August 26, 2021

Good morning,

Thanks to everyone who joined this morning’s (weekly) NYS Council Public Policy and Member Support Call.

Attached please find a list of SFY22 NYS Council Budget and Legislative Priorities, for your consideration.  The document dovetails a discussion we had this morning during our weekly call regarding one of the priorities – to secure a carve out of mental health and substance use/addiction programs and services from Medicaid Managed Care.  We first discussed this proposal about three weeks ago on a Thursday morning call.  When I brought it up, member reaction was strong and supportive.  Since then I have been meeting with state leaders, making the case, collecting input, and generally doing diligence to ascertain whether our ‘ask’ has legs, and it does.   I brought the issue up again this morning to check in and to make sure we are all on the same page.  Member support was universal among the agencies on the call and so we are moving ahead with this priority ‘ask’, having already done some heavy lifting.

While it appears brief, our SFY 22 agenda for the upcoming legislative session is significant and will require a herculean effort from all NYS Council members to achieve our goals.  As such, in the days to come we will be implementing a NYS Council Legislative Network designed to activate member agency reps and other stakeholders, and to make it easy for everyone to support our agenda.  Some of the priorities on our list require a time-sensitive workgroup to identify solutions we can then present to government leaders (rate reform), while others will be driven by a large group of associations working collaborative to conduct a statewide campaign that brings home a win (workforce investment campaign).

I’ll have more shortly but in the meantime I wanted to make sure you had a chance to consider the attached Priorities List.  Please share your feedback with me as soon as possible, but no later than Tuesday, August 31. 

As always thank you for your tremendous support and partnership.