State Budget Agreement Offers Relief to Human Services Sector

The New York Nonprofit Press offered the following story in reaction to the NYS budget agreement announced:

Human service advocates and providers were generally pleased and relieved with the New York State budget agreement announced yesterday for Fiscal Year 2009-10 which begins on Wednesday, April 1st. The agreement by Governor David A. Paterson, Senate Majority Leader Malcolm A. Smith and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver closed the largest budget gap in State history -- $17.7 billion over two years -- through a combination of Federal stimulus funding ($6.2 billion), increases in taxes and fees ($5.2 billion) and cuts to state spending ($6.5 billion).

The final budget restores approximately $3 billion of the $9 billion in cuts which were originally proposed by Governor Paterson as part of his Executive Budget submission in December.
Approximately two thirds -- $254 million -- of the Executive Budget’s proposed cuts to human service programs were restored in the agreement. Among the wide range of programs which were entirely or partially restored were homeless prevention, refugee resettlement and Community Optional Preventive programs.

Significant restorations were made in the area of youth services, where a proposal to combine several youth development and juvenile justice-related funding streams into a single Youth Services Block was scrapped. The remaining budget reductions for several of the individual block grant components – Youth Development and Delinquency Prevention Program (YDDP), Special Delinquency Prevention Program (SDDP) and Runaway and Homeless Youth (RHY) – appear to be less severe , perhaps 10% -- than originally proposed. Funding for Advantage AfterSchool and Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) were also fully restored.
In a similar victory, Child Care funding was once again separated from the Flexible Fund for Family Service block grant.

Additional details regarding both restorations and remaining service cuts were not yet available as advocates continued to review the maze of budget bills being prepared for legislative approval.

Despite the relief over specific programmatic restorations, advocates noted the negative impacts which the budget will have for many service areas.

“It only looks good in comparison with how bad it could have been,” said Ronald Soloway, Managing Director of Government Relations at UJA-Federation of New York. “Hospitals, nursing homes and home care agencies still took considerable cuts and the mental health, MRDD and substance abuse providers are not getting back everything we would have wanted to see restored.”