Connecticut nonprofit providers painted a dire picture of their staffing situations Wednesday, as they began to make the case that lawmakers should approve more state funding to support their operations during the legislative session that begins next month.
More than two dozen nonprofit leaders crowded around a group of conference tables in the multipurpose room of Hartford’s NEAT Center at Oak Hill, where they took turns articulating the need for bolstered state funding for the community-based organizations that provide social safety net programs that were once offered by state government.
“How do we value these services?” Barry Simon, Oak Hill’s president and CEO, asked the handful of legislators who attended the meeting. “How do we make it so it can be included in the budget, so that it can have increases when inflation goes up, so we’re not scrambling and going 10 years without any increases? We just can’t exist if this is the type of partnership we’re in.”
After years of largely flat funding, state policymakers approved an increase for the providers in the two-year state budget adopted last year. That bump included a 2.5% cost of living raise over the two years as well as an additional $50 million for providers funded by the Department of Developmental Services.
But that increase fell well below what the Connecticut Community Nonprofit Alliance argued it needed to retain underpaid staff and avoid service disruptions.
On Wednesday, Gian Carl Casa, the group’s president and CEO, outlined a new funding request, asking the state to allocate $50 million for the providers who did not receive the additional increase in last year’s budget as well as a 5% increase for providers across the board.
At $186 million, Casa acknowledged the request came with a hefty price tag.
“It’s a lot of money. I know that that’s a concern,” he said. “But hopefully, from what you’ve heard today from these folks, it will help you to work with us to make that possible.”
But although the state continues to project a budget surplus, it will be difficult for lawmakers to allocate that much additional spending in the coming legislative session.
That’s due in part to a set of fiscal guardrails that constrain spending and have been credited with helping to produce a string of surpluses that have resulted in more than $7 billion in additional payments on the state’s pension debt.
In an interview, Sen. Cathy Osten, a Sprague Democrat who co-chairs the legislature’s Appropriations Committee, said her panel would be tasked with making adjustments to a state budget that was already running over the spending cap by around $30 million.
Osten hoped that lapses and slowed hiring at state agencies would mitigate the need for spending cuts, but said her committee had already received about $500 million in funding requests, most of which they would be unable to accommodate.
Still, Osten said she would seek to approve funding to make whole the nonprofits who did not receive the raise given last year to DDS-funded providers. Beyond that, new spending will be limited, she said.
“Nonprofits are near and dear to my heart. I know we need to do something, but I also know I have a complication relative to what I call the fundamentals of the budget: spending cap, revenue cap, pensions,” Osten said.
During Wednesday’s meeting several providers told lawmakers that they have struggled to retain employees willing to work demanding and stressful jobs, often for around $17 an hour and with uncertain future prospects.
And while the nonprofit groups are often credited with providing the safety net services at a lower cost than state government, Deanna Bencivengo, supportive housing director at the Chrysalis Center, said that distinction had begun to feel like an insult.
“One of the reasons why we’re here is we want to be able to pay our frontline workers a living wage. That takes more money,” Bencivengo said. Comparisons to the cost of state government programs were “kind of a slap in the face,” she said.
“You’re paying them a lot more money to do the same job that I do,” she said.
House members from both parties attended the Hartford meeting and several seemed sympathetic to the nonprofits’ concerns. Rep. Francis Cooley, R-Plainville, encouraged the providers to demonstrate to legislative leaders how their programs save the state money.
“You’re doing a great job and you are saving the state a lot of money,” he said. “If you can put it in those terms to the budget-crunchers, it’s going to be really helpful.”
Rep. Jeff Currey, D-East Hartford, said Connecticut had already spent too much time celebrating how cheaply nonprofits could serve its vulnerable populations. “Until we sit down and have tough conversations around the structures and systems that are supporting everything, we are going to have this conversation every single year,” Currey said. “There’s just no more time for it.”
