What's going on in there?

It's getting to be an unfortunate tradition: National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day rolls around -- and it comes to light that millions of dollars intended to fight the AIDS epidemic among people of color in New York City are being needlessly delayed because of City Hall bureaucracy.

Despite the fact that $2.6 million for the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Education program -- better known as the Communities of Color (COC) funding -- was approved during the June 2007 New York City budget agreement (1.6 million in city funds, the rest in state funds), most of the small community-based organizations slated to receive the funding are still waiting. The hold-up means that essential community HIV prevention and outreach is on hold and that when the money does arrive, service providers will have to scramble to spend it within the fiscal year.

"We want to create a good program, but it's harder with the short amount of time to spend the money. Until you receive an authorization letter you can't do anything," said Chris Norwood, executive director of Health People, Inc., located in the Bronx. Last year Health People received $200,000 -- a significant portion of its $1 million operating budget. But the lack of funding has meant that it can't provide significant HIV outreach and testing. Last year they identified hundreds of HIV-positive people who weren't in services, and were able to place them in appropriate care. "It's hard to understand why this lag keeps happening every year," Norwood said.

"We're just waiting," said Ding Pharjaron, director of development at the Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition in HIV/AIDS, which also received COC funding last year. "It's very difficult to create a program when there's such a short period of time to implement it. It all depends on what the City Council wants. Maybe they'll be able to do it, maybe not."

We're Having Flashbacks

Almost exactly a year ago today, the Update told a strikingly similar story: City Hall was holding up Communities of Color funding. Back then, the problem was back room politics. While there is still a hint of that, this year the trouble seems to be good old-fashioned bureaucracy.

According to the City Council's finance department, the Department of Health is in possession of this year's Communities of Color allocation but is waiting for City Council to tell it who should receive the money. Representatives of the DOH and various City Council members, including Speaker Christine Quinn's office, did not respond to the Update's request for an explanation of the delay in COC funding.

Council dithering means trouble for the groups waiting for the COC money. Once DOH finds out who gets the money, grant managers at the Medical Health and Research Association have to process the applications. Then it will be a rush-the-clock situation for groups, many of them with tiny budgets, to implement programs and spend the money by June 30, when the funding expires.

If groups have already been able to mount the programs for which they intend to use the COC money, they can spend their COC grants on those programs. Most small agencies, however, aren't able to front start-up program money, which means they are still waiting to get services off the ground and will have to rush to do so by June 30.

Same Pie, Smaller Slices

One new, potentially complicating factor in the COC story is that, previously, community groups had to have under a $2 million budget to be eligible for the COC funding. This year City Council expanded eligibility to organizations with budgets less than $35 million to get more CBOs to apply, especially those in the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island.

Expanding the number of groups means those organizations that received funding last year (including Housing Works) will probably see funding decreases. Insiders say that of the 16 groups that received funding last year, those in Manhattan and Brooklyn will get half of what they received last year. The three groups in remaining boroughs -- Positive People, the Bronx Community Pride Center, and the Community Health Action of Staten Island -- will actually have to reapply for funding, because the Council is trying to get more organizations from those boroughs to apply for funding as well. This will even more limit the amount of time groups have to spend the money by the June 30 contractual deadline.

The fact that many New York City organizations are going to have to learn to live with less makes City Hall's inefficiency even more unacceptable. It's up to the Council to speed up this process and make sure that the money is headed out to groups who can use it -- ASAP. And to ensure that this better-late-than-never approach to funding allocation never happens again.