Four of the committee reports essentially do that. The personalized misinterpretation of what Olmstead intends and allows weakens the credibility and effectiveness of our message, as was done in the Infrastructure Committee report. The desired result of our combined efforts will not come to fruition without the diversion of current institutionally biased funding streams. Such statements erect barriers to our agreed upon objectives of consumer controlled community based services. Rather than focus on the positive objectives we can all agree upon and increasing the size of the funding pie, these kind of statements set up win-lose battles over the same piece of funding pie.
Nobody wins, least of all the consumer.
Similarly, the Committee on Service Coordination and Public Policy missed an opportunity for recommending positive change by turning negative. This is the positive consensus goal that we are all working for. While some may deeply feel that there is an institutional bias in state policies, this is neither fact nor consensus. The efforts of this work group to construct forceful statements make the report appear shrill, undermining the effectiveness of what we want to accomplish, and compromising the credibility not only of this workgroup's report, but of all the workgroups. We would strongly recommend that the committee remove the polemics about institutional bias and make the first positive sentence of that section be the consensus objective.