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Protesters from non-profit agencies rallied on St. Nicholas Avenue on Fri., June 11 to protest projected cuts to their budgets. Photo: Daniel P. BaderBanging on drums, blowing whistles, and carrying banners, employees of
Northern Manhattan nonprofits and their clients marched down St.
Nicholas Avenue on Fri., June 11 to a rally against proposed cuts to
their funding.
The rally, organized by Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, shut down St. Nicholas Avenue between W. 170-171st Street for almost two hours during the afternoon. Along with the protest, the agencies involved shut down or curtailed their operations to demonstrate what life would be like under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed budget.
“What we’re so afraid of is July 1st,” Barbara Lowry, Executive Director of the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, shouted over chants of “no more cuts!”
Her organization is the largest, financially, in Northern Manhattan, and provides a host of services, including legal representation and help for domestic violence victims. But for the afternoon, it completely shut down except for emergency cases.
“As of July 1st we might not have a lot of these programs, then what will we do?” she asked.
In 2009, NIMIC had an almost $12.5 million budget, and served 30,000 people. Nearly a quarter of that money came from the city. Lowery believes she’ll receive $1 million less this year, primarily money earmarked for legal services.
“A $1 million cut to legal services is just devastating,” she said. “Lawyers, paralegals, it could cost eight [jobs]” and mean reduced hours.
“In an area with an average income of $25,000 a year, a majority immigrant and non-English speaking population and one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy and domestic violence, how can we reduce the services in this community?” asked Rodriguez in a statement prepared before the event.
Angela Fernandez, executive director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrants Rights, is afraid she’ll have to cut the days her organization is open from six to possibly three or four. Her $600,000 budget could be cut as much as 20-percent, and if she has to reduce services she’s more worried that the people she helps will go somewhere else and get bad advice.
Both the state and city government has tough choices to make. The state has to fill a $9.2 billion gap, and is almost two months late in passing its budget. The legislature has passed multiple emergency funding resolutions just to keep the government running. The city, roughly $5 billion in the red, is waiting on the state, has delayed its own budget a month.
State Assembly Member Adriano Espaillat, who attended the protest, said it’s his priority to keep education, not non-profit funding, from being cut from the state budget, which he believes will be passed this week, and was ready to tell the protesters as much.
“I’m here,” he said, “I could be at home.”
Education funding is not strictly for schools, he told the crowd in Spanish. It could mean money for literacy programs.
Moises Perez, executive director of Alianza Dominicana, said his group not taking walk-ins today is to wake people up to the fact that if they don’t lobby their elected officials and City Hall to keep funding uptown, it might not be there next year.
“We can’t do it anymore,” Perez said. “Today we’re saying to them we won’t be able to do it any longer.”
Perez said he’s facing a $1.5 million cut to his $11.5 million budget. “That is not all because we don’t even have a state budget,” he said.
He warned that cutting funding to programs when crime is on the rise and more people need help than every before will destabilize the neighborhood and it will slide back to the drug-and-violence infested state it was in during the 1980s and 1990s.
“We’re talking about programs that are minimal,” Perez said.
The protest, he said, wasn’t to offer solutions, but to get a message to the decision makers.
“We understand they have a tough job to do,” he said. “We’re here today to tell them what our position is."
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