ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 28, 1997 TAG: 9702280091
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
THE DISTANCE between Washington and "Outside the Beltway" never looks greater than when a national pol proposes the devastation of a popular local program.
In this instance, the pol is President Clinton, whose proposed 1997-98 budget schedules a $75 million cut from the federal Community Services Block Grant program.
To get anywhere near a balanced federal budget, painful cuts will have to be made. But not this one. Not now.
In Roanoke, the cut would take a $125,000 slice out of Total Action Against Poverty's core funding. This, in turn, would cause more slicing. Like other community-action agencies, TAP uses its grant to leverage additional money from public and private sources.
Altogether, the agency could lose as much as $500,000, a reduction that would be not only unpopular but also foolish. No less a balanced-budget kind of guy than 6th District Congressman Bob Goodlatte agrees.
The Roanoke Republican says he'll be working to restore the funds, and to get a small increase for the program to keep it from losing ground to inflation.
How can a conservative such as Goodlatte try to get more money for a social program when he is part of a Republican Congress that, working with a New Democrat president, has begun unraveling the federal government's social safety net? Is this political pandering, some effort to backtrack when tough spending decisions begin to squeeze back home?
No. Funding TAP is in perfect alignment with welfare reform.
Now more than ever, support is needed for effective, community-based anti-poverty programs such as TAP and the equally commendable Virginia Water Project, the Roanoke-based program that helps poor communities and families get indoor plumbing. Funding is essential - and not just to lower the heat politicians otherwise might feel from advocates for the poor.
Community-action agencies should be nourished because they fit the model of decentralized, locally controlled, creatively run programs now regarded as the best hope for addressing the problems of intransigent poverty in our nation's urban and rural areas. The belief that traditional programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children are too bureaucratic and rule-bound to move permanent recipients off the welfare and onto the work rolls is widespread and frequently correct. Part of the solution lies in finding alternatives that work better.
TAP offers youth services, emergency home repairs and, most important, job training. Such programs must be in place as public assistance dries up for people who have been dependent a long time - in some cases, their entire lives, as perhaps their mothers were before them. Simply abandoning the hard-core poor and their children would be as mean-spirited as some fear welfare reform is meant to be.
Welfare reformers have countered that they want to offer a hand up, rather than a handout, to anyone in need in this bountiful country. TAP, and programs like it, are an excellent place for rhetoric to be backed by dollars.
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