Cuts could’ve been avoided

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, June 20, 2007 | 7:07 a.m.

A federally required committee of local volunteers that sets guidelines on spending federal money for HIV/AIDS patients says Clark County did not heed its call on how to avoid $250,000 in cuts approved Tuesday.

Gary Vrooman, public policy chairman for the Las Vegas Ryan White Council, said Tuesday that he asked the county in early May to pursue a waiver from changes in federal rules that have resulted in less funds for services such as housing and counseling and more for health care.

"The county didn't file the waiver we directed them to," Vrooman said, adding that he first brought up the issue at a May 1 meeting of the council and county officials.

The result, he said, is "we are going to have homeless people on the street."

But Jonna Triggs, a Clark County social service manager - the agency that passes federal HIV/AIDS funds to local nonprofit organizations - says the issue was never brought up at that or other meetings.

She said the council first described the idea of getting a waiver from the new rules in a June 8 e-mail - 11 days before the change was approved at a Clark County commission meeting.

"We never got a directive to pursue " the waiver, Triggs said. She said the issue was on the agenda at several May meetings, but was not discussed because time ran out.

"Had we been apprised that this was an issue, we would have looked into it," she added.

Vrooman said council members were told of the possibility of waivers in late April during a trip to Washington.

After that, he said, his "entire agenda" was to get the county to look into the waiver.

The guidelines for seeking waivers were made available by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration in early May, he said. Conference calls on the issue by Ryan White councils nationwide buzzed at the time. (The federal program is named after an Indiana teen who fought an internationally chronicled battle against HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and helped ease AIDS-related discrimination.)

One jurisdiction, Nassau/Suffolk, Long Island , in New York did not wait for those guidelines, obtaining a waiver through a lawsuit.

Triggs said the issue may be blown out of proportion in the Las Vegas Valley, because this year's overall federal funding is higher than last year's - $4.4 million versus $4.1 million.

Tuesday's reductions, she said, were simply "housekeeping."

For five local social service agencies - the Nevada Association of Latin Americans, Caminar Inc., Golden Rainbow, the Community Outreach Medical Center and the Southern Nevada Health District - the changes are expected to mean housekeeping on a smaller budget.

The Nevada Association of Latin Americans, for example, is scheduled to lose $133,125 of its $233,475 budget. The Community Outreach Medical Center would see its funding reduced by more than half, losing $55,842 from its $110,953 award.

The cuts the county commissioners approved Tuesday , Triggs said, were designed to "stop the bleeding on services ... that some providers were continuing to provide even though they weren't supposed to."

In the end, she said, "It's not a cut ; it's a shift."