Agency for Gays Is Forced to Cut Back : Social services: The budget deficit comes as a deeper controversy clouds the group’s future.
One in Long Beach Inc., the city’s largest gay and lesbian social service agency, is in trouble.
Hours at The Center, a drop-in facility on 4th Street, have been cut by a third. Judith M. Doyle, the agency’s executive director, has had her workweek slashed from 20 hours to 10. Her assistant, Robin Wadkins, now works 20 hours a week instead of 40. And Lee Balan, The Center’s former full-time director, has had his job eliminated altogether.
“It’s reduced my effectiveness and the effectiveness of the operation,” Doyle said of the cutbacks, ordered last month by the agency’s board of directors. “At this point it’s minimum maintenance of a reduced program. It’s definitely a tragedy.”
The cuts are designed to offset an estimated $20,000 shortfall in the budget of the $550,000-a-year agency that provides an array of services including HIV antibody testing, counseling, referrals and social activities.
In fact, they are only the latest symptoms of a deep-rooted controversy that clouds the agency’s future. Seven months ago the organization was proudly proclaiming the success of the city’s first AIDS Walk. Now an internal argument over financing and leadership has evolved into a full-scale stalemate raising the basic question of just what the agency--and especially The Center--should be.
On one side, some members say, is the overriding reality of the large professional service organization that One in Long Beach has become. On the other is an underlying suspicion that the growth has been too rapid, uneasiness with its implications, and a pervading nostalgia for the community-based, volunteer-oriented drop-in center the agency once was.
The controversy began in July, not over lofty philosophical differences, but over a matter of procedure. Barbara Kalish, a former member of the board of directors who had resigned six months earlier--in part, she said, because of the organization’s pro-growth stance--appeared before the new board to complain about what she perceived as its purposeful failure to inform large numbers of corporation members that their memberships were about to expire.
The organization’s 350 members, who pay annual dues for the privilege, theoretically constitute the body to which the board is answerable. The alleged failure to re-enlist them was significant, Kalish said, because it showed an attempt by the board to “change the operating philosophy” of the organization by getting rid of the majority of its voting members.
Board members denied the charge, attributing the lack of notification to a year-old change in the bylaws that had altered the terms of membership. Nonetheless, they voted to extend all memberships through December, when a major membership drive is to be mounted.
Kalish was not satisfied. Eventually she helped organize a series of meetings out of which a whole slew of new charges emerged. Among them: that funds earmarked for building had somehow been misappropriated, that donations for AIDS testing had been unethically used for other purposes, that the agency’s top administrators were being paid exorbitant salaries and that some of the revenue from the AIDS Walk had mysteriously disappeared.
Board members deny all the charges and say they have the records to prove them false. An independent audit of the AIDS Walk uncovered no irregularities.
But what quickly emerged as the major focus of the discontent was a proposal by Doyle to refinance a $150,000 loan on the 4th Street building in which the agency has its headquarters.
Doyle says she made the proposal for three reasons: to begin paying on the loan’s principal rather than interest only as is now the case; to borrow enough money on the building’s equity to finance earthquake preparations required by local ordinances, and to borrow enough to cover any short-term cash flow problems that may have developed.
Critics argued that the plan was a bad idea that would have unnecessarily encumbered the building to obtain cash that should have been there already.
The matter came to a head at a special Aug. 31 meeting at which a majority of the members present voted to strip the board of its power to encumber the property without a full vote of the membership. The coup de grace came two weeks later when one of the agency’s major annual fund-raisers--a lawn party called the Great Gatsby--brought in only about half the income expected.
Doyle blames the failure on the negative publicity generated by the allegations of her detractors. Critics blame it on lack of promotion and good planning.
Whatever the case, the bottom line is the estimated $20,000 deficit expected to last until the end of the year when new grant money is likely to become available. Unwilling to obtain a loan on its own because of the negative “feeling in the community,” said board Chairman Harlan Eyre, the board took the only path it perceived as open to it: the cutting of hours and personnel--a move expected to save about $4,500 a month.
In the meantime, the charges and countercharges continue to flow. But underlying it all, some members say, is a basic conflict in philosophy regarding the future of an agency that in three years has grown from a rented building run mostly by volunteers on $164,000 a year, to a major social service agency operated by a paid professional staff with twice the space and more than three times the budget.
