The TEAM Centers Inc. is a private nonprofit organization with an office at 1000 Third St. in Chattanooga that handles evaluation and assessment of people with developmental disabilities.NASHVILLE - A top state official said today he likely will extend for another 12 months a $774,000 grant to Chattanooga-based TEAM Centers Inc. to give the provider more time to pursue alternative funding sources for the diagnostic and treatment services it provides local people with mental disabilities.
"I'm probably going to to give them another year," state Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Commissioner Jim Henry told the Times Free Press. "The legislature can do what it wants to, but we're probably going to extend this grant."
TEAM Centers' interim executive director, Peter Charman, said it is too soon to say how the agency will respond. He said he intends to call the TEAM Centers' board.
The state says the unbid grant was unusual in nature and perhaps began as a pilot project in 1998. State officials planned to eliminate it, reducing funding to three months to give Team Centers officials time to apply for alternative sources of state funding, Henry and other officials said.
But TEAM officials opted instead to pay off current salary commitments and shutter that portion of their operations.
"I just heard about this, not 20 minutes ago from the commissioner himself," Charman said. "I need to talk to the board of directors of the organization about that."
He said he told Henry that it is unclear whether too many staffers already "have committed to other facilities' practices or not."
"Until 20 minutes ago, we thought we were losing a $774,000 grant," Charman said.
As for why the TEAM Centers, which has several other competitively bid state contracts for other services, never tried to pursue similar state funding, Charman said, "it wasn't feasible to try to do any of those things that quickly [in three months], and we're not sure it would have economically been helpful at all."
Tennessee senator Bo WatsonHenry and state officials say the grant is unique in that it provides funding not for services in a traditional fee-for-service Medicaid structure but through simply paying for salaries, fees, benefits, employment taxes and administrative assistance.
"We don't pay for overhead, we pay for services," Henry said.
He said the department, which was created as a separate entity to serve people with developmental and intellectual disabilities, serves few children, unlike the Chattanooga program.
The chairman of the Hamilton County legislative delegation, Senate Speaker Pro Tem Bo Watson, R-Hixson, had quietly been working to see if the issue could be resolved.
Earlier this week, Watson declined to go into details. Parents of children with autism are upset and angry about the planned closure of the program on Aug. 12.