ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 25, 1997 TAG: 9702250127
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
Total Action Against Poverty would lose $125,000 of its core federal funding under President Bill Clinton's proposed budget for the 1997-98 fiscal year.
Clinton's $1.7 trillion budget proposal would cut $75 million from the federal Community Services Block Grant program. The program - which has $490 million for the current fiscal year - provides financial building blocks for the nation's community action agencies, including TAP.
"This money is critically important because of dramatic changes in our welfare program," said Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, at a news conference Monday at TAP headquarters in Roanoke, where he rallied against Clinton's proposed cut. "This is a real cut - $75 million less available next year than this year if this goes through."
Goodlatte led a bipartisan effort last year to increase block-grant money for the current fiscal year. The block-grant program, as a result, had $100 million more in funding.
"It appears we still have work to do in terms of adequately educating some of the folks in the administration on the importance of this program," Goodlatte said.
"This program is something that should truly appeal to people in Washington, whether Democrat or Republican, because it fights poverty not by building a massive bureaucracy but by returning power and dollars back to where they can do the most good."
The federal block-grant program provides TAP with the bulk of its core funding. TAP uses the money - as do other community action agencies - as a resource to bring in money from private and other public sources. TAP leverages the core funding 10 times over.
TAP has $685,000 in federal block-grant money this fiscal year. Its budget this year is just under $10 million. The budget includes $135,000 in state Community Services Block Grant funding that also was used to coax money from other sources.
The impact of the lost federal grant money "could be as much as a half million dollars," said Ted Edlich, TAP president. "We project that approximately 800 people could be affected by the cut."
The federal block-grant money helps fund TAP's youth services programs, housing programs that provide emergency home repairs and energy conservation for low-income homes and employment training programs.
Funding for TAP's employment training programs in particular "is critical as people come off welfare, get jobs and earn their own way to stay off welfare," Edlich said. "This is a very dramatic proposal in terms of a cut."
Clinton's proposed budget also would affect the Roanoke-based Virginia Water Project Inc., a nonprofit organization that helps poor communities and families obtain running water and indoor plumbing. The proposed funding cut would cripple the services the organization offers, according to Mary Terry, executive director.
Goodlatte said the proposed cut in block-grant funding surprised him. Goodlatte said it appeared that someone in the Clinton administration saw the large increase in block-grant money for this fiscal year and thought it might be a good place to scale back.
But block-grant funding has been "languishing in terms of the kind of financial support that it deserves," Goodlatte said.
"I'm not only hoping to restore the $75 million but see that there is a modest increase so we can stay ahead of inflation, something we have not done," he said.
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