“We’re very proud of who we serve, we’re very proud of the community that we serve, boy it’s just wonderful to have the support. It’s really great.” – Don Rice
Geauga County voters went to the polls Tuesday and easily passed a five-year, 1-mill additional levy for the operations and funding of programs for the Geauga County Board of Developmental Disabilities, known as The Bessie Benner Metzenbaum Center.
According to unofficial results the Geauga County Board of Elections released after 9 p.m., Issue 29 won by more than 3,200 votes: 17,125 for the levy and 13,908 against.
This is the first time the Metzenbaum Center has asked residents for new levy dollars since 2003.
“The passage of the levy says to us that what we’re doing is a value to the community. That, more than anything else, is a pat on the back that we feel needed, that we feel wanted by the community,” said Superintendent Don Rice, who waited for results with roughly two dozen supporters at Danny’s Boys in Chester Township. “We promise that we’re going to do everything to maintain that trust of community and do our best to move forward, continue to serve people and do it wisely.”
The additional levy will cost the owner of a $100,000 home about $35 per year more in property taxes, according to the Geauga County Auditor’s Office.
“The taxpayer dollar, particularly the local levy dollar has to be something that we have to be very cognizant of using wisely,” Rice said. “We’ve been busy trying to use federal dollars to match whenever possible so that we’re not using and paying 100 percent of the cost with local levy dollars. We’ve also been trying to make use every opportunity there is to find ways where we work with other agencies, other districts so that we don’t duplicate efforts and can operate efficiently.”
He added, “There’s no need for all of us to have the same type of service if we can join together and work together, whether it’s school-age services, whether it’s adult services, whether it’s transportation, finding ways to work with other agencies so that we’re not wasting money is what we’ve been trying to do for the last almost 10 years.”
The center, located in Chester Township, provides programs and services to clients from birth through adulthood.
“This allows us to continue on with what we’ve been doing,” said Rice, who added changes in rules and regulations at the federal level have taxed those services. “We’ve seen an increase of more than 40 percent in the number of people we’ve served in the last 10 years. This allows us to continue on. We’re going the modify our programs to continue to serve them better, but it’s not necessarily going to change a lot of things.”
When a child is born with developmental disabilities, Metzenbaum provides therapists to help the family learn how to help the child develop as much as possible. The program helps support a child once he or she reaches school age and then funds a student to be integrated back into the public school classes, Rice said earlier.
Once children turn 16, Metzenbaum works with businesses to find them suitable jobs. There are about 80 of these individuals working in the community, he previously said, and others are being productive in workshops.
So far this year the board has served 859 people, Rice said, with about 150 employees and about 20 outside providers.
“We already provide a wide range of services for everything from a child that’s just been born with spina bifida or another birth defect, all the way to somebody who is in their 90s and needing residential care,” explained Rice. “We already cover a broad range of those things; we just need to continue to do that for the people that we have.”
Since 2003, the number of clients served has increased from 580 to 800 in 2015. The number of employees at the center has decreased from 350 to fewer than 160, according to a levy fact sheet from The Metzenbaum Center Levy Committee. Expenses at the center have risen 29 percent.
“This is a win-win for Geauga County. This is proof that Geauga County cares,” said JoAnn Brace, co-chair of the levy committee. “They care about everyone in their community and I’m proud to be a Geauga County resident.”
Added Brace, “So many people pulled together to make this happen because this is a family. It’s a family that cares about everyone and it’s a family that works together to make sure that everyone in Geauga County will be cared for and be cared for well.”
“We had a great group of folks, everybody from parents to employees to a whole group of just good community members who were supporting us between putting out signs, letters to the editor, speaking, making engagements,” said Rice. “We’re very proud of who we serve, we’re very proud of the community that we serve, boy it’s just wonderful to have the support. It’s really great.”
