Brown: Disabled group home residents still stuck in budget limbo

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Ljubica Tomasic would be the first to tell you that her severely mentally disabled son Damir is not an easy person to love.

“He’s very, very complicated. Very difficult to be around,” said Tomasic, 61, of Arlington Heights.

A 41-year-old man with the mental understanding of a 2-year-old and the physical strength of a bull, Damir requires constant attention and is prone to violent outbursts when he doesn’t get it, she said.

“Damir gets in people’s faces. He talks nonstop,” Tomasic said. And if the person to whom he’s talking doesn’t respond to his liking, he starts hitting or throwing things.

That’s why Tomasic considered herself so fortunate 20 years ago when the state of Illinois agreed to place Damir in a Wisconsin group home called Chrishaven because of a shortage of appropriate facilities in this state.

At Chrishaven, they understood how to handle Damir at a point when she no longer could safely do so. More important to his mother, they took Damir into their hearts.

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“They love him up there. They love him,” said Tomasic, who never expected anyone else to make that bond with her son.

Now that bond is under threat of being broken by the state of Illinois budget impasse.

The state hasn’t paid Chrishaven for the care of Damir and four other Illinois residents since the new budget year started in July, and the small nonprofit agency says the five must leave their facilities if the bill remains unpaid.

A March 31 deadline was extended until the end of April, but there’s still no resolution.

Wait a minute, Brown, some of you are thinking. Didn’t you report in February that this problem had been solved by Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger?

Well, I reported Munger said she recognized the importance of keeping them at Chrishaven, believed she had legal authority to pay the bill and would do so just as soon as Gov. Bruce Rauner’s Department of Human Services sent her a voucher for payment.

As I feared, however, the Republican comptroller doesn’t have quite that much juice with the guy who appointed her. Rauner’s lawyers have taken the position the state has no legal basis to pay the cost of individuals placed in out-of-state group homes without a state budget appropriation in place — and you know how well that’s going.

The result is that these individuals, most with severe developmental disabilities, remain in limbo, a particularly trying situation for their aging parents.

As best as I can tell, the Rauner administration is now trying to push off their care on the state of Wisconsin, which operates under a managed care system that would not necessarily allow them to stay at Chrishaven.

“They’re just pushing us back and forth,” Tomasic said. “I feel like these kids are a football between the states.”

One family, the Drazners, have given up finding a solution that will keep their autistic son Keith at Chrishaven and have accepted a placement closer to their north suburban home. That works well for them, but they remain worried about how Keith will adapt to being uprooted.

The Department of Human Services offered me this statement in response to my request for an interview: “Wisconsin and Illinois are still in discussions regarding the situation. Wisconsin has been very generous with their assistance to date. Simultaneously, Illinois is working to line up potential providers in Illinois to care for the residents at Chrishaven if they ultimately move back to Illinois. The provider has agreed to continue providing services until the end of April while we work towards a resolution. Illinois will ensure that services for each of the individuals continues uninterrupted, whether in Illinois or Wisconsin.”

They make it sound so reasonable. But the most reasonable solution remains the obvious one:

Pay the bill!

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