Slots revenue would fund agency overhead

By Robert Swift (Harrisburg Bureau Chief)
Published: July 9, 2010

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HARRISBURG - A share of slots revenues would pay overhead costs for a new Cabinet-level state agency to oversee drug and alcohol programs.

State lawmakers have sent a bill creating the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs effective July 1, 2011, to Gov. Ed Rendell's desk. Rendell is expected to sign the measure, possibly as early as today.

The agency is getting wings at a time when many state programs are at their lowest funding levels in years and some state appropriations have been zeroed out due to two years of recession-spurred cost-cutting in Harrisburg.

Legislative approval came for the new department on the last day of the spring session and surprised some who questioned whether it's a good move at a time of fiscal crisis.

But the momentum for having a separate agency to oversee the $100 million in federal and state dollars spent annually on substance abuse treatment programs in Pennsylvania has been quietly building in recent years. The measure has passed the House in two previous sessions. Supporters persuaded most lawmakers that a cabinet-level department will prove cost-effective in the long run.

"We are not reinventing the wheel or creating this big new bureaucracy," said Rep. Gene DiGirolamo, R-18, Bensalem, the bill sponsor.

This would be accomplished by having the department absorb an existing drug and alcohol bureau in the Department of Health. The legislation specifies that all the bureau's 76 personnel, records and equipment would be transferred. The current cost of operating that bureau is $5.5 million annually. Federal funds pay a large share of that cost.

However, the department would need a secretary, deputies for three mandated bureaus of Prevention and Intervention, Treatment and Administration as well as other top-level administrators. An analysis by the House Appropriations Committee estimates additional costs for staffing and operations at $2.1 million annually.

A new earmark of $3 million of slots revenue from casinos for compulsive gambling and drug and alcohol treatment programs should offset the additional costs, the analysis said.

When lawmakers passed the law legalizing table games at casinos in January, they included a provision transferring $3 million of existing slots revenue each year to the Health Department for drug and alcohol programs. DiGirolamo said he worked to get that transfer in the law with the idea the money would eventually go to the new department.

Contact the writer: rswift@timesshamrock.com

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