Friday, September 26, 2008
Still No Funding For AIDS Agencies
Posted by David Winkler-Schmit on Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 10:21 PM
According to a City Hall spokesperson, the City still hasn’t executed any of the contracts for funding local HIV/AIDS agencies.
As Gambit Weekly first pointed out in August (“What’s in Their Wallets?” ), the city annually receives federal monies to fund local agencies that assist the 4,144 people living with HIV/AIDS in the New Orleans area. The fiscal year for this funding began in March with New Orleans receiving just over $7 million for primary care and support services. At this point, local AIDS/HIV agencies have gone almost seven months without any financial reimbursement. One local agency, In This Together, was paying its employees with personal credit card loans, and was eventually forced to stop providing case management services for clients.
Now it appears another agency, N’R Peace, which primarily focuses on poor African American s, is headed in a similar direction.
N’R Peace’s executive director Demitre Blutcher says she is filling out paperwork to get her agency a line of credit in order to pay her employees. She is putting up a piece of her own personal property as collateral on the credit line. Blutcher says that the city’s Office of Health Policy and AIDS Funding (OHP) contacted her two weeks ago, saying she didn’t have the proper paperwork filed, so they couldn’t issue her a contract. Blutcher, who has run the agency for the past 11 years, has never experienced these kinds of contract problems.
“I think they’re actually trying to deny me because of all this. Because I did the article in the paper,” Blutcher says, adding that her signed contract is now with OHP.
The City Council’s Committee on Government Affairs was supposed to hold a hearing on these concerns in early September, but due to the Hurricane Gustav evacuation, the meeting never took place. Joan Hickson, Councilman Fielkow’s chief of staff, says the matter has been transferred to Committee on Housing and Human Needs.
To date, the committee has not put the issue on its agenda.
As for City Hall, Nagin spokesperson James Ross writes in an email:
Two (contracts) have not been received back from sub-recipients and, as a result, have not been routed. Five of the contracts are awaiting final signatures and should be fully executed within the next few days. The remainder of the contracts [is] in the final stages of the routing process.”
Comments (4)
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Call in the Inspector General! Where is the money? The NO/AIDS Walk should have been a protest against the inaction of the city. Imagine the power of the Task Force leading thousands of people from Audubon Park to City Hall in protest of the way the city manages AIDS funds. Instead we're out there raising funds to support services that our tax dollars have already paid for! How stupid are we?
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Actually, The NO/AIDS Walk does not raise funds that your tax dollars have already paid for. Government funding does not cover all of our programs and services. Our annual fundraisers, such as the NO/AIDS Walk, raise funds to fill in the gaps that government funding and other grants do not cover. Right now, with the issues with funding, the money raised at the NO/AIDS Walk is more important than ever. Not only to NO/AIDS Task Force, but to other AIDS Service organizations that participate in the Walk Share Grant Program.
TJ, you wrote, "Right now, with the issues with funding, the money raised at the NO/AIDS Walk is more important than ever." Why? Is it because without city contracts and reimbursements NO/AIDS, has relied on its resources (the money we donated to "fill the gaps that government funding and other grants do not cover") to fund HIV/AIDS services in the community since early this year? Imagine how much more good the money raised on Sunday and at other fundraising events could do if it actually were to be dedicated to filling the gap and meeting the unmet needs of the community. Instead, out of necessity, much of that money will be placed in reserve to avoid what the NO/AIDS Executive Director referred to as "a cash flow burden". It is a burden created by delays in the city's administration of the funds. People donate to support unmet needs - not to create large agency reserve accounts necessary to protect the cash flow of the agency due to the cities inaction. As of today, how much money does the city owe NO/AIDS Task Force? There must be relief that Sunday was a beautiful day for a walk in the park!
The PINK ELEPHANT sits in the middle of the room yet no one confronts it. We are confortable just continuing to skirt around it. How many more organizations that provide services to persons living with HIV/AIDS will be force to discontinue critically needed services before we confront the PINK ELEPHANT. Not confronting the PINK ELEPHANT put lives and our community at risk for something that the PINK ELEPHANT clearly can handle.
