Disability Care Homes Struggle to Maintain Staff Amid Budget Cuts

Group homes run by disability care agencies across Long Island are tasked with providing a good quality of life for people who need support in their daily lives.

But impeding that mission to provide a good quality of life, full of activities and socialization, is a lack of funding from the state. Charles Evdos, the executive director of the agency Rise Life Services, based in Riverhead, said that budget cuts — 16.2 percent in 2020 and 23 percent in 2021, followed by a decade of lack of Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA) — make it difficult to maintain and incentivize staff.

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“The state needs to come to the plate,” Evdos said. 

State Sen. John Mannion, the chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Disabilities, did lead a public hearing on Sept. 14 in Albany to evaluate the current workforce challenges within the system that supports New Yorkers who have intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

“This hearing is significant action,” Mannion said during the hearing introduction. “It is a manifestation of a very real crisis that is taking place in communities in New York. There are simply not enough caring and compassionate New Yorkers who are pursuing employment working with the disabled.” 

Low pay is clearly one of the factors behind this workforce shortage, Mannion said. But low pay is not the only reason, as the state needs to fund the recruitment of more clinical staff, such as nurses and mental health professionals. 

“We need to work with community colleges,” Mannion said. “We need to fund tuition credits and mentorships. We need to have a strategy that brings together job seekers with these challenging but rewarding and fulfilling positions.” 

Currently, predominantly women of color, make up most of the workforce in disability care across the state, Mannion said. At Rise Life, Evdos said, more than half of the employees are Black or Hispanic.

“They talk about fair wages and helping the minorities, and they’re not helping the minorities,” Evdos said. “Living on Long Island is very expensive. A lot of our employees work three or four jobs just to make ends meet.” 

To address the crisis, Mannion said, the committee has rejected the cuts proposed in the budget and also secured the first COLA in over a decade. 

“This is long overdue,” Mannion said. “No employee anywhere should go without a raise and people who provide this service certainly deserve one. Our front-line healthcare heroes, particularly those who we entrust with our vulnerable, deserve to be valued. They deserve better pay.” 

But these victories are not enough, Mannion added, as they must serve as a launch pad for additional increase in salary for direct support professionals. 

The state did just receive $700 million from the federal government, with $550 million of those monies allocated towards this workforce shortage. “It will provide for things like longevity bonuses and hazard pay,” Mannion said. 

During the hearing, he called on the state to match the federal investment and include $500 million in the next budget to “begin moving the needle on this crisis.”

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