Ghiz Response to Human Services

Question: Last winter five council members attempted to kill city funding for human services. After four standing-room-only public hearings, council "compromised" by cutting those funds from 1.5% to .06% of the budget. What is your position on this issue?

I am afraid that there is quite a bit of misinformation out there regarding human services. Last December, five of us put together a budget proposal that included 2.2 million dollars for human services. We allocated 1.2 million from the General Fund (where HS budget is usually allocated), and another 1.0 million from CDBG funds, which is federal funding.

There were two reasons we allocated the HS budget this way: 1) the city manager had recommended that HS be cut back to 1 million. We thought that was too drastic, so we added .2 million to that number to be taken from the General Fund, and we found another 1 million from federal funding (for those HS programs that would fit into the CDBG definition for funding); and 2) we knew the city was facing a 13 million dollar deficit in 2008, and the first fund that gets raided when there need to be cuts to the budget is the General Fund. If we had kept the entire 2.2 million in the general fund, we knew it would be hacked out the following year.

Unfortunately, other members of council wanted the entire amount to come from the General Fund. We were very reluctant to do that, but we ended up compromising with 1.6 million for HS from the General Fund. If we had a surplus in January 2007, we planned to allocate another 1 million to HS from the General Fund. This was in fact done, so the HS budget is now at 2.6 million dollars, .2 million more than in 2006. However, this money is all accounted for in the General Fund. Hence, it is subject to cut backs.

There is widespread innuendo that five members of council didn't care about HS or that we were indifferent to it. To the contrary, we were very careful about HS funding to the point of trying to protect some of it by getting it out of the General Fund. Unfortunately, that plan didn't work.