The Washington Blade; Friday, January 31, 1997
Lou Chibbaro Jr.

Mel Wilson, the AHA administrator, said yesterday that budget officials asked him to conduct an "exercise" to determine the impact of a 25 percent cut in the AIDS budget.

Wilson said he is hopeful that the exercise will not be implemented into an actual cut because Mayor Marion Barry has expressed opposition to reducing the budget for any city health program.

Sources familiar with the budget process said city administrator William Rogers and D.C. Chief Financial Officer Anthony Williams have directed the heads of various city agencies to develop impact statements for potential budget cuts.

Barry is scheduled to submit the city's proposed fiscal year 1998 budget to the D.C. Council tomorrow. Local AIDS activist Hank Carde and other AIDS activists said they are fearful that Rogers and Williams' request for the impact report is an indication that Barry will include the 25 percent cut in the AIDS budget in his overall budget proposal.

The mayor's office has said it will not comment on Barry's fiscal year 1998 budget until the mayor submits the proposal to the Council on Saturday, Feb. 1.

D.C. Councilmember Linda Cropp (D-At-large), who chairs the Council committee that oversees the AIDS budget, said she too has heard from various city government sources that Rogers and Williams asked AHA and other health-related agencies to assess the impact of cuts in their budgets.

'96 money left unspent

Wilson disclosed Tuesday night at a meeting of the city's HIV Planning Council that a "significant" amount of AHA's fiscal year 1996 budget had not be spent. Sources familiar with AHA said between $900,000 to $1.4 million of AHA's fiscal 1996 budget may not have been spent, despite the fact that the unspent funds were appropriated by the D.C. Council and earmarked for specific AIDS programs.

Among the programs that were shortchanged by the budget underspending, according to Carde, were a mass media AIDS prevention campaign for black Gay men; a Latino outreach program; a needle-exchange program for intravenous drug users; and a program to provide tap water filters for people with HIV.

"Shock and anger swept through the room," said Carde, in describing the reaction to Wilson's disclosure of the unspent funds at the Jan. 28 Planning Council meeting.

AIDS Activist Steve Michael, who serves as chair of the Planning Council's budget committee, noted that the federal Ryan White CARE Act requires cities and states receiving Ryan White AIDS funds to inform the councils about unspent AIDS funds before the end of the fiscal year. Fiscal year 1996 ended last Sept. 30. "They appear to be in violation of the law," Michael said.

A section of the Ryan White Act known as the "sustainment" clause requires cities and states receiving Ryan White funds to maintain their AIDS budgets so that the Ryan White funds add to, rather than substitute for, a city or state's overall AIDS budget. Failure by a city or state to comply with the sustainment clause could result in the loss of millions of dollars in Ryan White funds for the following fiscal year.

Carde noted that D.C. Mayor Marion Barry had certified in writing in the city's application for fiscal year 1997 Ryan White funds that the city complied with the sustainment clause in fiscal year 1996.

"This puts us in jeopardy," Carde said. "Why did AHA Administrator Mel Wilson not share the serious news of the underspending with the Planning Council when the unspent funds 'evaporated' on Sept. 30?" Carde asked in his weekly newsletter to AIDS activists, "A Letter To Friends."

Wilson and Cropp have cited problems in the city's contracting office as the reason the fiscal 1996 AIDS funds were not spent. Cropp noted that she held two separate oversight hearings last year to determine why the city's contracting offices have been plagued by problems over the past several years.

"We scheduled all of our programs to be implemented in fiscal year 1996," said Wilson. "The sole problem has been the snail pace by the [Department of Health] Contracting Office."

The D.C. Financial Control Board, which Congress appointed to oversee the city's financial problems, has ordered the city to balance its budget by 1998. Cropp said the order has placed tremendous pressure on the D.C. Department of Health, which makes up a large portion of the city's budget, to cut various programs. AHA is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Health.

Because the budgets of nearly all of DHS's programs are protected by entitlement laws or court orders, Cropp said, the small percentage of programs that don't fall under the "protected" categories are facing enormous pressure to reduce their budgets. AHA is among the few agencies whose budget is not protected by entitlements or a court order.

AHA has been one of the few city agencies that has not had its budget cut in the past year, Cropp said. The AIDS budget has remained at $6.4 million each year since 1991, although activists say the city has rarely, if ever, spent the entire budget in any given year.

AIDS activists point out that the number of AIDS cases has continued to increase in D.C. each year. They say the AIDS budget has been stretched to its limits and any cuts, no matter how small, could create devastating hardship for people with AIDS who must rely on city programs, including programs provided for the city by the Whitman-Walker Clinic.

Carde, Michael, and other activists expressed outrage that Wilson did not transfer the unspent funds from the 1996 AIDS budget to the city's AIDS Drug Assistance (ADAP) program. That program helps people with AIDS pay for lifesaving AIDS drugs that sometimes cost more than a thousand dollars a month. Instead, the activists said, the unspent funds from the fiscal 1996 budget reverted back to the city's general fund or may have been transferred to other, non-health programs.

Wilson said he was unable to transfer the unspent funds into the ADAP program because procurement procedures were not in place at the time to accommodate "a mass purchase of drugs on such a short notice."

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