Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2007. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
San Francisco Chronicle - Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Sabin Russell, Chronicle Medical Writer, srussell@sfchronicle.com
An audit by City Controller Ed Harrington released Monday recommended that the Department of Public Health take over a program called TRANS that runs a drop-in center and refers transgender people to substance abuse programs. The city would select a community organization to run the program under contract.
San Francisco supervisors would have to approve spending $150,000 to keep the program running until Oct. 1, when a federal grant of $400,000 would kick in to finance its fifth year of operation.
Barbara Garcia, deputy director of the city's Department of Public Health, said the department is very supportive of the TRANS project and is working with Supervisor Bevan Dufty to secure the $150,000 needed to keep it going.
Harrington's audit concluded that unexpectedly high rent for the TRANS office had caused the program to run out of money for this fiscal year. Instead of spending $2,000 a month as budgeted, the program's directors were forced to pay more than $10,000 a month after two other tenants that were to share the office had dropped out.
UCSF declined to renew the appointment of Tooru Nemoto, who had run the program as principal investigator but will be leaving the university at the end of this month. Nemoto has said that UCSF cited three alleged overdrafts of $50,000 each, as well as concerns about disruptive behavior at the program's office, as reasons for not renewing his appointment. However, Nemoto, a Japanese citizen, contends that he is being discriminated against because of his ethnic background.
Meanwhile, UCSF said it will continue to run a second program developed by Nemoto, called the Transitions Project, which is funded by a $500,000-a-year grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Transitions Project develops HIV prevention programs for neighborhood organizations around the country to bring to transgender people.
On May 10, the university informed the CDC that it intended to relinquish that grant because Nemoto was leaving and had been unable to find a new principal investigator to replace him.
However, on May 25 UCSF sent a letter to the CDC agreeing to keep the program going under the direction of Susan Kegeles, associate director of the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies.
"It's definitely going to continue," said UCSF spokesman Jeff Sheehy, who said that although the CDC has yet to send a letter confirming the arrangement, the deal had been worked out between the university and the federal agency and the final letter is a formality.
Sheehy also said that if the city does not come up with $150,000 to keep the TRANS program going, the university will try to find private donors willing to contribute that amount to whatever organization contracts with the city to run it.
Nemoto said he was glad to hear the projects would continue. "But my question remains the same," he said. "Why do I have to be kicked out from UCSF and give my work to others after I have built up the transgender projects for more than 12 years?"
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