Tri-Town faces $1.2M in cuts

For weeks leading up to the sequester, social service agencies braced for the worst. And on March 1, with Congress and President Obama at a standoff, their fears came to fruition. At Tri-Town Community Action Agency, automatic cuts through the sequester amount to $1.2 million in lost federal funding.

“We knew there would be cuts; we didn’t think they would be so draconian,” said Joseph DeSantis, chief executive officer at Tri-Town.

While whispers of sequestration cuts have been heard since the Budget Control Act of 2011, as Washington tried to set the debt ceiling, DeSantis and his staff were cautiously optimistic about how community action agencies would fare. They never thought it would come this far, or that Congress and the White House would truly reach an impasse.

“They were setting it up to force a compromise – it never happened,” DeSantis said.

Notices from federal funding sources have already started coming in, and Tri-Town must assume that without further action in Washington, there will be a 10 percent cut across the board to their roughly $12.5 million budget. Though the cuts called for closer to 5 percent reductions, the impact is closer to 10 due to mid-year changes.

“We already spent based on our budget,” said Brenda Dowlatshahi, Tri-Town’s chief operating officer.

In Johnston specifically, Tri-Town provides $4.7 million worth of services, from job programs and education to income management, emergency support, nutrition, health and youth development. Tri-Town serves nearly 18,000 people – 6,275 of them in Johnston alone.

The first program to feel the pain is Head Start, an early intervention education program for low-income children. Tri-Town rents a space for the program in Johnston but has already notified the landlord that they will close doors at the end of April. Head Start will instead switch to a home-based option for early intervention, also laying off one teacher. The program will start two weeks later in the year and close two weeks earlier. Next year, additional cuts will lead to two more staff layoffs, and the layoff of a family advocate. Statewide, Head Start and Early Head Start will be eliminated for approximately 200 children in Rhode Island. DeSantis is surprised that Head Start has not been spared some of the pain, calling it a favorite program for legislators, with bipartisan support.

The Low-Income Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) will lose its 10 percent, too. As is true with many programs, DeSantis is not yet sure what the human impact will be. He predicts the state will change LIHEAP eligibility guidelines, providing heating assistance to fewer Rhode Islanders. In the Health Center, which is in the process of expanding, there will be cuts to medical staff to the tune of $100,000. Dowlatshahi fears that these cuts will be especially challenging for the many uninsured Rhode Islanders that Tri-Town serves.

“Thirty-five percent of the people in our Health Center are uninsured. They’re on a sliding scale, so the most you’re going to get is $20 per visit,” she said.

Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), which DeSantis called the glue of this agency, will be modified and cut. Another $130,000 will be lost from services to seniors and disabled adults. The majority of the agency’s work in juvenile hearing boards will be eliminated altogether, as they pay for that out of pocket. Smithfield pays for the board, so that will likely stay. DeSantis added that Johnston is one of the only communities that supports Tri-Town from their general operating budget. The town gives approximately $30,000 to the agency, which DeSantis says he is grateful for, now more than ever.

Altogether, DeSantis and Dowlatshahi estimate 10 to 12 Tri-Town employees will lose their job.

“It’s very frightening,” Dowlatshahi said, noting the irony that these cuts could increase unemployment both from social service workers and from the people no longer receiving job training, GED or other programs that aim to put people back to work. She does not know how the agency will continue to deliver the same level of service with that kind of staff reduction. She sees every department and program doing more with less, and federal reporting guidelines have become exponentially more stringent over the past five years, requiring constant monitoring. To remain transparent and accountable, Tri-Town must account for all of the money, time and human resources spent to maintain programs – a job in and of itself.

All of these cuts were presented to the Board of Directors and staff last Friday, and Tri-Town executives will begin the difficult task of choosing who will stay and who will go.

“We’ve got to make the right business decisions and affect quality as little as possible,” DeSantis said.

That is especially difficult, he added, because the cuts are universal. The $1.2 million lost comes from every federally-funded program, whereas a straight funding cut would have allowed him to cut costs in certain programs more than others.

“It would have been easier if they gave us more discretion. We could have prioritized,” he said.

Dowlatshahi has been with the agency for 37 years, DeSantis for 40. In their careers, they can’t remember a time when social services have been so threatened with funding cuts.

“This is the worst we’ve seen it in 40 years. It’s over the top,” DeSantis said.

If he could talk to the policy makers responsible for sequestration, he says he would warn them to think long-term.

“I would tell them that in this economy, and given the need, ultimately they’re going to pay more,” DeSantis said. “These cuts, to me, are purely political. I think it’s foolhardy.”