Posted on 05/24/2008 4:50:41 PM PDT by anymouse
With the price tag of providing care for more than 400 children seized last month from a polygamist ranch in West Texas expected to reach the tens of millions of dollars, a legislative panel suggested Tuesday that the state explore garnisheeing the religious organization's assets to recoup the costs.
"That compound didn't grow out of fairy dust," Sen. Robert Deuell, R-Greenville, said after a Senate Finance Committee hearing in which he urged state health officials to determine whether members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or even the sect as a whole, should be held responsible for the cost of care. "Why should we be footing the bill when they've got assets?"
The remarks came after the panel heard testimony that providing foster care, Medicaid coverage and casework for the children from the YFZ (Yearning For Zion) Ranch will likely cost taxpayers more than $1.7 million a month for as long as they are in state custody. The figure does not include the $5.3 million for the first six weeks of the operation or the cost of providing the required legal representation for each of the children, which is likely to cost at least $2.2 million.
The committee, which plays a lead role in drafting and overseeing the state budget, is exploring ways to cover the near-term costs even though no money was appropriated last year for such an event.
Legislative leaders and Gov. Rick Perry's office expect an emergency appropriation will be necessary when lawmakers return to Austin in January to ensure that the state's bills for the operation are paid.
"We basically need to pay what it's going to cost to do the job right, and we need to know, to the best of your ability, what that cost is so we can factor that in when we're making decisions about other worthwhile costs and needs in this state," Sen. Steve Ogden, a Bryan Republican who heads the finance panel, told Albert Hawkins, the state's executive commissioner for health and human services.
Law enforcement officers and officials from Child Protective Services rounded up the children from the ranch near Eldorado after an anonymous caller claimed to be a pregnant and abused 16-year-old forced into a marriage with a 50-year-old.
Officials now believe that the call may have been a hoax.
But CPS workers have said that the children were in imminent danger of abuse. In court hearings that began Monday in San Angelo, many parents are seeking to regain custody.
Deuell said efforts should be made to determine whether any of the children placed in foster care are covered by the parents' private insurance. If so, he said, the state would not have to enroll them in the taxpayer-supported Medicaid program.
Hawkins said it is unclear whether sect members have private insurance. He also said that officials have found no evidence that anyone from the sect is receiving public assistance.
Even if the adults do have private insurance, the children would still likely require Medicaid coverage, Hawkins said, because DNA testing to determine parentage is expected to take up to two months to complete.
Rod Parker, a spokesman for the FLDS, said any effort to seize assets would be an overreach by the state.
"I think my response is to ask the state on what legal grounds it believes it would be entitled to take FLDS assets," Parker said in an e-mail to the Star-Telegram. "This is a country of laws; they cannot simply go after assets without legal basis."
Look into 18USC241 Conspricacy Against Rights and 18USC242 Deprivation of Civil Rights Under Color Of Law.
If the State of Texas loses its appeal before the SC or Texas, the folks who planned and carried out this little 'raid' are in some very deep kimchi legally speaking.
L
Give me the names of the ones willing to file, if they aren't in jail are soon to be, and also the ones willing to get on the witness stand and have an attorney ask them any and everything they wish?? You file and you get to take the witness chair, and then all bets are off.
It won’t come to that. The gov’t will settle. Crying kids and parents will cost a great deal more.
State Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville whose district includes Eldorado, speculated that law enforcement and CPS probably had a loose plan in place. Hilderbran remembers talking to CPS officials about the ranch in 2005, when he worked to pass a bill targeted at the sect that raised the legal marriage age with parental consent from 14 to 16. The bill passed.
The state of Texas has been working on getting at these people for years. A conspiracy to get them actually. They changed the law concerning legal marriage age, JUST to get these people.
Up until a few years ago, it was legal, with stipulations, to marry at 14. but this cult/sect moves in and the age gets changed right quick to get them.
Did Texas go too far in polygamy case?
ALL that it took to get things rolling in motion was that hoax phone call. I want a LOT more info about that phone call, who made it, and who took it.
I am so glad that you have set yourself up as the ultimate arbiter of what is right and what is wrong with everyone. You make a good busybody. Also, the boys aren’t “tossed out to fend for themselves” as you claim. The boy/girl ratio is pretty even. You have bought every word that the very same media that can’t seem to tell the truth about ANYTHING that has to with liberalism without question.
There are not “old men raping little girls”. In fact, there hasn’t been a single charge against anybody in the entire FLDS. Also, a TOTAL of FIVE girls between 15 and 17 are said to either be pregnant or have given birth, and that is from the lead investigator!
The only “raping of little girls by old men” that is going on is in your overcharged imagination.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2020157/posts?page=13#13
Scary that folks like you have a vote. [shudder]
The only “raping of little girls by old men” that is going on is in your overcharged imagination.
__________________________________________________
Ah No....
I never said that.... so
It must all be in your own imagination......
And since everything YOU say is supposedly TRUTH....
Weeeeeelllll....
Just like other marriage amendments....
Bump - “conservative” is growing a whole lot of strange definitions around FR...
-PJ
You
are
delusional!
LOL
Well we will just take you at your word, you don't have any.
You do? If so prove it.
Boy, none of this innocent until proven guilty nonsense in your sick little universe, is there?
NOT against the law. They didn't have to tell the previous owners jack squat about what they were doing with it once they owned it.
What, you were the one that said you did not have any knowledge and I was just agreeing with you and now you want me to prove your first statement. What universe are you from??
Sick perverted old married men raping little girls have no claim on innocent. Only a choice between life are execution.
Apparently it was some kook up in Colorado who's making a career out of doing this. There have been details here on FR, but I can't remember what thread.
To see a nominally Christian community working up a pogrom against this religious group is pretty ugly. Smacks of what Jews suffered in Europe for about a thousand years. Makes me ashamed to even be a Christian.
"There was no evidence that the male children, or the female children who had no reached puberty, were victims of sexual or other physical abuse or in danger of being victims of sexual or other physical abuse"
*"... there was no evidence regarding the marital status of [twenty pregnant females identified by CPS as being from 13-20 years of age] when they became pregnant or the circumstances under which they became pregnant other than the general allegation that the girls were living in an FLDS community with a belief system that condoned underage marriage and sex"
CPS "failed to establish that the need for protection of the Realtors' (the name for the 38 women whose children were seized by CPS) children was urgent and required immediate removal of the children.... [N]one of the identified minors who are or have been pregnant are children of Realtors. There is no evidence that any of the five pregnant minors live in the same household as the Realtors' children."
"The notion that the entire ranch community constitutes a `household' as contemplated by section 262.201 [of the Texas Code, which deals with child protection actions] and justifies removing all children from the ranch community if there even is one incident of suspected child sexual abuse is contrary to the evidence. The Department's witnesses acknowledged that the ranch community was divided into separate family groups and separate households. While there was evidence that the living arrangements on the ranch are more communal than most typical neighborhoods, the evidence was not legally or factually sufficient to support a theory that the entire ranch community was a `household.'..."
Unless the State of Texas can strengthen its case and get the Texas Supreme Court to reverse the decision of the lower court, there is going to be major exposure to the taxpayers, irrespective of the legal problems of the cult's leaders.
I don't know why not. The thugs can take your children without legal basis, and numerous freepers applaud...
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