January 26, 2006
NYCWatch:
CONTRACT STAND-OFF
PLUS! Cracking down on RW-funded legal services...
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CRITIC FROM WITHIN: Pressley was among the few Planning Council members to question the funding shift |
For those of you who have been following our coverage of an array of outer-borough groups whose Ryan White contracts were not renewed, we want to report briefly on the HIV Planning Council meeting in a Bed-Stuy basement last Thursday afternoon. There, Judy Verdino of the nonprofit MHRA, which administers the contracts, shared with the council and with community onlookers (many of them hopping-mad folks from the defunded groups, or their supporters) a presentation that included a no-surprises review of the contract-awarding process as well as per-category maps of funded and defunded sites in all five boroughs.
Verdino was quick to point out that all boroughs lost sites across the board because MHRA awarded 33 contracts this year instead of last year's 70, choosing to give fewer groups more money with the federal flat funding. She also said that only after contracts were numerically scored did MHRA then apply some discretion to make sure there was geographic diversity, noting that MHRA's goal was to have at least one site per service category (legal, family counseling and treatment adherence) per borough, if not per neighborhood. "I've been doing this 11 years and I will stand by the integrity of this process," she said, as onlookers, led by Housing Works director of New York City advocacy terri smith-caronia, talked back openly to the presentation.
Indeed, the maps present a somewhat more nuanced picture than many might have thought. There has not been a categorical shifting of RW-funded services from the boroughs to Manhattan. But to be certain, because of the sheer density of services in Manhattan, it was far less drained than the other boroughs, and certain stark gaps are clear. Legal services have been drained from the hard-hit Lower East Side and heavily impacted parts of Brooklyn far from Manhattan. There are no more family counseling sites on the Lower East Side or in all of Queens or Staten Island. And treatment adherence has been drained out of hard-hit outer Brooklyn.
New York AIDS Coalition head Joey Pressley, one of the few Planning Council members among the roughly 19 present to critique the funding shifts, put it best when he asked, "Do you think the awards reflect community needs?" (Yes, given the limited funds, answered Verdino.) Pressley then said, visibly angry, "This feels like the old argument that programs don't have to be in the actual neighborhoods [where people are affected]," adding later, "We're very disturbed with what's happened here—there must be community-based organizations."
In the wake of the meeting, outer-borough groups and their supporters are pressing forward to enlist the help of City Councilmembers (Brooklyn's Al Vann, who was at the council meeting, is already involved), borough presidents and HIV-care networks—as well as the media—to freeze the current contracts pending an investigation (the DOH does have final say in who gets what, Verdino noted) or help find interim money for heavily burdened groups that were abruptly defunded. Advocates also aren't giving up on the HIV Planning Council, whose Thursday meeting was short members who might have spoken up alongside Pressley. "We'd like the full Planning Council to assess what happened here," says smith-caronia.
We'll keep you posted on the story. Meanwhile, another story is emerging regarding legal-service groups that were funded: They're getting explicit word from MHRA that HRSA, the federal agency that administers Ryan White money, is going to start enforcing a long-lax rule that RW money must go only toward directly HIV-related cases. That rule basically means that such RW legal funding cannot go to housing- or immigration-related cases for clients with HIV/AIDS, which legal-service providers say currently makes up the lion's share of cases among their HIV-positive clients—especially cases contesting evictions and those helping immigrants pull together documents to show they're legal and hence qualified for other services.
In other words, "if a client is getting evicted, we can only represent them if the landlord was discriminating against them because of their HIV, and we're not seeing a ton of that in New York City in 2006," says Cathy Bowman, an attorney at South Brooklyn Legal Services, which received $50,000 more in RW funding this year than last. "But people are behind in their rent [and hence being served eviction notices] for a million different." She calls the idea that losing one's home is not directly related to access to caring for one's HIV "unbelievably restrictive and irrational."
According to Bowman, legal-service groups that still receive RW money are coalescing around how to address the impending crack-down. "We're desperate for money to do housing and immigration work [for clients with HIV/AIDS]," she adds, noting that state funding for such work has drifted upstate and a key source of city money for it is slated to dry up in May.
As ever, we'll keep you posted.