Budget Deadlock Hits Home for Disabled Centers Awaiting Funding

The eviction notice arrived early in the morning, just as the landlords warned it would. Having failed to pay rent for the last two months, Communities Actively Living Independent and Free, an independent-living center that provides advocacy and services for disabled people in 50 Southern California Zip Codes, must vacate.

At CALIF, located in the heart of downtown Los Angeles at Broadway and 9th Street, the creamy bond stationery calling for $11,270 in back rent--money the group should have received from the state by now--has brought home the state’s budget deadlock with fearful immediacy.

“This is an emergency,” said Lillibeth Navarro, founding director of CALIF. “We’ve tried to be responsible. We had three months of reserve funds, but we’ve gone through them, and now I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

Of all the people hurt by the state’s nine-week budget deadlock, advocates for people with disabilities say their clients are poised to suffer not mere inconveniences, but life-changing consequences.

Independent-living agencies such as CALIF and the state’s 21 regional centers help disabled people obtain in-home care, respite care, affordable housing, employment and peer counseling. It is such a fragile chain of services that, when one link is withdrawn, it can thrust a disabled person who lives at home and has a job into a nursing home and unemployment.

Kim and Randy Horton, both of whom use wheelchairs and rely on in-home care for their independence, tremble for the unity of their 15-year marriage. Randy uses a computer to speak, and the green T-shirt he wears reads: “Not being able to speak is not the same as having nothing to say.”

“Randy asked me, ‘What if they put us in nursing homes?’ ” Kim said Thursday. “ ‘What if they split us up?’ But I’ll sleep in the street before I go into an institution.”

Exacerbating the frustration the Hortons and many other disabled people say they feel is a growing sense of powerlessness in the face of political machinations

“What’s infuriating is that there is money, but we’re not treated as equals in setting policy,” Navarro said. “We’re not behind closed doors making deals. We serve the poorest of the poor.”

No Budget, No Contract

Established in 1969 as a result of the Lanterman Developmental Disabilities Act, regional centers are private, nonprofit, community-based agencies that contract annually with the state Department of Developmental Services. But the contracts expired with the old budget, and the state, with few exceptions, is not allowed to pay for services without them.

California’s 21 regional centers serve 170,000 disabled people. Since July 1, when a new fiscal year began without a state budget, most centers have relied on lines of credit from banks to stay open, but those are nearly exhausted. Many have notified clients and their families that unless a budget is passed, they will be forced to shut down by mid-September. Others say they can last until mid-October.

Regional centers recently received a little breathing room from the state controller’s office. A 1998 statute requires the state to continue to pay for disabled services and certain others through August in the event a budget is not enacted.

The Regional Center of Orange County, whose $20-million note is scheduled to come due Tuesday, will now be able to stay open a few days into October, said Executive Director Bill Bowman.

“What we’re telling our vendors and staff is, ‘Don’t relax. Don’t think this is the end of the problem,’ ” Bowman said. “We keep hearing noises from a variety of sources that say this impasse could go deep into October. We’ve overheard the possibility that it could go to the last official day for the Legislature to submit a bill, which is Nov. 15. We’ll be dead by then.”

Stephen Brees, who receives services through the Orange County center, is holding his breath. Because of cerebral palsy, Brees, 50, cannot walk, stand or sit upright extensively in his wheelchair.

Each morning, at Brees’ one-bedroom apartment in Fullerton, an attendant helps him out of bed, into clothes and then cooks for him. A similar routine occurs in the evening.

The few hours of help each day allows him to live independently, slip over to Starbucks for a latte, write poetry and read novels.

“I rely on disability services I get for a better quality of life,” Brees said. “I would be much more isolated otherwise.”

Turning Up the Pressure

In the last few days, disability advocates have stepped up their lobbying of Democrats and Republicans, exhorting both sides to come to a budget compromise, which has stalled over a disagreement about how to close a $23.6-billion shortfall.

Monday, scores of disabled people, homecare workers and advocates picketed in front of the state offices in downtown Los Angeles, shouting for Gov. Gray Davis to sign a budget.

Davis’ spokesman Byron Tucker pointed out that Davis would like to sign a budget but cannot until the Legislature approves one, but few heard him. Navarro handed Tucker a mock cardboard Supplemental Security Income check for $750, saying the governor should try to live on it, the way many disabled people do.

Then on Thursday, Navarro, the Hortons and a handful of demonstrators planted themselves in Assemblyman Keith Richman’s Granada Hills district office, having been told that he was one of a few Republican holdouts on the budget.

Richman’s district staff emphasized that the former physician was aware of their distress and, far from holding out on the budget, has been working around the clock with Democrats.

After two hours of cordial conversation, the small group left--but not before pointing out that the office building lacks the appropriate handicapped signage. Richman’s district representative Gary Washburn thanked them for putting a face on the budget crisis. “It makes it real,” he said.

Snapped Navarro: “It should have been real Day 1!”