In 1989, Pacific Pride Foundation volunteer David Selberg was providing case management services to
HIV and AIDS clients out of a hotel room on Broadway in Santa Maria.
Fast-forward 20 years and hundreds of medical breakthroughs later. Selberg—who now serves as the organization’s executive director—said his co-workers and he might have to go back to those same methods in order to deliver services.
Since 1986, Pacific Pride Foundation has been a premier provider of HIV and AIDS services in Santa Barbara County, including case management, free and anonymous HIV testing, counseling, prevention education, and more.
Those services, however, have been severely jeopardized by budget cuts issued by the California Legislature.
On July 24, legislators approved $30 million in cuts to statewide AIDS funding. Four days later, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger line-item vetoed another $52 million.
The additional cuts, Selberg said, came as a shock.
“Apparently our governor has found a cure for AIDS, which none of us are privy to,” he said.
The $82 million in cuts brings AIDS funding down to pre-1985 levels. Selberg said the change is especially alarming for Californians because the state has the second highest prevalence of HIV infection in the nation.
“And [the cuts] have totally eliminated free, anonymous HIV testing statewide,” he added.
Pacific Pride Foundation alone is looking at a spending reduction of more than $600,000, or 42 percent of its HIV services budget. To keep the foundation’s doors open, Selberg said, he had to lay off 11 staff members countywide.
“I had to reduce the number of case managers from six to two,” he explained.
Those two case managers will be responsible for caring for more than 150 clients throughout the county.
“That’s a boatload of people for one social worker and one nurse,” said Carol Gerletti, the nurse case manager working in Santa Maria. “And we still don’t know what the future holds. There could be more cuts coming down the pike.
“It’s a bleak time,” she added. “We don’t even have condoms to give people. We’ve had to turn away people coming in asking for condoms. We have to tell them, ‘We don’t have any, we don’t have any.’”
The Santa Maria office might soon have to close its food pantry, which provides approximately 40 individuals and families with groceries each week. The loss is a frightening concept for Pacific Pride Foundation clients for multiple reasons, Gerletti said.
“We’re the only food pantry locally that offers the confidentiality they need, and the only one, I think, that offers nutritional supplements like Boost and Ensure,” she said.
Another frightening potential loss is the organization’s ties to the Latino community through the laying off of case manager Ramiro Diaz.
One of the only Spanish-speaking employees, Diaz has spent countless hours trying to build a rapport with the local Latino community, including fieldworkers. The cuts, Diaz said, have been especially difficult to explain to his
clients.
“It’s hard for them, because they don’t understand the big changes. You have to explain things to them two to three times,” he said. “They’re worried especially because they don’t think there’s anywhere else they can go for help because they’re scared.”
Without Diaz, Gerletti said she has no idea what will happen to the organization’s Latino clients.
“It’s been an uphill battle just getting people to trust us to keep their secret,” she said. “To get them to realize that we’re here to take care of them and we’re not going to have them arrested or deported; to tell them how important it is to go to the doctor and take your pills—we have to go right back to the beginning.”
Contact News Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 20-27, 2009.