Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

AUSTIN – Dallas County would be forced to provide guardians for senior citizens and other adults unable to care for themselves – or pay the state to do it – under legislation unveiled in the Senate on Thursday.

HARRY CABLUCK/AP Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, and Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Lewisville, discussed how to improve protection for elderly Texans at a Senate meeting Thursday.

Probate judges said Dallas County's unwillingness to spend any money on guardianships threatens other counties' uphill effort to overcome failings by the state Adult Protective Services division.

A four-month Dallas Morning News investigation recently showed that APS repeatedly has left elderly and disabled Dallas County adults in filthy homes, alone with sexual predators or exposed to financial exploitation.

"The amount that Dallas County has put into guardianship services has been zero," Tarrant County Probate Judge Pat Ferchill told the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

The state also has spent very little on guardianships. Since the late 1990s, APS has received several million dollars a year for guardianships, but critics say that money was absorbed by the bureaucracy, with about 50,000 Texans who need guardians left lacking.

Under a Senate bill to reform APS and Child Protective Services, a $1 increase in the fee for filing new deeds or other real estate records would generate an estimated $3 million a year. The money would be given to local or regional "guardianship alliance boards," which also would raise money from local governments and charities. The boards would recruit and train guardians.

If a county declined to pay part of the tab for creating guardianships, the state would absorb the cost – and then bill the county.

Judge Ferchill said Dallas County officials "are defaulting on a county obligation and pushing it over to the state." Those counties now funding guardianships, he said, "would be disinclined to continue doing that if they see that other counties are ... pushing it off to the state."

Dallas County Judge Margaret Keliher said that she and the commissioner's court are not to blame.

"We are right now running the figures to see what the need is and what we can do to help fund that," she said. "The reason it's now all of a sudden, in typical fashion, becoming a county issue is because it's so woefully underfunded at the state level."

Harris County spends $2.2 million a year on guardianships; Travis, $328,000, with the city of Austin chipping in additional funds; and Tarrant, $140,000. The only public funding in Dallas is $66,900 in state funds that APS pays to a local nonprofit.

Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, author of APS portions of the overhaul bill, said the state should oversee guardianship programs.

Health and Human Services Commission chief Albert Hawkins wants the Department of Aging and Disability Services, which answers to him, to oversee them.

But Mr. Shapleigh said judges appoint guardians and must have confidence in them to look after the finances and basic needs of mentally incompetent old people and disabled adults.

"We wouldn't be here if you didn't have independent courts coming forward and saying, 'Look, there's a problem in the APS system,' " Mr. Shapleigh said. "Let's face it, state agencies don't reform themselves."

Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Lewisville, who heads the committee, said her goal is for it to fine-tune the CPS and APS reforms and move the bill to the full Senate next week.