It’s budget time, Tenant Resource Center is losing $90,000 from the county, which is 1/3 of our budget and it will destabilie the entire organization. The City and County are determining their budgets TODAY and we need your help, ESPECIALLY if you live in Dane Dane County, outside the City of Madison. Please take a few moments to see how you can help!
These are in chronological order, most urgent (today at noon, today at 7:00 etc.) to less urgent, but its all urgent. (sigh.)
1. Ask City Council members to add an amendment to help the TRC BEFORE NOON TODAY.
For 17 years the county has served Dane County residents, so City of Madison dollars were used to subsidize people in the City of Madison, who are also in the City of Madison. With Dane County pulling their funds, we don’t have enough funds to serve everyone in the City of Madison, since the County was helping to serve Madison rensidents. 1/3 of an organization’s budget means that more of our dollars need to go to pay for copiers, phone services, our administrative positions to do all the reports required to get our funding and support our volunteers and all the other infrastructure that goes into running a business. When 1/3 of your partners pull their money, that infrastructure is shaken and jeopardizes the services to the other partners (UW and City of Madison) as we have to shift our dollar to cover essentials to keep a business open. Current our Housing Counseling Program is most in jeopardy. At the moment, the city pays $16,000 for rent, $3,500 for supplies and $34,000 for staff for housing counseling- so about one staff person is paid the city required living wage and health insurances and taxes. One person, with no support can’t serve all the residents in the City of Madison and do outreach to neighborhoods, youth groups, seniors groups, etc. Not to mention that without infrastructure to keep up with brochures, the website, keeping on top of law changes, this person can’t do their job. With the county pulling essentially 2.5 staff people, and since we only have a staff of 7.5 people, this no longer works. Please ask the city council members to add $50,000 for the Tenant Resource Center to serve tenants in the City of Madison, its a small amount given that half the households in the City of Madison are renters. We need support of our core services. Amendments for the Board of Estimates are due this morning by noon. Email allalders@cityofmadison to ask them to support TRC, or give them a call if you have the time!
2. Attend the public hearing on the budget at 7:00 tonight.
Tonight the county board will be hearing testimony about priorities for this year’s budget. It’s the last chance you will have to address the full county board on the budget, since they don’t allow public testimony the evening they do the final vote on the budget. Thank you to everyone who attended County Executive Joe Parisi’s listening sessions (that didn’t seem to have any impact) and the Human Services hearings in early September. As of today, no supervisor has sponsored an amendment, several are considering it, but the first deadline for Human Services amendments was Monday at 10am and nothing was submitted. The final deadline for an amendment at Health and Human needs is Monday at 10am, but we need supervisors who represent people outside the City of Madison to support an amendment. Tonight is our chance to address the full county board and make our case for the final time. Please show up tonight and tell the county board that Dane County renters deserve the same services as City of Madison renters, including help with landlord entry, repairs, getting a security deposit back, breaking a lease, non-renewal, notices of increased rent and wading through the eviction process and what all the notices mean. These are legally tricky issues and people can’t afford lawyers to sort this all out – and given the law changes in the past three years – this service is needed more than ever. If you can’t make it tonight, email county supervisors at county_board_recipients@countyofdane.com or contact them individually. Ask your supervisor to support and amendment to fund one staff person at the Tenant Resource Center at $50,000 so that we can continue to do basic housing counseling for tenants that do not live in the City of Madison.
3. Contact Health and Human Needs members before next Monday at 10am.
The final deadline for amendments to Health and Human Needs, which is the committee that votes on Human Services and makes recommendations to the finance committee is Monday at 10am. Currently, we still don’t have a full commitment for an amendment to help save the Tenant Resource services for people outside the City of Madison (including Town of Madison, Middleton, Fitchburg, Sun Prairie, etc) Read above for more details. Please contact committee members individually and ask them to support the Tenant Resource Center and sponsor an amendment for $50,000 for the TRC. (Listed in order of least support to highest support)
Jeremy Levin (near West Madison) – District 10
Nick Zweifel (Sun Prairie) – District 3
Ronn Ferrell (West Madison and Town of Verona/Middleton?) – District 15
Bill Clausius (Sun Prairie) – District 19
Matt Veldran (Southwest Madison) – District 7
Jenni Dye (Fitchburg) – District 33
Heidi Wegleitner (Near East City of Madison) – District 2
Or an email list to email only HHN
levin.jeremy@countyofdane.com
zweifel.nick@countyofdane.com
ferrell@countyofdane.com
clausius@countyofdane.com
veldran@countyofdane.com
dye.jennifer@countyofdane.com
wegleitner.heidi@countyofdane.com
Amendments are due Monday at 10am, they will have a hearing on any amendments submitted on Tuesday at 5:45 in Room 351 of the City-County Building. Mark your calendars now. We will need people there to support this amendment. I believe we will have Jenni Dye and Heidi Wegleitner’s vote, but after that . . . I’m not sure we have the votes. And we may not even get an amendment if it will just fail. So if you have personal connections to any of the people on this committee, it is very important to contract them personally.
4. Contact Personnel and Finance Committee Members.
If we are unsuccessful at Health and Human Needs, we have one last shot (realistically) at Personnel and Finance Committee. We would need someone to sponsor an amendment (doesn’t need to be on the committee) and then we’d need the votes, which honestly doesn’t look promising here either, but we have to try, and crazier things have happened. Hopefully they will think about what this means to their constituents and forget how much they hate me personally.
Mary Kolar, District 1 – Central Madison
John Hendrick – District 6 – Near East Madison
Chuck Erickson – District 13 – Near West Madison
George Gillis – District 14 – Far South West Madison
Jeff Pertl – District 17 – Far East Madison
Dennis O’Loughlin – District 20 – DeForest
Sheila Stubbs – District 23 – South Madison/Town of Madison
And the list of emails.
kolar.mary@countyofdane.com
hendrick@countyofdane.com
erickson.chuck@countyofdane.com
gillis.george@countyofdane.com
pertl.jeff@countyofdane.com
oloughlin@countyodane.com
stubbs@countyofdane.com
Sharon Corrigan (District 26, Middleton), chair of the county board serves as an ex officio member of the board. She doesn’t vote, but will be at the meetings and participating. She led the charge to put TRC services out to bid, which let to the disastrous RFP process that combined our services with another agency so that they applied for our funding, we didn’t apply for theirs and therefore their application was more “complete” than ours and now tenant services isn’t part of that contract as far as we can tell. Please contact her to help her understand what the result of that action is and ask her to return housing counseling services to tenants, including those in her district, who are outside the City of Madison. corrigan@countyofdane.com
5. Donate or attend our Silent Auction Fundraiser on November 13th.
We are still collecting silent auction items or (prepared in a commercial kitchen) food donations (contact anders@tenantresourcecenter.org) for our event on November 13th! It will be at the Brink Lounge 5 – 7 on Friday, November 13th (yeah, we tempt the mysterious powers of the universe). If you can’t attend, you can still donate! Please make sure to thank our sponsors!
