Perhaps you’ve heard: King County’s in a budget crisis.
But while an 8.6 percent cut to county public-safety agencies hogged
the headlines, two less heralded but equally critical agencies, human
services and public health, were given a virtual death sentence. Under
county executive Ron Sims’s proposed cuts, county funding for health
and human services would be reduced, over the next three years, to
zero—eliminating tens of millions of dollars for services
like domestic violence support, drug and alcohol treatment, and public
clinics.
County officials justified the deep cuts by noting health and human
services, unlike public safety, are considered “discretionary“
under state law. Beth Goldberg, deputy director of the county’s budget
office, says, “As much as we value the role that health and human
services has to play in this community, it is not within our mandates”
to provide them.
The county’s projected $68 million shortfall can be credited, in
large part, to a state law limiting property-tax increases to 1 percent
a year. At a news conference last week, Sims said coming up with a
long-term fix to the shortfall (which county budget director Bob Cowan
has called a “multiyear financial crisis”) would be his “top
priority” in the upcoming legislative session.
In the meantime, though, critical services are getting slashed and
burned.
Seattle City Council member Tom Rasmussen, a member of the King
County Board of Health, calls the proposed cuts “devastating…
shocking, and unacceptable,” noting that many health programs, like
the enhanced HIV prevention program approved last year, take years to
work. “[The county and the city] have just got to work together to
maintain services,” Rasmussen says.
Although county human services spokeswoman Sherry Hamilton says it’s
“too soon to say what might be coming up for cuts,” human-services
advocates aren’t buying it. “You name it, it’s on the chopping
block,” Sakara Remmu, executive director of the King County
Alliance for Human Services, says.
Dorry Elias-Garcia, head of the Minority Executive Directors
Coalition, says human-service providers are in shock about the
magnitude of the cuts. “We don’t have time to put on a press conference
and issue a statement because we’re just being bombarded,”
Elias-Garcia says.
Critics fault Sims and his budget department for failing to fix a
structural gap that was both predictable and avoidable. “This should
have been headed off years ago,” county council member Larry Phillips
said last week. “In terms of 2009,” though, “there’s not a lot we
can do.“
Phillips is considering challenging Sims, whose reelection kickoff
is next week, for the county executive’s seat. With Sims’s popularity
at what may be its lowest level ever, there’s no time like the
present for Phillips to make his announcement. 