June may signify the kickoff to warmer and sunnier days for the majority of us, but it also represents the start of budget wars and costly cuts for taxpayers. As the June 30 deadline for the New York City Council Fiscal Year 2012 Executive Budget creeps up on the calendar, New Yorkers are beginning to get a little uneasy about the cuts that are being proposed at Council hearings, and for good reason.
On Friday June 3, I had the ‘pleasure’ to sit in on a heated Budget hearing. The room was filled with large groups of angry seniors and loved ones who are unhappy with the direction that Commissioner of Aging Lilliam Barrios-Paoli is taking for the City’s growing senior citizen population.
Faced with $44 million worth of cuts from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and one of the smallest budgets for a City committee, Barrios-Paoli must find a way to restore every single penny. If that isn’t hard enough, she also has to find a way to fund 10 additional senior centers as a part of Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign for modernized facilities with innovative technology.
Unfortunately, technology comes at a costly price — more like $3.7 million. In order to fund the new centers, Barrios-Paoli has proposed to cut 30 percent of the current funding that goes toward the existing 256 senior centers.
But here is the issue: there is hardly enough money to sustain our centers as they are now. On average, a case manager, or social worker, is assigned to 65 to 75 seniors and is only obligated to meet with them in person once a year. Such statistics are daunting. If one case worker is spread out so thin that they have to cover that many seniors, then that means that it is virtually impossible for for the elderly to get the necessary individual attention they need at such a sensitive and fragile time in their life. To make matters worse, with food prices going up and the budget shrinking, it seems highly unlikely that all of the senior agencies will be able to serve daily meals to every senior without at least one of them defaulting in the process. Does this mean that some low-income seniors who live on their own and are in desperate need of a meal will suffer first? Quite possibly.
Thus, the stage was set for yelling councilmen and women who spent more time pointing fingers than seeking solutions.
While there is nothing anyone can do about the tight budget, this situation has at least bought several troubling thoughts to my mind. For starters, it is hard for any of us to understand why seniors have one of the smallest budgets in the City when the senior population has increased by nearly 50 percent between the 2000 and 2010 census. And the most obvious question, which was bought up over and over again throughout the hearing, is how can we expand and add more centers when what we have is already suffering from poor service? As Haggai said, “Is it time for you to live in your paneled houses and this house lies waste (Haggai 1:4)?” There isn’t even enough money to fully finance senior abuse prevention programs since the Mayor has stripped Borough Presidents of the discretionary funding that they typically use to ensure senior safety. In an ideal situation, the Mayor and city would recognize this and instead spend more money on case workers in order to improve the current system that's in place. This is no different than the charter school argument: adding new and improved centers at the expense of the majority of us who are serviced by the current system will only make matters worse for the community.
Unfortunately, the only way to be heard in politics is to shout the loudest. There was shouting in the Chamber that I sat in from senior advocates who claimed that they should be the priority of the budget because they are an important population for the City. Then, when I walked out of the Chamber, there was shouting from CUNY college students and faculty who claimed that they were the most important population of the City. Sure enough, when I walked down another two blocks, there were some thousand firefighters who shouted outside of City Hall with the belief that their firehouses ought to take primary attention in the budget wars.
In the budget war, we all claim to be first, the priority of the City. But if all of us fight to be first, then none of us will ever last. What New York suffers from is a culture in which we get our money at the expense of our brother and sister. Afterward, we play the blame game and point fingers at the next guy in charge.
By Jerome Nathaniel
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