Aid for needy imperiled

President Bush has plenty of admirers in red-state Utah, but you won't find many of them in the nonprofit world.

Most Utah nonprofit agencies are seeing their budgets shrink while the president invests more money in defense spending.

"It's hard to be a Bush fan right now," said Maria Garciaz, executive director of Salt Lake Neighborhood Housing Services. "The war has had an incredible impact in communities across the country."

As the battle rages on in the Middle East, defense spending is on the rise, leaving local nonprofit groups like Garciaz's desperate for funding. Under Bush's proposed budget, defense spending would increase and funding for the community development block grant program would plummet by nearly $1 billion.

Local nonprofit groups rely on the grant money to fund numerous programs, from housing the homeless to helping at-risk teens find their way, to revitalizing blighted communities. These groups are already reeling from consecutive years of federal budget cuts. Now, if Congress approves Bush's budget, the cuts will continue through June 2008.

"It's a scary, scary future here," said Leticia Medina, executive director of Utah Issues, a Salt Lake County-based nonprofit group that seeks long-term solutions to the problems associated with poverty.

Because of previous cuts, nearly 11,000 fewer people will receive services from Utah's nonprofit groups, said Lynn Feveryear, Salt Lake County's manager of community development and housing. That number will balloon to 40,000 if Bush gets his way with the 2007-08 budget.

If The Road Home, a Salt Lake City homeless shelter, loses any more CDBG funding, programs that help people move out of the shelter to permanent housing would suffer, said Matt Minkevitch, the shelter's executive director. The Road Home received $126,000 in block grant funding from Salt Lake City in the 2005-06 fiscal year.

Minkevitch said the shelter moves some 200 families from its 31 apartments to houses each year; a funding cut would mean far fewer families could move into permanent housing.

"If we have families who move into our 31 units and they have nowhere else to go and we have no resources to help them get out of the shelter . . . you could have families sitting in that shelter for two years," Minkevitch said.