State announces clawback amounts from county mental health services
Hawk Eye, The (Burlington, IA)Oct 22, 2014
The figure represents 80 percent of the savings the county experienced during the last fiscal year, ending
The state passed legislation in 2012 that redesigned how such services are delivered. The state promised to equalize services to
If a county's MHDS tax levy totaled less than
This year, the money did not go to the county but to the new regional MHDS organization, Southeast Iowa Link, or SEIL.
Regionalization of services and therefore records and accounting also were a requirement of the redesign legislation. SEIL is an eight-county-member organization that formed
The nearly
The state warned the counties it would ask for a clawback nearly a year ago, but the counties protested the state's proposed method of calculating savings was unfair and too general.
The state went through an administrative code adoption procedure with county input to standardize how counties measure MHDS savings.
Standard software codes for MHDS are being used to measure what the county used to pay for, but now does not, using 2012 as the base year.
Counties with tax levies of more than
The redesign legislation only goes to fiscal year starting
Therefore equalization payments, clawbacks and MHDS tax levy rates again will be addressed by
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