by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Jacksonville Area Legal Aid hasn’t been having a good year.
Over the past three months, JALA has lost more than 15 percent of its $3.5 million annual budget though funding cuts by the city and state.
In May, JALA administrators discovered that one funding source from the City of Jacksonville, a $65 fee attached to criminal case convictions, wasn’t going to pan out as well as they had expected, leaving them about $100,000 in the red. One month later, JALA lost another $130,000 when Gov. Jeb Bush pushed a line item veto and killed the Florida Access to Civil Legal Assistance program, which assisted legal aid programs across the state.
The axe fell again last week when JALA’s executive director Michael Figgins found out he was going to lose a one-year-old $250,000 grant from the City. He also learned last week that the City is cutting about $40,000 from another $378,000 public services grant to JALA.
Funding cuts are never a good thing for JALA, but Figgins said the recent $250,000 cut will virtually dismantle the legal aid association’s foreclosure defense unit. He said that money was earmarked in 2004 by Mayor John Peyton to be used specifically for defending foreclosure cases and victims of predatory lending.
Though the Mayor said last week in his budget address to the City Council that the City’s government has “invested in our city’s most vulnerable citizens” mayoral spokesperson Kristin Key said this year the funds were simply not available to renew the $250,000 predatory lending grant.
“We know (JALA) serves an important part of the community, but due to belt tightening that had to happen all over the city this year, the funds were just not available,” said Key.
Though the City will not be able to renew the fund out of its budget this year, Key said that Peyton “has offered his hand” to help JALA allocate private funds to help fill gaps left behind in its budget.
Now that the money is gone, Figgins said the future looks particularly bleak. Besides having to temporarily halt taking any more new cases, he said he will also not be able to hire anyone to fill a current void in JALA’s predatory lending department.
The cut also means that Figgins will have to hit the bricks harder than ever to find more funding.
“The immediate effect is that we are going to have to lean on the private bar more than ever (for funding),” he said. “They certainly already do a lot for us, but I don’t think that we can expect them to do all that needs to be done.”
Figgins said the $250,000 cut was especially shocking because Peyton was such a driving force behind the funding one year ago.
“This was the mayor’s baby and I commend him for it,” said Figgins. “He really started this. He has done his share of good things, but as far as I am concerned that is one of the most visionary things that any mayor has done.
“For $250,000, he has saved more than $10 million in housing and $200,000 or $300,000 in debt for people that can least afford it. The alternative to that is that you will have more foreclosures, empty houses, neighborhood blight and people losing their homes. He stopped all of that or significantly slowed it down with an appropriation of $250,000. I don’t know if he has any other programs with that much bang for the buck in the community.”
Though Figgins is upset about losing another major chunk of his rapidly shrinking budget, he isn’t putting all the blame on the mayor’s office.
“It is hard for me to allude that this is the mayor’s intent because I believe that since this was his baby since the beginning, he certainly believes in this,” said Figgins. “It was a significant achievement of Mayor Peyton’s administration to recognize this problem and do something about it.
“I feel that I am somewhat responsible because maybe I didn’t keep him well enough informed or didn’t toot our horn loud enough. It seems that if I had done so, it certainly would have made this a priority especially for the small amount of money it takes to get such a significant result. Maybe he isn’t even aware of it. It is a small line item in a very, very big budget.”
Though JALA’s $250,000 grant is a relative drop in the bucket for the City’s $887 million budget, JALA consumer law attorney Lynn Drysdale said the effect of the budget cut will be ruinous.
“We have a caseload of 220 open cases,” she said. “We have had to temporarily shut down our ability to take on new cases. New clients trying to avoid foreclosure will simply have to be turned down at the door.
“It just breaks your heart. We always say that our work here at JALA gives a voice to the voiceless. Now their voice has been taken away and the consequences are going to be devastating.”
Drysdale said JALA’s work funded by the city’s predatory lending grant greatly helped to significantly level the playing field between home owners and lending establishments.
“It had a great effect on stabilizing a few of the neighborhoods in the area and stabilizing a few family lives. We had just been able to reach so many people and we had done some real work with homeowner preservation,” said Drysdale.