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I've had an office job for years. If I've learned anything, it's that once the boss starts throwing around official statements coded with phrases like "asked to find efficiencies," "leverage resources," and "decreased...revenues," well, you've got problems. D.C. Department of Human Services Director Clarence Carter released such a statement yesterday regarding the massive cuts in homeless services slated in the District's 2010 budget. Carter still appears to toe the Fenty administration line of "what cuts?", confidently stating that D.C. will be able to "meet the full demand for homeless services during the hypothermia season." Unfortunately, in his attempt to put ten coats of wax on this particular budgetary Yugo, he forgot that plenty of homeless service providers are already seeing large reductions in the amount of their contracted work with the city -- and anyone with experience in any sort of corporate setting will read Carter's statement with serious trepidation about the state of D.C.'s homeless services in the year to come. Hey, at least we're certainly not alone in wondering about what Carter thought he was clarifying here, other than burying a sack of incredibly bad news with plenty of heavy semantics.
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Nearly every city and state government in the US has had to make major cuts in services. Why demonize the DC government for having do so? Many people from all over the US (and other counties too) end up here homeless. I don't think that the DC taxpayer should have to carry the full burden of taking of them. If we don't supply the honey, maybe they will return home.
Read Aaron's post more carefully - he's not demonizing the D.C. government for making the cuts, he's demonizing them for trying to pretend that they are not making cuts, or at the very least spinning what they are doing. There's a big difference.
As long as we refuse to consider selling the Mitch Snyder Center and the Gales School and using the massive revenue streams those would generate to fund comprehensive programs on less ridiculously expensive real estate then we aren't serious about funding homeless programs.
As it is, right now we are apparently comfortable trading actual homeless services for a high profile politically important Capitol Hill address.
So whine all you want, folks. This is the decision the city and homeless advocates have made.
except the homeless advocates insist that they be able to live downtown so they can have easy access to areas where they claim they can get jobs (i'm sure this is true in some cases, but it also seems that they just want to keep it easy for many to be able to panhandle).