Bay Windows - May 25, 2006
Ethan Jacobs, ejacobs@baywindows.com

"We haven't been able to get anything clear. The hints that have been trickled down to us have been that it could have been just an error," said Rogers. The state has provided funding to GMDVP since 1999, when it funded the organization's safe home program, and GMDVP continued to receive funding through DPH during the height of the recent state budget crisis. Senate Ways and Means Chair Therese Murphy's office did not return a call to comment for this story.

Rogers said after discovering the Senate funding cut, GMDVP urged its supporters to contact their senators, and he said the response has been more than he could have anticipated. He said their calls helped persuade 17 of the 40 state senators to sign onto Barrios's amendment.

"When it got out that the funding had been eliminated, the community response was just incredible," Rogers said. "For us to have 17 senators signing onto an amendment is just unbelievable."

Barrios's amendment would expand state funding for gay male domestic violence services, allowing GMDVP to fund its direct services and shelter programs. It would also broaden the scope of the funding, changing the language in the budget to fund LGBT domestic violence services more broadly. Rogers said that would permit other organizations dealing with LGBT domestic violence like The Network/La Red, which serves the lesbian, bisexual women's and transgender communities, to apply for the funding. Yet despite the support from the community and from the Senate, Rogers said he is not at all confident that they will be able to restore funding to the Senate budget.

"Seeing the community response has been very heartening and has given us hope, but it's hope à We're just not even in the budget right now, and that's a scary place to be," said Rogers.

Even if the Senate votes down the Barrios amendment, GMDVP may be able to salvage its state funding. Once the Senate finalizes its budget proposal, members of the Senate and the House, which level-funded GMDVP in its proposal, will meet in a conference committee to reconcile the differences in their budgets. That new budget will go to Gov. Mitt Romney, who also level funded GMDVP in his proposal, for his signature.

Push for new gay youth committee, youth funding

State programming for gay and lesbian youth programs endured a series of catastrophic funding cuts beginning in FY03, but advocates are hoping to build on the modest increases in last year's budget by pushing for an increase this year. Yet the push comes as those programs have come under new public scrutiny, with Romney publicly, and inaccurately, criticizing his own Governor's Commission Gay and Lesbian Youth for allegedly using state funding for the Massachusetts Youth Pride festival and momentarily threatening to disband it (see "Lawmakers Move To Protect Work Of Governor's Commission," May 18, 2006). In fact, funding for Youth Pride came from donations to a non-profit called Friends of the Governor's Commission on GLBT Youth, but Romney's threats prompted lawmakers to introduce an amendment into the Senate budget, filed by Barrios and joined by 15 other senators, to protect the work of the commission by creating a new commission on gay and lesbian youth that would exist independently from the governor's office.

Kathleen Henry, chair of the Governor's Commission, said that Barrios's amendment is "something that the existing commission is looking at with great interest, but we don't have any comments other than that."

The amendment would do more than simply move the existing Governor's Commission outside the purview of the Corner Office. While current commissioners would serve on the new commission through next January, the amendment calls for an expanded 27-member body made up of members selected by a collection of organizations ranging from the Massachusetts Coalition for Suicide Prevention and the state Association of School Superintendents to Greater Boston PFLAG and Fenway Community Health Center. Like the current commission, the new body would advise the state on how to spend its funding for safe schools and communities.

Barrios declined to speculate on his amendment's chances, but it has some powerful co-sponsors, including Ways and Means Assistant Vice-Chair Sen. Steven Tolman and Senate Minority Leader Brian Lees.

LGBT youth advocates are also hoping to use the amendment process to pass an increase in funding for gay and lesbian youth programming. Up until FY03, the state provided funding to the Department of Education (DOE) for conducting school trainings on LGBT school safety and inclusion and funding for gay/straight alliances (GSAs) and to the Department of Public Health (DPH) to do trainings for community-based organizations and to support the statewide Alliances for Gay and Lesbian Youth (AGLY) network, among other projects. In FY03, in response to the budget crisis, in which the state faced a $1 billion-plus deficit, the state eliminated all of the DOE funding for LGBT youth programming and made major cuts to DPH, beginning a pattern of cuts that brought the combined state funding for LGBT youth programs from $1.5 million during its heyday in the mid-90s to just $250,000 in FY05.

In FY06 the budget for the safe schools and communities programs showed the first signs of recovery, with the DPH budget bumped up to $350,000 and DOE funding restored to $75,000. The Senate budget proposal this year level funds the DPH component but bumps the DOE funding up to $125,000. Lawmakers are hoping to expand that increase; Tolman filed an amendment to add an additional $100,000 to the DPH budget, while Sen. Robert Antonioni (D-Leominster) filed an amendment to add an extra $25,000 to the DOE budget on top of the current Senate proposal.

Henry said that while the budget increases come nowhere near restoring the programs to their funding peak, passing these increases is crucial to keeping these programs effective, particularly in the DOE where the programs were left unfunded until last year. She said she is "hopeful" that the amendments will pass.

"We have such strong support and bipartisan support for the services for gay and lesbian kids that we are hopeful that it will go through," said Henry.

Mixed bag on HIV/AIDS

Denise McWilliams, the AIDS Action Committee's director of public policy and legal affairs, said that the Senate's funding for the HIV/AIDS budget line item, which forms the core of much of the state funding for HIV/AIDS services, is "disappointing," especially compared with the budget proposal from the House.

"The Senate budget increased the line item by only $100,000; the House increased it by $1.2 million," said McWilliams. "We like the House [budget] a lot better, if truth be told."

In the current fiscal year the HIV/AIDS line item is funded at $35,553,770, and neither budget proposal brings the line item up to its pre-budget crisis high of $51.1 million in FY01, but McWilliams said that with the state's financial situation seemingly on the mend AIDS Action hopes to put more funding in prevention, which she said took the biggest hit within the AIDS budget.

Sophie Godley, AIDS Action's deputy director of programs, said that AIDS Action and the statewide coalition of AIDS service organizations called Project AIDS Budget Legislative Effort (ABLE) are pushing the legislature to add $1 million to the HIV/AIDS line item for prevention efforts particularly for communities of color as well as a general funding increase to stabilize existing prevention services. She said prevention programs have been so under-funded that it has been difficult for many to adapt to changes in the epidemic, such as increased awareness about the impact of crystal methamphetamine addiction in HIV infection.

"We all believe strongly that in the absence of a vaccine, prevention is our best hope for ending the epidemic, and I think Massachusetts got in this backwards mindset of cutting prevention services," said Godley. Project ABLE introduced an amendment, sponsored by Sen. Mark Montigny (D-New Bedford) to bring the budget up to the House budget proposal. One section of the Senate budget that did not disappoint is the HIV MassHealth funding, which provides state Medicaid benefits to people living with HIV. The Senate increased funding from $7.5 million in FY06 to $13 million, about $1 million higher than the House proposal. McWilliams said both budgets provide adequate increases for the HIV MassHealth funding. "My sense is that what the data shows us at this point is that this should be adequate funding," said McWilliams. "There can always be a few bumps along the way because you never can predict what the year is going to bring, but it should be sufficient."

LGBT elders vie for funding

While other LGBT and HIV/AIDS programs are struggling to maintain their funding or to push through modest increases the LGBT Aging Project is campaigning to begin receiving state funds. Lisa Krinsky, director of the LGBT Aging Project, said the project succeeded in convincing the House to add $50,000 in a budget for elder services for the organization to do statewide trainings of elder service providers on the issues facing LGBT elders, although that funding was not specifically earmarked in the House budget. In the Senate state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson has proposed an amendment that would both add the $50,000 in funding as well as including language specifically earmarking the funds for the LGBT Aging Project.

Krinsky said the new funding would allow the LGBT Aging Project to expand its training program statewide, helping them work with a wider range of elder service organizations to make their programming inclusive and friendly to LGBT elders. The LGBT Aging Project has urged supporters to lobby their senators in the days leading up to the budget debate.

"It would allow us to extend [our training program] significantly," said Krinsky. "We would be in a position of having more funding to support more staffing and being able to contact and reach more agencies and being able to move in a statewide capacity."

Budget at a glance

Proponents of LGBT and HIV/AIDS related programs are pushing the Senate for increased funding as the Senate begins its budget debate. Here's a rundown on what advocates are asking for:

Domestic violence

While both the House and Gov. Mitt Romney level-funded the Gay Men's Domestic Violence Project's outreach and education efforts, the Senate completely eliminated funding in its proposal. Sen. Jarrrett Barrios filed an amendment to restore GMDVP's funding, increase it to help fund the organization's shelter and direct services, and broaden the language of the budget item to allow other LGBT domestic violence organizations to apply for funding.

FY06: $158,000 through the Department of Public Health Senate FY07 budget proposal: 0 Barrios amendment: $616,000 plus broader LGBT-inclusive language

Gay and lesbian youth

The Senate budget proposal level-funded the Department of Public Health's funding for gay and lesbian youth anti-violence programs for community-based organizations and increased funding for the Department of Education's anti-violence programs for gay and lesbian youth. Sens. Steven Tolman (D-Boston) and Stephen Buoniconti (D-Chicopee) filed amendments to increase funding in DPH and DOE respectively. Barrios filed an amendment to create a new commission on gay and lesbian youth independent of the governor's office.

FY06: $350,000 through the Department of Public Health, $75,000 through the Department of Education Senate FY07 budget proposal: $350,000 through DPH, $125,000 through DOE Tolman amendment: $450,000 through DPH Antonioni amendment: $150,000 through DOE Barrios amendment: creation of a new commission on gay and lesbian youth

HIV/AIDS

The Senate budget proposal offered only a $100,000 increase in the HIV/AIDS line item, which provides much of the state funds for HIV/AIDS services. By contrast the House increased the line item by $1.2 million. Sen. Mark Montigny (D-New Bedford), sponsored an amendment to bring the Senate's budget in line with the House's. The Senate's budget did contain a $5.5 million increase to the budget for the HIV MassHealth program, which provides Medicaid services to people living with HIV.

FY06: $35,553,770 for HIV/AIDS line item, $7,589,164 for HIV MassHealth Senate FY07 budget proposal: $35,653,608 for HIV/AIDS line item, $13,047,887 for HIV MassHealth Montigny amendment: $36,785,682 for HIV/AIDS line item

LGBT Aging ProjectThe LGBT Aging Project lobbied for new funding in both the House and Senate budgets to fund its work training elder service organizations in being LGBT inclusive. In the House budget $50,000 was added but the final language does not include an earmark for the organization. Sen. Dianne Wilkerson filed an amendment to the Senate budget to add the funding and the language.

FY06 budget: 0 Senate FY07 budget proposal: 0 (the line item the funding would be in increased, but there is no specific earmark for LGBT Aging Project)

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