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witn various State agencies, including the State Department
of Welfare and Mental Hospitals, and so forth, and from my
experience, when a decision was made to change a certain
rule or a function of the Department of Public Welfare, for
instance, one time the Department of Public Welfare
admitted all the mental patients to the State Hospital and
that duty or function was taken away, I don't know if it was
by executive order or by law, but, of course, we have a
State Department Welfare Manual which is revised now and
tnen. And, many times this manual was revised at the
direction of the general legislature because many laws were
not just administrative, certain regulations were not just
administrative or policy making and they had to be changed
by law.
I think the Committee has done the right thing
] in drawing up this proposal because I feel that if the
Governor decided to take the mental hospital away from the
Department of Mental Health and put it into the Health
Department, I believe this would require some type of
statutory change and therefore, I support the Committee in
this particular proposal.