Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/24680
RICH PEDRONCELLI /AP PHOTO Women Take the Fallout D When state budgets are cut, guess which programs bite the dust? URING THIS RECESSION- plagued year, low revenues from income and sales taxes left all but two states in the U.S. with staggering multimillion- or even bil- lion-dollar budget shortfalls. And when states cut their budgets, the first programs to go tend to be those that fund women’s and family servic- es and employ women. In Minnesota, the new state budg- et eliminated health coverage for 29,500 low-income adults, most of them women. In Nevada, parents of toddlers with developmental delays will lose 15,000 hours in services for their children. Forty-one states have reduced funds to services and pro- grams that both employ women at a disproportionate rate and provide many women and their families with basic needs. In California, facing a shortfall more daunting than any other state—$26 billion—Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger approved a dracon- ian budget, which he heavily edited with line-item vetoes, that guts health and human service programs. As an example of what that means on the ground, take the state’s com- munity clinic program, for which all funding was eliminated. Less than a month after the budget went into ef- fect, the 27-year-old Potter Valley Community Health Center in Cali- fornia’s Mendocino county—which served 3,000 uninsured—closed its doors for good. “We’re trying to keep Karen Bass, speaker of the California State Assembly, fights cuts to social services. www.msmagazine.com FALL 2009 | 15 our health services open,” said Cathy Frey, the executive director of the nearby Alliance for Rural Community Health, “but it’s challenging when our whole budget has been turned over.” “It’s going to be extremely ugly this time,” adds Margaret Baran, executive director of the nonprofit In-Home Supportive Services Consortium in San Francisco, which offers cooking and cleaning assistance and paramed- ical aid to 21,000 elderly or disabled residents in the city—63 percent of whom are women. Some clients live alone and depend on IHSS providers to function. “People’s quality of life will be de- clining, and it will be declining be- hind closed doors,” says Baran. She predicts other IHSS clients who lose services will end up in the streets. The new California budget also shrinks resources for mothers, includ- ing maternal health programs and child-care services—not to mention community clinic services such as im- munization. Additionally, the budget reduces funding for employment services and child care in California’s welfare-to-work program, CalWorks, and eliminates the Latchkey pro- gram—an after-school child-care service that enables low-income mothers to work. Not only will state budget cuts