San Jose
– It won’t take long for cuts in the county’s new budget to be
felt in South County. This summer, hundreds of Gilroy kids will be
left to their own devices because the county budget doesn’t have
room for the Mexican American Community Services Agency, which will
lose $150,000 in funding.
San Jose – It won’t take long for cuts in the county’s new budget to be felt in South County. This summer, hundreds of Gilroy kids will be left to their own devices because the county budget doesn’t have room for the Mexican American Community Services Agency, which will lose $150,000 in funding.
MACSA Regional Director Mariaelena DeLaGarza said that money is the entire budget for MACSA’s after school programs and summer day camps at the Gilroy Youth Center and San Ysidro Park.
“There’s going to be 500 kids with nothing to do after school or during the summer,” DeLaGarza said. “They will not have activities to keep them busy, and parents are not able to provide that support.”
MACSA may be the South County agency hit hardest by the county’s $126 million deficit, but it is not the only one. Community Solutions in Morgan Hill is looking at an $86,000 cut. The funding for Rebekah Children’s Services will stay flat. To Chief Development Officer Eleanor Villarreal, that feels like a cut.
“The dollar isn’t what it used to be,” Villarreal said. “When you get funding that’s the same or a little less, it’s a bigger loss than people might think.”
DeLaGarza said she is particularly upset by what she perceives as a disparity in social service funding between North and South County.
“Our needs in this community are huge,” she said. “Gilroy tops the charts with teen pregnancies, domestic violence and substance abuse in kids. We’re concerned we’re not able to have prevention services for kids.”
The endangered MACSA programs are part of its Zero Dropout Youth Academy, which offers counseling and academic programs for kids from 6 to 18 years old. All hope for the program is not lost because MACSA could still receive some funding from so-called addback funds that county supervisors will tap for various programs in the coming weeks.
But competition for funds is fierce.
“The hurt is spread out through the entire county,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage said this week. “The reality is that services are not where they were five years ago. The surprising thing is that with the amount of dollars we’ve had to cut, the service [levels] are stable.”
The $2.1 billion recommended budget for fiscal year 2006, which begins July 1, is more than $630 million less than the county’s budget for fiscal year 2003. County Executive Pete Kutras was able to cut the $126 million deficit for this year by eliminating 198 vacant full-time positions, refinancing the county’s retirement plan and drawing on about $40 million in “one-time” funds, money unexpectedly left over from the previous year.
There are virtually no service increases in the budget, though some additional staffing has been provided for the county probation department, in part because of trouble at the William F. James Boys ranch in Morgan Hill. The budget preserves the rural sheriff’s deputy for South County.
There are some service cuts. The county will no longer help staff the California Department of Forestry Santa Clara Unit fire station near Smith Creek in east San Jose, and the road repair budget has been slashed, though those cuts shouldn’t affect Gilroy drivers. Road Operations Superintendent Roger Piazza said that South County will adhere to its normal maintenance schedule in the coming year.
“We’ve been knocked down in half, but the good news is that the rural area near the south yard is keeping 23 miles [of road sealant],” Piazza said.
But as good as county officials feel about maintaining the status quo, there are storm clouds on the horizon. Kutras said the federal budget for fiscal year 2006 may contain bad news for the county.
“The major caveat about this recommended budget is that we’ve taken care of local problems and set aside for state reductions, but we’ve done nothing to deal with any federal reductions,” Kutras said. “We have a lot of potential issues coming down the road on the federal front.”
The federal budget as proposed by President Bush includes, among others, cuts to low-income housing program, juvenile justice programs and Medicaid, health care for the poor. Those could translate to losses of several million dollars in Santa Clara County.
Katie Brown, the county’s legislative director, said the federal cuts aren’t accounted for in the budget because there’s too much uncertainty in the federal budget and the cuts may not come until well into next year. She said health care cuts could be particularly devastating.
“A funding reduction would mean a really hard time providing services at public hospitals and clinics because revenue would be drastically reduced,” she said. “There would be less access to health care.”
And though the county’s projected deficits for future years are shrinking, Kutras and Gage said that the county has already cut so much that the toughest choices are still to be made.
“We’re running out of places to make reductions,” Kutras said. “We’ve pretty much hit the wall in our law and justice areas … we’ve hit bottom as far as services and staffing. We can’t make reductions in mental health services because of Proposition 63 [which requires minimum levels of mental health funding], and we have a looming problem in financing the hospital. We have funds set aside for [2007], but maybe the board will use them now. It gets harder and harder to find areas to reduce.”
Still, local social service providers remain hopeful that they will continue to serve the people of Gilroy.
“We have to look at our budget and look at costs that don’t affect the children and families we serve,” Villarreal said. “We’ll shut off the lights a littler earlier. We’ll do what we need to do.”
