Senate passes amendment to restore AIDS funding

The state Senate on May 19 passed a budget amendment to restore some funding to the Department of Public Health's (DPH) AIDS budget that had been cut in the Senate Ways and Means Committee's original proposal for Fiscal Year 2010 (FY10). State Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz (D-Boston) filed the amendment, which brings the state's AIDS budget up to $35.3 million. Ways and Means had originally funded DPH's AIDS budget at $34.4 million.

Mary Ann Hart, lobbyist for Project AIDS Budget Legislative Effort (ABLE), the state's lead HIV/AIDS lobbying coalition, said that while the Senate has not yet passed a final budget bill, the AIDS budget is unlikely to change before the final passage.

"I think that we would consider it a done deal. The budget isn't passed until it's passed, but it would be very unusual to go back and change what they did last night," said Hart, in a May 20 interview.

Prior to the passage of Chang-Diaz's budget amendment, the Senate voted to raise the sales tax and to end the sales tax exemption for alcohol, actions Hart said were crucial to the amendment's success.

"Sales and alcohol tax [were] very important because the funding for most of the public health and many human services programs were very explicitly tied to the increase in the alcohol and the sales tax," she explained.

Once the Senate passes a final budget bill, the House and Senate will meet in a conference committee to create a compromise budget based on their respective budget bills. The House passed a budget that funded DPH's AIDS programs at nearly the same level as the Senate budget; Hart said it is likely that the conference committee will agree to the $35.3 million funding level for AIDS programs. She said there is a chance the conference committee could cut the budget if state revenues plunge unexpectedly, as happened in 2001.

"Back in 2001 there were many budget accounts where people went into the conference committee ... [and] what came out in the final budget was something much lower than either [the House or Senate] version," said Hart.

As Bay Windows went to press it was unclear how the Senate would vote on a handful of amendments to restore money and earmark language to LGBT youth, elder and domestic violence programs. The Senate Ways and Means' budget proposal eliminated all of the earmarks for state-funded LGBT programs as part of a broader effort to cut costs in response to the state's $3.5 billion budget shortfall, and it also made substantial reductions to the larger budget line items through which those programs receive their funding. Advocates are working with lawmakers to pass amendments to restore as much of the earmark language and funding as possible. Given the state of the economy, however, advocates acknowledge that maintaining funding for their programs will be a struggle.

The Senate Ways and Means proposal was similar in its treatment of LGBT programs to the proposal released by the committee's House counterpart last month. House Ways and Means eliminated all of the LGBT programming earmarks and made funding cuts to those programs' budget line items. During the amendment process advocates and their allies in the House were successful in restoring earmarks for elder, domestic violence and some youth programs, but none of those earmarks included specific dollar amounts to be spent on those programs. That gives the executive agencies that oversee those programs additional leeway to determine how much funding to allocate to them.

Lisa Perry-Wood, executive director of the Massachusetts Commission on GLBT Youth, said the mood on Beacon Hill throughout the budget process has been dire. The earmark for the commission's administrative funding was one of the casualties of the Senate Ways and Means budget, but state Sen. Cynthia Stone Creem (D-Newton) has filed an amendment to restore the earmark for the commission's funding as well as for DPH's LGBT youth programs.

"We're just hearing so much bad news there. Things are so grim that we're going to go for whatever we can get, basically," said Perry-Wood.