King County Journal - October 13, 2002

Human Services Funding Requires Public Awareness
By Pamela Mauk

I appreciated the Eastside Journal's Sept. 24 front-page article on pending King County cuts in human services. I believe most people do not understand how human services are funded, and thus precious community supports may quickly disappear without real awareness by the public.

On the block this year are the basic building blocks for a healthy community. Nothing less than the dismantling of our health and human services infrastructure is at stake. Services that readers may assume are, of course, available will be removed.

We recently surveyed the 18 independent agencies providing services to 35,000 Eastsiders each year on the Family Resource Center campus. We asked them to describe the impacts of 2002 and proposed King County cuts. I don't have space here to review the breadth and depth of the losses, except to point to a few examples:

• For Community Health Centers of King County, the $500,000 lost in 2002 represents the cost of providing 5,000 medical visits per year or just over 3,500 dental visits per year to children and adults who otherwise could not afford care. The 2003 proposed budget eliminates another $500,000 in funds.
• Youth services for violence prevention and protection of at-risk teenagers has taken and will take devastating cuts. Given that all agree that King County's budget limitations stem in part from the huge demands of funding the criminal justice system, these cuts are particularly penny-wise and pound-foolish. Reckless, to be more exact.

There are many more specific examples where the poorest and the youngest will be left without supports. More broadly, no agency or group will be left unaffected by these catastrophic cuts.

Most agencies both on the Family Resource Center campus and throughout King County refer clients to multiple other agencies: go here for work training, here for food, here for dental work, here for counseling. A loss of services at one can leave the type of service gap that will collapse the efforts of all. Further, these cuts will force other funders to shift emphases to fill in new gaps in service, thereby depleting many more resources than are currently under discussion.

Most health and human service agencies have multiple funding streams. As one agency director said, ``It's like a quilt. You pull one or two threads out and before you know it, it all begins to unravel.''

Side by side with King County funding issues are grave concerns about balancing the next state budget and cutbacks or elimination of programs funded by the federal government. It is imperative that the community works to maintain King County funds that maintain the community's health. We must then gather together to identify stable long-term funding for all key community services.

Pamela Mauk is executive director of Family Resource Center in Redmond.

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