Recently, I read an article about how Maine ended the past fiscal year with a large budget surplus (Sun Journal, July 31). Not too long ago, I read an article about Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services being short of staff for child care workers, who are overworked, taxed with paperwork, in addition to child safety concerns.

I spent my professional life working for the state, and my colleagues and I experienced similar problems. Similar to now, the management was not transparent.

I think that if someone put those two pieces together and dug into them, there might be a valuable article about how budget surpluses are gained by cutting staff, training and budgets. Management will try to point responsibility at the field staff, and it may be that there is some responsibility at that level. But they will never point to themselves for their constant cutting funds, which is done for political bragging rights, nor for adopting substandard programming because it is cheaper than professionally developed, reliable, verifiable systems.

Meanwhile, there are children out there being injured; but Maine has a budget surplus.

Joseph DeFilipp, Auburn

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