Before, During And After
Jeff Thom
As the ball dropped on 2020, the outlook in California was certainly more positive than it had been a decade before. Contrary to the generally held view by many Americans, the restrained state fiscal policies of the decade resulted in California undertaking limited spending on new initiatives, salting away a fairly significant rainy day fund and essentially being on a very solid fiscal footing. In fact, although revenue projections were very positive for 2020, the state was reasonably well-situated to weather the long-awaited recession, which never seemed to materialize. Moreover, in recognition of the large unmet need, both current and future, for services to seniors and persons with disabilities, Governor Newsom took the bold step of requiring the development of a master plan on aging and persons with disabilities in order to obtain a short-term and long-term blueprint on the direction California needed to take in order that California could best serve these populations.
Committees were making incredible strides in the development of MasterPlan content.
And then Covid-19 arrived and the world as we knew it changed, and will continue to change in ways that we can only begin to guess. This article looks at only one small piece of the landscape, the state budget for California.
As you all know, the economy is, temporarily at the very least, in shambles, with unemployment reaching depression-era numbers thus creating significant revenue losses for the state and local governments for an unknown number of months or even years to come. As one example, transit provider fare box revenues are down to a trickle and it remains to be seen, even after we fully re-open, to what extent riders will return to using public transit. On the other side of the equation, costs to hospitals, nursing facilities and other providers, for Covid-19 testing, for unemployment benefits, and for a host of other items related to Covid-19 are sapping the resources of government. In addition, since we are not in a position to predict, with any high degree of certainty, the length of this pandemic, including any possible recurrence, it is difficult to accurately estimate what Covid-19-related costs will be for the 2020-2021 fiscal year. To make matters worse, it is almost certain that the economic situation will cause more Californians to apply for publicly-funded health and social services, thus stretching the thin safety net even thinner.
By the time you read this, the Legislature will likely have met its constitutional deadline and passed a budget by June 15. In fact, it is possible that, when the Legislature returns in August to wind up the 2019-2020 session, revenue and expense projections will have changed, for better or worse, and the Legislature and the Governor may be forced, based on any such changes, to adopt modifications to the budget. However, the budget that the Legislature will adopt in June will be primarily based on a May revise that the Governor made on May 14 and that revision was filled with cuts. A few areas did not suffer, such as funding for the handling of wildfires, case growth increases for nursing facilities, and homelessness funding, as well as the aid grant amount for families on the CalWORKS program. By and large, however, most program areas are slated to receive reductions. Even education, although the proposed reduction is smaller than in most areas of the budget, will be negatively impacted. However, I am pleased to mention that special education appears to have been relatively unscathed in the governor's May revision.
Sadly, the governor's May revision axe made the heaviest strokes to health, mental health and social services programs, including Medi-Cal, senior services, in-home supportive services, SSI, and many more. Some of these health and social services cuts are proposed to occur only if the federal government fails to provide California with funding that could be used to offset these funding reductions, although the specific language on how this trigger mechanism would work is not yet known. Moreover, with Congress currently deadlocked over the level of assistance state and local governments might receive, it is impossible to tell whether any of these proposed funding reductions will be precluded by the receipt of federal monies.
Just as was true during the recession of a decade earlier, programs for people with disabilities and seniors are the first to be slashed and if history repeats itself will be the last to be returned to prior funding levels. In fact, state funding for SSI has not even returned to the levels of a dozen years ago. It is just a reality of American life that programs for vulnerable populations, other than education, generally do not fare well in times of economic crisis.
Having said that, I think there are some opportunities that Covid-19 has provided to us as advocates. The public recognized that older adults and people with disabilities are more vulnerable in certain respects than others. With that viewpoint comes a backlash that casts doubt on why we should invest so much money into our vulnerable populations. Such public backlash, however, allows us to argue that services that help to promote independence and non-institutionalization make complete sense for the individual and for society. In addition, the cry for nursing home reform should be amplified by the extremely high numbers of Covid-19 cases, including deaths, in these facilities. In my last BC column, I noted that the long-term services and supports subcommittee for the aging master plan included a call for more access for nursing facility residents with vision loss. Social distancing and other requirements make it all the more imperative that our population be as independent as possible whether they are attempting to continue residing in their own home or they already reside in a nursing facility.
As you know, isolation issues are incredibly rampant among those suffering vision loss, especially those losing their vision later in life. Now that the general population has had to handle some degree of isolation as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps we can take advantage of the opportunity to educate the public concerning the traumatic nature of losing vision and the need for services to enable these individuals to regain the ability to live independently.
We must also advocate for services that address the needs of those with transportation limitations. This crisis may be giving those of us in urban areas a taste of what our rural brothers and sisters have had to overcome. We need to make sure that essential services, including food, medical/veterinary care, etcetera are available to all of us, no matter where we live and whether we have access to a computer.
Finally, the governor does not want to shelve the development of his Aging Master Plan. Unlike his predecessor, I believe that this Governor does care about seniors and people with disabilities and we must continue to make sure our voice is heard.
So, as the pandemic hopefully begins to ease and the cruel reality of the aftermath of that crisis begins to become apparent, let us try and learn from the crisis and shape our advocacy messages in a way that will achieve results that, before the crisis, we could not have hoped for. Let us use this horrible time as a way to move toward a better future for those who are blind or have low vision.
