“Take care of the people without adherence to a whole bunch of bureaucratic silly nonsense and rules,” he said.

However, Kerry Winterer, CEO for HHS, said the five service areas already are responsible for providing services in their area.

Meister recently spoke with an unnamed HHS child protective service worker whose caseload went from 40 clients to 258 clients, and in Omaha CPS workers went from 254 down to 100.

“There is no better evidence of what’s going wrong with the system than watching the crime rate soar in Omaha, watching tragedies like Landon Payne happen. We’ve got to fix this broken system.”

Winterer said Omaha’s crime rate isn’t an HHS issue, and wouldn’t comment on specifics of Landon Payne’s case.

But even with a more regionalized system, Meister isn’t sure it would’ve prevented Payne’s death.

“I think, locally, somebody thought there was a problem, but it didn’t fit the matrix. I think had a social worker on the ground been permitted to take some steps, I think this whole thing could’ve been avoided,” he said.