by J. Brooks Terry
Staff Writer
At a public hearing of the Duval County Legislative Delegation this week, the Jacksonville Transportation Authority said a proposed multi-million dollar Medicaid cut could leave its disabled riders greatly inconvenienced or even permanently stranded.
About 4,460 riders use the JTA Connexion, a service provided by the JTA which offers disadvantaged riders round trip rides across the city.
Statewide Medicaid allocations in the neighborhood of $75 million partially fund that program and others like it in Orlando, Palm Beach and Miami.
This year, the Agency for Health Care Administration, which administers those dollars, is capping the amount at $67 million.
Where are the cuts being made? On June 22, the Florida Commission for the Transportation Disadvantaged voted to apply most to only eight of Florida’s 67 counties. Among them, Orange, Miami-Dade and Duval County are being hit the hardest. In Duval County alone, a $2 million reduction has left some asking, what, if any, thought process is being used?
Wednesday, an agitated Duval Delegation made that point, allowing the JTA and various City Council members the opportunity to drive it home.
The first of its kind locally, the meeting came just hours after the Council passed an emergency resolution, urging “a fair and equitable budget reduction” across the state.
“I think it’s very disturbing that Duval County and only a few others are being told we may have to carry the load for the rest of the state,” Council member Suzanne Jenkins, also a delegate to the Florida Association of Counties, told the Delegation. “It’s not right.”
Council member Lake Ray said cuts in Duval County will ultimately impact the taxpayers.
“The JTA has said they cannot run that operation for $2 million less than what they use to operate it now,” he said. “It only makes sense that, eventually they are going to come to the City to make up for that, and we don’t have those funds because we’ve never had to budget for them until now.
“Their needs to be a more fair system when determining cuts like this.”
None echoed that sentiment better than JTA executive director Michael Blaylock. Blaylock said the $2 million, 42 percent funding reduction would render the JTA Connexion — its total annual budget hovers around $13 million — inoperable.
“It’s madness,” said Blaylock many times while at the podium. “JTA became the Community Transportation Coordinator in 2001 because the systems before had deteriorated so badly over time.
“Today our system makes more than 84,000 trips a year. This is not the way to implement public policy.
JTA is on the right track, and this is not the kind of system you can just go and tinker with. We’re talking about lives, not machines.”
Later, after spending several minutes defending the membership and intentions of the CTD, Commission member Rita Kane said Duval County might be eligible for more funding, providing JTA could recalculate its data to reflect a less expensive rate for the JTA Connexion.
JTA representatives agreed, saying they based their numbers on a scale somewhat different from what the CTD used when determining which counties were potentially overspending increasingly limited Medicaid funds.
In determining which counties would experiences the sharpest cuts, Kane said local taxi rates were often the benchmark by which lower rates were checked.
Hearing that, the Delegation then argued that if the JTA no longer offered transportation for the disabled, a taxi service would hardly fit the bill.
“To find a cheaper rate, it doesn’t seem right to simply go and contact several tax cab companies,” said Don Davis. “I hope you understand that they cannot perform this kind of service.”
Kane said no decision was final and that more input could possibly reflect a change in local cuts.
“We’re rechecking our calculations right now,” she said. “I can assure that, until we have completed a completed analysis, nothing is final.”
Follow up meetings with the CTD in Tampa, Miami and Jacksonville have already been scheduled for later this month.