My apologies for not posting this right away. For those who have been following the battle in the California Legislature to restore some of the lost funding to disability services, WE WON!
OK, we started out trying for a 10% increase and got 7.5%, but this is a heck of lot better than when we got nothing in the new budget.
The ARC and United Cerebral Palsy California Collaboration spent a lot of time getting support for this and deserve a lot of thanks from our community. The letter announcing the final decision is below.
Dear Friends,
The Assembly and Senate just passed the bills to save our community services. The bills now to Governor Brown for his signature, which is certain.
As Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins said, “The passionate advocates for this funding should be proud of their persistence” – two years of persistent, vocal, united community advocacy.
The bipartisan vote on the key bill to provide the funding was 28-11 in the Senate and 60-16 in the Assembly. To find out how your assemblymember voted, clickhere. The Senate vote isn’t up yet, but the 28 “aye” votes were all the Democrats and two Republicans, Senator Huff and Senator Cannella.
If your senator and/or assembly member voted “aye,” please call them now to thank them. Click here to find them. If you talked to someone in their office before, call that person and let them know we don’t just complain, we thank them when they deserve it. And save their name and number; there will be more fights.
If your senator or assembly member is among those Republicans who for one reason or another felt they couldn’t vote for it, don’t hold it against them! The Republicans’ vocal support for months was a big reason why we got this far. And if they had tried to stop their fellow Republicans from voting “aye” today, they probably could have stopped them, which would have blocked the bill — but they didn’t.
This isn’t the last fight. As Assemblymember Mark Stone said to all his colleagues who voted for the package, “Stay with us next year, the year after that, the year after that, to protect this particularly vulnerable community.”
(Actually, we can’t even wait till next year. Today’s action will, for the most part, stop the deterioration of our community services, but we have some gaps to try to fill in the budget that will get adopted in June. Stay tuned.)
But for now, it’s time to celebrate.
And thank you for your advocacy.
Greg
Greg deGiere
Public Policy Director
The Arc & United Cerebral Palsy California Collaboration
1225 Eighth Street, Suite 350, Sacramento, CA 95814
—
By
Matt Carey
Left Brain Right Brain 
Out f-ing standing! Excellent work!
Raise enough hell and they’ll eventually want to preserve their hearing. 🙂
They did a lot of hard work. I am so happy that people like this are fighting for my kid.
our son was vaccine injured. HIB vaccine and then MMR. They were the only two vaccines he received, both almost killed him. I will not stay silent and I will never comply to shooting known NEURO TOXINS into my child made by Corporations who continually engage in civil and criminal fraud. This is highly unethical and human experimentation and expressly forbidden in the NUREMBERG code of ethics.
Stephanie, first, there are no neurotoxins (or as you quaintly call it, NEURO TOXINS, as if random capitalization actually means something) in vaccines. That is an outright lie.
Second, the Nuremberg Code is as follows:
Required is the voluntary, well-informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity.
The experiment should aim at positive results for society that cannot be procured in some other way.
It should be based on previous knowledge (like, an expectation derived from animal experiments) that justifies the experiment.
The experiment should be set up in a way that avoids unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injuries.
It should not be conducted when there is any reason to believe that it implies a risk of death or disabling injury.
The risks of the experiment should be in proportion to (that is, not exceed) the expected humanitarian benefits.
Preparations and facilities must be provided that adequately protect the subjects against the experiment’s risks.
The staff who conduct or take part in the experiment must be fully trained and scientifically qualified.
The human subjects must be free to immediately quit the experiment at any point when they feel physically or mentally unable to go on.
Likewise, the medical staff must stop the experiment at any point when they observe that continuation would be dangerous.
Experimentation. Vaccines are in general usage, so are not medical experiments. So, you lie again claiming that vaccines are mass experimentation upon the general populace.
Finally, there are some children who do have adverse reactions to vaccines. There are also people, children included, who have adverse reactions to sterile water. It happens, it’s rare and it’s a shame. If we give up every medical procedure that might result in an adverse reaction, we’d be back with witch doctors and pandemics that kill off half of the population.
As I’ve been present for a mutual polio and measles outbreak and saw far too many tiny graves being filled, I’ll not permit that to occur in my homeland and especially, not to my grandchildren.
So, kindly stop lying to us and yourself.
” I will never comply to shooting known NEURO TOXINS into my child”
And yet you proposed increasing the exposure to thimerosal for infants. Do you not consider that a neurotoxin?
By the way, take a look at the article above. It has NOTHING to do with vaccines. Well, except as a side note. People like you pulled advocacy efforts away from supporting efforts to improve services for the developmentally disabled. We could have won sooner, and possibly bigger, without your efforts.
This has nothing to do with anything but I just went to look at some of your blogroll stuff
Action For Autism is broken.
thanks for this heads up. I’ll check on that.
Powerful message. Hopefully you will be back at the AACC. I just read where you wrote: “To bring this home in a very personal way, consider this exchange from a recent IEP meeting I had. I was asked for a long term goal for my son. I answered that I want him to be in a position to be able to say— and be believed—“this person is abusing me”. Because if he can say that and be believed, the chances of him needing to say it drop dramatically. ” My admiration for you has quadrupled! Thank you from the most neglected end of the spectrum.
IACC