Budget cuts are not fun for anyone. After three years of cuts in the District’ caused by a nearly $1 billion drop in tax collections in the recession ‘ our leaders understand that the budget reductions they are making are painful and affect services that are important to residents. We’re at the point where there are no easy budget choices.
Nevertheless, some of the cuts are especially troubling, because they lack a vision for how the District will grow out of the recession and tackle its biggest challenges, like unemployment.
Take the $1.7 million cut to child care, for example. Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post wrote a column last week highlighting the devastating effects the cuts could have for working parents; some neighborhood child care centers may go out of business or stop accepting children who are using a child care voucher.
Mayor-elect Gray has said he wants to focus on youth from age zero to 24, and he wants to reduce high unemployment in the city. Yet budget cuts that make child care less convenient and less affordable, at a time when finding a job itself is not easy, moves the ball backward on both aims.
The $4.6 million cut in cash assistance to poor families with children provides another example. Several Councilmembers have rightly raised concerns over inadequate welfare-to-work efforts in DC and the result that some families have used TANF cash assistance for a long time.
But rather than focus on things to improve employment outcomes for parents — better assessments of employment barriers, for example, and an overhaul of TANF’s inadequate education and training services ‘ Mayor Fenty and the Council voted to reduce cash payments immediately to some families. Cutting income assistance to the poorest families with children without changing the services they receive, in the middle of a recession, is not a meaningful way to get parents into family-sustaining jobs. (The Council’s effort to restore adult job training funds, while laudable, will at best help only a small fraction of TANF recipients who need it.)
The next year will not be easy, with yet another large budget gap looming. But it doesn’t mean that the new Mayor and Council cannot make progress on the District’s major challenges. With more than three months before the FY 2012 budget is submitted, they can take the time to make budget decisions that protect resources need to help unemployed parents get back into the labor market and avoid cuts that will set these families ‘ and the city ‘ back.
