Dispute over Human Services cuts
GREENWICH — When the Board of Estimate and Taxation decided earlier this year to roll back all proposed increases in the municipal budget for the 2020-21 fiscal year due to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it affected every town department.
But the impact on the Department of Human Services is now a point of contention.
“I was given my marching orders, so to speak, to reduce down to a flat budget and that’s what I did,” Commissioner of Human Services Alan Barry said Friday.
Across the board, town operating budgets for 2020-21 remained the same as in 2019-20. For the Department of Human services, that meant getting rid of the planned 1.76 percent budget increase it had planned, a
reduction of nearly $71,000.
However, what Barry said he planned to cut and what the BET sent to the Representative Town Meeting for budget approval in June ended up being two different things.
The Human Services board and staff decided to reduce the salary line by $38,000, which would be done through two retirements, including his own, Barry said. The remaining $33,000 cut was to come through reductions in funding slated for Kids in Crisis and the YWCA Greenwich.
At that point, the budget was sent back to the BET and then to the RTM. Barry said he thought the issue was settled.
“The BET never told me what they did with the budget,” Barry said. “They took the $71,000 out of the line for case managers. They did it arbitrarily and no one said anything to me about it.”
But BET Chair Michael Mason said Friday there had been some confusion about “the intent of the BET.”
“I think the idea was that all the departments in town were to live with an operational budget they had equal to last year,” Mason said. “What I think Alan has is a unique situation. External entities are services that everybody wants. We put those in the Human Services budget, and Alan thought since he had to reduce his budget he could just reduce the contributions to those external entities.”
Back to the budget
The BET Budget Committee would have to hear a transfer request and send it to the full BET for approval. But on Friday, committee Chair Leslie Tarkington said she had not heard from Barry.
“We would want to know the reasoning behind any proposed move between the object codes, and the impact on the new area or entity,” Tarkington said.
Barry said he will meet with the Board of Human Services on Tuesday to discuss the next move. If possible, Barry said he would like the $71,000 transfer to go before the BET in August — because he wants to settle the issue before he retires, which is slated to happen before Sept. 1.
“I don’t want this to go to my successor,” he said.
Also, the issue has put the department in “limbo” because its first payments to nonprofits, including the YWCA Greenwich and Kids in Crisis, are slated to go out in August, Barry said. The budget matter should be settled first, he said.
Board of Human Services Chair Alan Gunzburg said the board had approved Barry’s original plan. “We will revert back to the budget that we asked for originally and go back to the BET to say these are the changes we’d like made,” Gunzburg said.
He criticized the decision to cut to the budget, calling it “short sighted” to make any reductions for the Human Services Department during a pandemic.
The BET is not scheduled to meet in August, but Mason said, “We look at requests as needed” and said he was willing to hold a conversation.
Tough to cut
The decision to cut the amount of money the Department of Human Services gives to nonprofits was not easy, Barry said.
The money was slated for the teen talk program, which Kids in Crisis is expanding into the town’s elementary schools, and to YWCA Greenwich’s violence prevention education program in the schools.
Both nonprofits will still receive funding from the department, but it would be under 10 percent less, Barry said.
The department did not want the cuts to “dramatic,” he said, and end the programs. Barry said other sources would be able to provide the money needed for those programs.
“It was really, really difficult,” he said. “All of these programs are so carefully vetted and monitored for their effectiveness.”
The Department of Human Services provides funding each year to nonprofits, including Family Centers, Neighbor to Neighbor, CCI, the Child Guidance Center, River House Adult Day Center, Abilis Inc., Pathways and more.
Any budget cut to the department, is tough, with demand for services rising in the community, Barry said.
“You can’t apply a cut like that easily,” he said of the $71,000 reduction. “Our budget is pretty tight.”
The average allocation to an outside partner is $10,000 to $15,000 a year, which can be a critical source of funding. Barry said the board determined that these two programs had enough other funding to survive the cut.
“It was a matter of looking at those programs and saying the impact would be greater on programs with a lot less funding,” he said. “We were trying to do to the least amount of damage ... and it wasn’t easy.”
Before making the cuts, it held discussions with Kids in Crisis and the YWCA Greenwich about helping them find other sources of funding from private donors or foundations, Barry said.
Looking ahead, Barry said he does not know how future budgets will be affected. His successor, who has not yet been hired, will work this fall and winter on the 2021-22 department budget.
“I would certainly hope that in the future, we would be able to look at all of our community partners and be able to provide effective funding for them,” Barry said. “I don’t know if the board or the department will make a decision to provide what we consider to be full funding for programs.”
It’s important for the town to make a commitment to the not-for-profits in the community, he said. “Yet at the same time, I don’t think fully funding the programs will be the way to go in the future. It should take different allotments from different entities so they’re not putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. Things like this happen.”
“I think the idea was that all the departments in town were to live with an operational budget they had equal to last year. What I think Alan (Barry) has is a unique situation. External entities are services that everybody wants. We put those in the Human Services budget, and Alan thought since he had to reduce his budget he could just reduce the contributions to those external entities.”
BET Chair Michael Mason