Grant Process for AIDS Financing Hurting Agencies

At first, the news from the state Office of AIDS seemed good to the directors of the Los Angeles Women’s AIDS Project. The $40,000 already earmarked for the community agency’s education and prevention work would be increased by $15,000.

But, as AIDS project co-founder and board President Joyce Macy soon discovered, getting the additional money meant starting all over with the lengthy and complicated process of obtaining a state contract for the entire grant. Macy said it was December before her fledgling agency saw a penny of the grant that was supposed to have started last July 1, the beginning of the 1987-88 fiscal year.

As a result, the agency’s leaders took out personal loans to keep the agency afloat, worked for little or no pay and were forced to delay hiring for the very projects called for in their contract. Now Macy worries that the agency will not be able to complete those projects on time.

Community agencies throughout California are finding themselves in similar straits and are complaining that the state is dragging its feet in turning over promised funds. With 75% of the budget year already over, roughly a third of the education and prevention contracts between the local agencies and the Deukmejian Administration’s Office of AIDS still have not been completed. The delay means a community agency is left without its promised funds for months and must borrow money from other sources--or leave the work of AIDS prevention undone in the interim.

As of last count, 34 of the 89 contracts for AIDS education work had not been completed. Some AIDS group advocates believe that the delays stem at least in part from the large numbers of vacancies in the governor’s AIDS office, where 24 of 107 authorized staff positions are empty. The vacancies include slots for seven education and prevention workers, who oversee the contracts.

But Thelma Fraziear, who heads the governor’s Office of AIDS, said the vacancies “have not slowed up the works. We have put other things on the back burner” in order to get contracts finished. “I know those agencies need their money,” she said. She added she expects to have most of the contract-monitoring jobs filled by month’s end, in part by changing the job requirements so it will be easier to fill the slots.

The usual contracts procedure goes something like this, Fraziear said: Agencies are notified in late spring of how much they can anticipate receiving from the state, based on the governor’s proposed budget for the coming fiscal year. By the time the Legislature and the governor put the final touches on the document, the amounts can change substantially. Any time a contract is amended, including increasing the amount to be awarded, the process starts all over again, beginning with the receiving agency’s rewriting its detailed application and including review by several state offices before final approval.

This budget year, the Office of AIDS’ budget for education and prevention programs grew from the $4.8 million proposed originally by Gov. George Deukmejian to $11.1 million. In September, many community agencies learned that they would get more money than they had anticipated. Thirty new grants were awarded, and funds for 46 of the original 59 contracts were increased.

“But that (increase) means the clock stops on those contracts and the process starts all over again. . . . The state does not allow me to have two separate contracts,” Fraziear said. Some of the delays are caused by the agencies themselves when they seek to change details of their application, Fraziear said, noting that this is especially true for younger, smaller agencies inexperienced in applying for state grants.

“I don’t think the organizations understand that we have a process here,” said Fraziear, an experienced health administrator who took over the Office of AIDS last May. “I cannot just hand out the money.”

Understanding the process does not necessarily make it easier to live with, according to an official with a large Southern California agency. “This kills us,” said the official, who spoke on grounds that his agency not be identified. “We have so much to do taking care of sick people. We have a community freaking out. This just makes my job three times harder.”

AIDS education funds are generally spent on producing brochures or seminars or on hiring health workers to conduct programs for such high-risk groups as gay men, intravenous drug users and women whose sexual partners may carry the AIDS virus.

One agency director dubbed its prevention seminars for women “safer sex parties, kind of like Tupperware parties.” Women are brought together in informal settings to learn ways to help protect themselves against the virus.

Unable to Hire Workers

When contracts are not ready on time, the community agencies that cannot borrow money from other sources are unable to hire workers to implement the programs or to produce the educational materials. The prevention work aimed at stopping the spread of the invariably fatal virus is delayed. To those familiar with studies showing the effectiveness of prevention programs, the contract delays are particularly frustrating.

“The endemic issue is the length of time it takes from (initial approval of an agency’s application) to getting a final contract,” said Werner P. Kuhn, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center of Orange County.

“That process often takes five months or more,” said Kuhn, who is also a member of the executive committee of the California Assn. of Aids Agencies, a group formed two years ago to lobby for AIDS legislation and funds. The group also provides support for the community agencies, including trying to help get funds turned over more quickly.

Another association executive committee member, Kate Guzman, who is executive director of the Sacramento AIDS Foundation, said the contract delays makes it difficult for any agency to complete the promised work.

‘We Have Failed’

“If we haven’t fulfilled the terms of our contract by June 30, (the end of the budget year) on paper we have failed,” said Guzman, explaining that all the state is interested in is whether the agency did the work it promised in its contract.

“It doesn’t matter that we didn’t have the money to hire the people to do the work,” she said, estimating that her agency will spend $2,000 to $3,000 to use state money this year because it must take out loans until the funds come through. Particularly hard hit by the delays are the smaller, independent agencies that often do not have a parent organization to help tide them over or the ability to borrow money or juggle funds from one part of their budget to another.

“For my agency, it’s a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul,” said Orange County’s Kuhn, “but the process really skews the system against the smaller agencies.”

As an example, Kuhn cited the Black Community Aids Project in Orange County. When Kuhn’s agency got word that it would receive an additional $35,000 from the Office of AIDS, it decided to subcontract with the minority agency for an outreach project. But the contract is among those still not completed, so the smaller group has not yet received its money. Kuhn’s agency took out a loan to cover most of the funds in the interim.

Main Problem

California Assn. of AIDS Agencies leaders are careful not to pin all the blame on the Office of AIDS. And in fact several of them said things have improved since Fraziear took over.

Some, including Sacramento’s Guzman, believe that the main problem lies in the state’s cumbersome contract process.

“We need to go back to the Legislature and find a better way of putting this money through. After all, we have an epidemic out there,” Guzman said.

One lobbyist, who has been monitoring the state’s contracts programs for a long time, agreed. The slowness in getting contracts finished “has been a chronic problem in the state for 10 years . . . and with all state contracts, not just AIDS contracts,” said the lobbyist, who asked not to be identified.

Others wonder whether the Office of AIDS is adequately staffed to carry out the Administration’s battle against the acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a fatal, virus-caused condition that has afflicted more than 12,500 Californians.

Proposed Increase

Stan Hadden, a special assistant to Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), noted that the Office of AIDS is one of the few state programs that has been growing in recent years.

With the governor proposing to increase the AIDS education budget to $15.4 million for the coming year, Hadden, who monitors AIDS-related issues for Roberti and serves on the state’s AIDS Advisory Committee, wonders whether the state can cope with the increased workload.

“It looks like the (AIDS office) will get 70 new positions in July,” Hadden said, “but if they’re already this slow in filling the vacancies they’ve already got, you can see how this can get to be even more problematical.”

And the community agencies, frustrated that the unspent monies will go to the state’s General Fund and not be applied to the fight against AIDS, are worried that next year’s contracts will also be late.

‘Get It Together’

But Fraziear said her office, which recently moved to new quarters several blocks from the Capitol, is “going to get it together” to improve the contract process. “We’re ahead of the game right now” in planning for next year’s contracts, she said. While acknowledging that she cannot stop the problems caused when a contract is changed, she expects that it will “normally take four to six weeks” to get a contract through when there are no amendments to be made.

In the meantime, groups such as Macy’s Los Angeles Women’s AIDS Project must get by as best they can. Unprepared for the “nightmare” of waiting months for state money, Macy said her group has at times considered not taking the funds at all. But the state grant represents virtually the entire budget for the agency, which was founded two years ago as the county’s first independent organization for women affected by AIDS.

“Part of me wants to return the state grant,” Macy said, “but then the other part of me looks out at the women who have AIDS and at those who are at risk and says, ‘But how can we?’ ”