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The lives behind budget numbers

By SUE CARLTON
Published June 8, 2007

In a sprawling building on a quiet St. Petersburg street, the kids are stretched out on their mats in the day care room. Nap time is over, and they are belly down on elbows, watching cartoons.

A woman comes in fresh from a job hunt, and her little boy jumps up to hug her. It's another day at CASA, St. Pete's 30-bed domestic violence center, temporary home to 400 to 500 women and children a year.

Here they share bunk beds and nightly cooking duties in the harvest-gold kitchen. They trade stories in the living room and scour the bulletin board for job leads, bus schedules, free child car seats. Here is the beginning of a way out.

Executive director Linda Osmundson has been here nearly two decades, and always it's a battle for funds. But never has she been this worried about what's happening up in Tallahassee.

Lawmakers are about to let us in on big plans to cut our property taxes. Services that matter to you in your city, your county, could be on the chopping block.

Everyone's got their particular worries. Please, not the social services my family relies on. Not the parks program my kid likes.

In the case of nonprofits like CASA, we should be listening. If we have to cut, we have to cut smart.

"Government has something to tighten in their belt. We don't, " says Osmundson, sitting in her office over the CASA thrift shop. "We're already on a shoestring."

About a third of their $4-million budget comes from fundraising, but she says people seem to be holding money tighter (an irony being that domestic violence tends to go up in bad financial times.)

Given the early warnings from the city, county and Juvenile Welfare Board, CASA could lose more than a quarter of its budget, Osmundson says.

That would mean no more CASA workers to supervise court-ordered visitation between parents and children.

No more substance abuse counseling, though 90 percent of their cases involve substance abuse. No more legal advocates to help regular people negotiate the tangled court system. No more Peacemakers, a prevention program that works with kids from preschool to middle school.

The Spring, a 102-bed domestic violence center that shelters a thousand people a year in Tampa, is bracing for the possibility of similar cuts.

It's hard to measure prevention, or what didn't happen.

But as a practical matter, problems left to fester will surely cost us later, in police and jail services for starters.

Here's an interesting statistic: Out of about 70 domestic violence deaths Osmundson has reviewed in the last five years as part of a countywide committee, only two of them involved people who had contact with a Pinellas domestic violence shelter.

Think that whole cycle-of-violence thing is overplayed, that programs to change thinking and behavior are overrated?

Osmundson remembers a man who showed up at the shelter despite its discreet location, determined to find his wife.

How did he know where to go? He'd been there before, as a little boy, with his mother.

Sue Carlton's column now appears on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

[Last modified June 8, 2007, 00:37:45]