Mostly, there was 3.5 hours of testimony about how the cuts would impact agencies, then a lot of confusion and then they got kicked out of the building.
I haven’t seen it this bad in a while, but the non-profits were there in force, begging to get funded at their 2010 levels . . . that’s right, not asking for more money, not asking for COLA (cost of living adjustment) increases, just asking to get flat funding. No staff increases, no raises, no compensation for increasing health care costs . . . no increases for the increasing demands on our organizations due to the economy. Just please, give us the tools we have now to continue to try to serve the community as we struggle to do every day.
A half hour before the meeting, the parking lot at the Water Utility was full. And the room half full. By about 10 minutes before the meeting started, there were no more seats and most people couldn’t even get in the room. I took pictures, but there were a lot of kids in the pictures and I wasn’t sure about using them, so I’m not posting them. I counted the people and there were at least 100 people in the room and with more people waiting in the hallway.
Most of the organizations were on the “B list” to be considered for further funding they had in reserve, but not all. Kajsiab House (A project of Dane County Mental Health) and Neighborhood House were two that stick out in my mind. Here’s a list of organizations that showed up to advocate for themselves and are at risk of getting cut.
– Rainbow Project (being cut up to $90,000)
– AIDs Network (normally gets $26,000, getting cut $11,000(
– YWCA explained that they started their program at the request of the city and these funds help leverage other funding
– Lussier Community Center – 4 programs being cut
– Boys and Girls Club
– Kajsiab House
– Goodman Community Center – 3 programs being cut
– Neighbrohood House – all funding being cut for core services
– Freedom Inc
– TJ Brokerage
– Centro Hispano
– Urban League
– Commonwealth Development (not on the B list, but trying to recover extra funds this year)
– Vera Court and Bridge LakePointe Community Centers
– Tenant Resource Center
What was amazing is this wasn’t the public hearing . . . that is yet to come.
COMMITTEE DISCUSSION
Goodman
First, they corrected a staff error, and they gave Goodman another $40K or so.
Fuzzy math
Next, they tried to figure out why the math didn’t work. They thought they set aside 10% to allocate among the categories and 5% they held in reserve in case their priorities and process didn’t quite give them the results that they wanted. Eventually they figured out that their “10%” was actually 14.2%. In other words, if they had just distributed more of the funds, they would not have so many agencies upset. So, after the Goodman issue, they have $444,031 left for the “B list” and then they have $172,706 for their 5% adjustments. The total amount of money they have to distribute is $3,455,124. They got more double or more of that in requests. STILL trying to get the final numbers. Basically, I think it all boils down to this, they funded some new projects, have a new category of funding AND they only allocated 85% of their funds so far . . . but they still have the same amount of money no matter how they want to arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Fuzzy process
Steven Small raised a concern that he couldn’t rank the remaining B list because
a) there was no criteria
b) he didn’t know why different committees ranked things the way they did (didn’t have the benefit of their conversation)
c) it would be easier to group programs than rank 54 of them
Alan Sweet, the chair, agreed with the concerns, but was concerned about changing the process at this point.
Several committee members explained how they ranked the programs 1 – 54, but none of them seemed to do it the same way and it was based on different strategies. Some approached it by looking at the numbers and rankings and some looked at the needs in the community and some like Paul VanRooy just ranked the Senior programs highest because that is what is important to him.
They talked about what the rankings meant, and they said it was just a starting point.
There was a question about if the neighborhood and workforce development programs need to go back to the conference committee.
There was a whole lot more discussion and confusion.
They argue about if they should even look at the rankings and finally decide yes, have some technical issues, but they throw the numbers up on the screen, but OF COURSE don’t have copies for people.
Staff also has recommendations, but we never saw them either. I guess they will show up Wednesday night at the next meeting.
They argue about if they should just keep going and make decisions tonight, or if they should make decisions on Wednesday.
More confusion, the staff tell them that they need to let the cleaning people in to clean the room because there is an alarm that gets set at 11:00 and so they need to leave and they leave for the night with the staff promising to send the committee members the rankings and the staff recommendations.
CONCLUSION
Way back last year, they started this whole new confusing process because they wanted to have priorities and fund those priorities and not just fund the same old programs every year. They set priorities, they came up with criteria to rank the applications and they required us to look at best practices. Right now, a program like TRC is an A-1 priority, the highest. It also ranked 3 out of 25 programs. However, along with the programs ranked 1 and 2 in our category, are still waiting for the “make whole” for 2010 funding that other agencies got that were ranked lower than us. And in the larger ranking that I just got a peek at, we were half way down the list of agencies to be funded. My question is, what happened to those priorities? What happened to the criteria they said they would rank the programs on? What happened to a process that would be more predictable and less subjective so the council couldn’t question it? How’d they end up in a place where committee members are making up their own criteria to judge the remaining funding? An even bigger question I have is, why didn’t all the groups place agencies on the “B list” with the same criteria. It should have been based on a percentage of funding, or a certain percentage of unfunded groups, not some random motions. This process isn’t fair. It’s not transparent. And in the end, I don’t think it is serving our community well. I think they’re going to have to try again for a better process in two years and I hope it is not, as Bill Clingan suggested, going to move to a staff only process where it will become even less transparent and therefore, less predictable.
