LAAC Director Testifies on Substantial Need for Additional Funding
On November 16th, the State Assembly Committee on Judiciary and the Judicial Council co-sponsored a fullday, informational hearing on "Actions and Obstacles to Achieving Equal Access in California." LAAC Director, Julia R. Wilson, gave testimony on behalf of LAAC member programs on a panel addressing the "Justice Gap in Legal Services" with Ken Babcock, Executive Director of the Public Law Center, and Robert Hawley, Deputy Director of the State Bar. LAACs testimony focused on the existing gap between the need for legal services and the current available funding levels; below is a portion of Julia's testimony advocating for additional funding for legal services in California.
"Every day legal aid programs in our state face a mind-boggling variety of client needs. Many of these needs relate to lifes most basic necessities. Facially with this radically diverse set of legal needs, legal services programs offer a broad continuum of services designed to best meet client needs while ensuring efficient and cost-effective services.
In an ideal world, legal aid organizations would have sufficient staff and resources to serve every qualified prospective client. Programs would make decisions about the level of services to undertake in each case based solely on client's needs and abilities, the underlying substantive issues, and the outside resources available to the client. Instead, programs are often forced by lack of funding to limit the services available to clients - and even then must still turn eligible clients away.
The most recent data tracking the impact of this lack of funding comes from a September 2005 report from the federal
Legal Services Corporation, entitled Documenting the Justice Gap in America. According to this report, at least 80% of the civil legal needs of low-income Americans are not being met. Fifty percent of the qualified prospective clients seeking assistance from LSC-funded programs are being turned away for lack of program resources. This means that for every two eligible clients that come to a legal aid program, one of them cannot be served due to lack of program resources. And even for the people who do receive some help, programs are often not able to offer the level of service the client truly needs.Preliminary results from some of LAAC's member programs indicate that the gap between funding and client need is even greater in California. The funding gap forced programs to turn away between 50 to 75% of their eligible clients due solely to lack of sufficient resources. Large numbers of the clients who were turned away were seeking assistance with housing and family law needs, two core areas of basic subsistence.
Although these statistics are striking enough on their own, we simply cannot underestimate the human impact of this funding gap. Low-income parents of children with special needs can attend an educational seminar describing their children's legal rights to certain services, but the attorney doing the presentation cannot offer them any legal representation despite their horror stories about the barriers they face in trying to meet their children's most basic needs. Attorneys conducting intake with frail elders are forced to make the unconscionable decision about which of that days worthy clients can be served and which equally worthy clients must be turned away. Victims of domestic violence call an afternoon family law phone intake system, only to be turned away because the intakes were completely filled in the first five minutes. And these heart-wrenching stories do not even capture the clients who never contact legal services programs in the first place because of the discouraging "word on the street" that legal aid is simply too busy and too overwhelmed to help.
It is true that we have seen significant improvement in the overall funding for legal services for the poor in recent years. . . resulting in great benefits for the legal services community and most importantly for the clients that we serve. Nevertheless, the funding available today has not kept pace with the escalating poverty rate in California and remains woefully inadequate. Despite gains over the last five years, significantly more funding is necessary. This reality is, as shown by the recent Justice Gap report, at current levels of funding legal services providers simply cannot meet the overwhelming demand for assistance."