpert Reyes at LAT:
Nearly $1 billion allocated for regional agencies that purchase supportive services for Californians with developmental disabilities went unspent in a recent year and was ultimately returned to the state, even as some disabled people and their families said they needed more help.
California provides assistance to people with autism and other developmental disabilities through a system of nonprofits called regional centers, which are contracted with the California Department of Developmental Services. Twenty-one of them exist across the state, each serving a distinct area. More than 400,000 California children and adults are served through the regional centers annually.
The system has been criticized for persistent gaps in spending on services for Californians of different races and in different regions. Families have complained it can be difficult to navigate.
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Disabled people are legally entitled to such services in California, so “if the system is running short of resources, then the obligation shifts to the administration to seek additional resources from the legislature,” Westling said. “It really is designed to ensure that we have the resources necessary to meet people’s needs.”
But to attorney Valerie Vanaman, who represents people with disabilities and their families, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars unspent is a symptom of a system “that is falling apart.”
Vanaman said the pandemic led to regional centers losing experienced professionals and that working remotely had harmed the kind of collaboration needed to make sure people get the services they need.
“What you’re seeing is that where services should have been put together, where the money would have been spent, there was no internal structure to make it happen,” Vanaman said.
Areva Martin, chief executive of the nonprofit Special Needs Network Inc., said she understood the unusual circumstances facing regional centers amid COVID. “Even taking into account those things,” she said, “I think it speaks to a level of bureaucracy that makes regional centers very difficult to navigate.”
“It is disheartening to meet families who don’t have adequate services, who don’t have adequate resources, and then to hear about a billion dollars being returned,” Martin said.
