Please do not institute a 56 hour 'soft cap' limit on the personal care/assistance hours for families who have adult children with disabilities living in their home or in the apartments in the community. You could be putting too many of these individuals at risk and endangering their safety. How can adults with disabilities who cannot speak, have lower functional abilities, have epilepsy or are a fall risk be expected to live completely on their own without attendants nearby to help them when faced with emergencies, have seizures or are approached by strangers in the community. Families with adult children with disabilities living in their home or in apartments in the community already provide so much extra care and support of their adult children that are beyond what hours they are already allotted. To reduce these hours further, puts both the adult children and the parents at greater risk of negative health outcomes which will mean further expenses to ameliorate these issues. 

Do not remove LRI's as allowable providers of Employment and Community Transportation services. Due to the poor wages offered to DSP and other services providers, it is all too often that providers of these services cannot be found who are willing to take these low reimbursement rates to support adults with disabilities in the community. The ESOs (employment service organizations) cannot find adequate job coaches to support indivdiuals nor do they provide more than the bare minimum of hours (less than 10 hours/month) to support an adult with disabilities in a job, and when they do show up, they do not provide any job support services, they just 'monitor' how the individual is doing to complete the paperwork they need. Moreover, with high staff turnover of job coaches, they often do not know what services the individual needs so are useless to the employer to help.

Transportation services deal with the same difficulties - low reimbursement rates, high turnover, stressed service providers - and cannot be relied to provide transportation services, especially on a less than five-day-a-week typical model. Many adults with disabilities cannot handle a five-day-a-week program so need a more modified schedule, but transportation service providers cannot guarantee consistent drivers on schedules that are not the typical model.

Lastly do not switch to brokers and get rid of Service Facilitators. Sometimes the SF are the only individuals who can advise families how to proceed and deal with difficulties in provider services, advise on state offices, or assist with questions on available resources. They see and understand the situations that families are dealing with on a daily basis, unlike some 'broker' from the state, so they can advise and counsel families on situations as they arise. 

Families and caregivers are already shouldering so much of the work for the state! Why would you want to reduce support further? Support families and caregivers who are supporting adults with disabilities, the most vulnerable members of our commonwealth!