BND Editorializes In Favor Of Home Closure
Published by Al Adomite on May 13th, 2008
The News-Democrat editorialized on the sheltered care home today. There are three good points summarized:
Simply, this business is outside the usual scope of county government. County leaders would be doing the taxpayers a disservice to spend their money on it.
Their 22-7 vote to close the home is definitive. Still, opponents are grasping at straws to force the county to keep it open. For instance, there’s a challenge about whether the County Board followed proper procedural rules on the vote to close the home. That might force a another vote, but it is not going to alter the outcome.
County leaders have assured residents of the shelter care home that they will be placed in other, appropriate facilities. The residents won’t be put out on the street. That’s the extent of the county’s responsibility.
Does the County Board need to take one more definitive vote to close?
Filed under County Issues, Uncategorized
May 15th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Local government is inherently in the best position to aid individuals; and it can do it at the lowest cost. Big government services to individuals must aim at statitistical abstractions instead of real people. It is unwieldy in requiring a lot of arbitrary rules to cover real and imagined possibilities. Whereas the practical judgments of local officials more often succeed in actually helping real people. Local governance aims at results rather than compliance with arbitrary rules. Overhead is lower with local governance. (The only logical reason for wanting non-local government to do something is the possibility that someone non-local will wind up actually footing the bill.) The alternatives to county sheltered care are mostly state and federally funded. Costs will therefore be higher overall and the results less effective. Overhead will dominate costs. Logic suggests that the opponents of county sheltered care are looking more to reduce the burden of providing mental health care by eliminating a means to it, than to improve the quality of it. The folks who want to kill the sheltered care home have never taken any other initiative to improve mental health care in the county. The want big government to do only because it will then not be them doing it. Whether big government does it well or at all will be beside the point.