Nonprofits Leader: Let Us Do It Cheaper

Gian-Carl Casa used to hear desperate pleas from nonprofits to avoid budget cuts. Now he’s issuing those pleas. And he has an idea.

Casa heard those pleas when he worked as the budget spokesman for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a job he left in 2016.

Now he issues the pleas as the head of the Nonprofit Alliance. The group represents the largest collection of nonprofit agencies in the state, more than 400.

As the state wrestles with another year of grim deficit forecasts, nonprofits are feeling the pain. Staff gets cut. Group homes have closed. In New Haven, the Community Action Agency closed its doors, then reopened them only slightly, for now. Casa said in a recent survey of 40 nonprofits, all reported they have more demand than ever for services but are struggling to make ends meet.

Casa has brought state lawmakers together with nonprofit agency heads in a series of meetings at the dawn of this legislative session, including one in New Haven. The message: Please stop the cutting.

How to do that? In part, Casa, like other nonprofit leaders, argues that lawmakers should raise revenues, not just cut social services, to close deficits. He argues that the state should consider funding for nonprofits as essential as the bond and debt payments it can’t touch when it comes time to make emergency cuts.

He’s also peddling a Big Idea: Move more of the state’s social services from government agencies to nonprofits. He argues that they’ll save money while preserving or even improving services.

Casa, who is 60 years old and lives in New Haven’s Morris Cove neighborhood, made that argument in an interview on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program. Following is an edited excerpt from that conversation, in which he responded to questions about whether that’s a truly viable alternative to better funded government services:

WNHH: What makes it cheaper [to outsource to nonprofits]? Is it cheaper because they don’t have a union, so, therefore, you’re not paying people as well and they don’t do as good workers?

Casa: I think that’s part of it.

So why do we want it?

It’s not the whole story. I think that last year, for instance, the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services put out a RFP [request for proposals] to run the [local state mental health branches] branches in Torrington. The providers that applied for that have said that … they could provide the services at less than the RFP [proposed paying].

Is that because they could pay their workers less. Because they don’t have a union?

You know, that’s part of it in some situations. But for instance, clinicians in behavioral health organizations are not paid at the lowest wage rates. Some are paid quite well. People who are psychiatric nurses, social workers, psychologists … It varies.

So give me an example of something that saves money without paying people less.

I think that some of the requirements for staffing are different. I believe that the requirements for inspections are different between the two. I don’t know how the requirements match, for instance, for the infrastructure of buildings. I can tell you that our members say that when a person goes into a state facility and then walks into one of theirs, they say, ​“This is a lot nicer.”

So you get a nicer facility by spending less money? That just doesn’t seem logical. I’m just trying to understand it. …

It’s because they are very efficient organizations.

Often when we hear different rules for inspections or different rules for staffing requirements, sometimes the reaction is: You’re scrimping on staff. Or you’re scrimping on inspections. Sometimes the other side is: Some of those requirements are one-size-fits-all or outdated — it doesn’t make you safer; it just makes you spend more money.

We only have had one real state study that compared the quality of nonprofits with the quality of state services. That was done in 2009 by the Program Review and Investigations Committee of the General Assembly. They found 40 percent fewer deficiencies in the nonprofit facilities. Those deficiencies were remedied at a much higher rate. Overall the quality ratings for nonprofits were at least as good if not better than the state facilities.

So you’re saying nonprofits spend less but get higher quality. But part of it is labor savings. Correct?

Yes.

But you believe this study would go against the argument that you’re just trying to go cheap on the quality of the workers and the care is going to be worse.

Absolutely. The quality has been shown to be at least as good as at state facilities, if not better.

At your forum two weeks ago in Science Park there was a Republican lawmaker who has a background in social services. She said: Let’s do a lot of that. Let’s offload a lot of state work onto local not-for-profits.

The response she got from, for instance, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp when she was here on the radio, was: That all sounds good the first year. Like you, she believed these agencies know how to do it better. But she said in her experience in 21 years at the state Capitol is that the first year the state says, ​“We’re doing this because you’re more efficient. We’re going to get more bang for our buck.” But that always that becomes the place where they cut and cut in subsequent years and make quality worse over time. Once it gets offloaded to a nonprofit, it gets easier to cut over time.

The mayor is correct. Those line items are cut time and time again because they’re vulnerable. The state facilities tend to be a little more consistent in the funding that they’ve received. That’s true.

But what is not true is that the quality has come down.

But she said over time inevitability the savings become just cutting them, and there’s less they can do.

If you save $1,000 at a given facility in the first year, that $1,000 rolls forward in the future. So it’s not just savings in the first year.

Click on the above audio file or the Facebook Live video below to hear the full interview with Gian-Carl Casa on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”