Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to testify on the state’s 2009-10 State Budget.  My name is Anne Erickson and I am President and CEO of the Empire Justice Center.  Empire Justice maintains offices in Albany, Rochester, White Plains and Central Islip.  In addition to providing support and training to legal services offices, which I will address here today, we also undertake policy research and analysis, engage in legislative and administrative advocacy and we represent low-income individuals, as well as classes of New Yorkers, in a wide range of poverty law areas.

As many of you know, we have led the effort to secure state funding for legal services programs across the state since 1993. Indeed, we now formally staff and lead the Legal Services Funding Alliance, a coalition of the 20 legal services programs outside New York City.  Testimony from the Alliance will also be offered here today.

For the Empire Justice Center, state funding is a critical part of our annual budget – with it we are able to provide training, support and technical assistance in a broad array of substantive law areas to legal services staff throughout the state.  Much like the New York State Public Defenders Association, which provides support to the defender community, Empire Justice provides support to the civil legal services community.

Poverty law is extremely complex and incredibly intertwined.  In applying for public benefits, trying to secure federal disability assistance, or attempting to navigate the Medicaid and Medicare systems our staff and their clients confront systems that rival the tax code in their complexity.  And what happens in one system can impact your access to another system.  The interactions between public assistance, for example, and access to child care or child support or employment assistance are fraught with complications and peril.  The slightest misstep can lead to sanction and loss of benefits. 

Thanks to the expertise of our incredibly knowledgeable staff, Empire Justice keeps the legal services community up-to-date on any changes in laws, rules or regulations that will impact their access to critical services so that they can be effective advocates for their clients.  We do this in a number of ways as outlined in my testimony.

Funding for State Support Centers

We have been the support center for legal services programs outside New York City since 1973.  Until 1996, state support centers were funded as part of the federal infrastructure for legal services through the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), one of the three core funding streams that to this day support the delivery of legal assistance.   In 1995, a Congress hostile to legal assistance for the poor, severely cut funding, imposed a number of practice restrictions on those programs receiving LSC funding, and eliminated all funding for state and national support centers.   We lost one-third of our budget in a single year and we have struggled to maintain our services ever since.

This lack of federal funding makes the state funding for support services even more critical. 

State funding for our general support services comes through the Department of State (DOS), the Legal Services Assistance Fund (LSAF) and the Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS/Domestic Violence funding).  In the 2007-08 budget, a high mark for state funding which also included funding through the Office of Court Administration, the combined funding for our general support services was approximately $662,000; that funding level dropped to $458,500 in last year’s budget.  By way of contrast, state funding for the New York Defenders Association, also a state support and backup center, is approximately $1.4 million.

Clearly, we are part of the overarching state funding initiative and we urge the state to increase funding for legal services across the board – which will help our ability to provide services and will ensure at least some level of access to justice across the state.

Empire Justice Structure and Staffing

As a support center, Empire Justice provides a range of services to our clients and to the community.  In order to address the areas of highest need, we concentrate our efforts on core poverty law issues.  We also watch for new and emerging legal issues which we then try to address.  For example, through our direct services in Monroe County, we began to see clients with exotic, non-traditional mortgages in trouble in the late 1990’s.  We began looking more closely at the patterns, secured local funding to provide deeper services to this increasing number of clients facing foreclosures and began to develop expertise. Today we are able to provide statewide training, support and technical assistance in this critical area so that legal services programs across the state can better meet the needs of their clients in what is a new area of practice for many of them.

Our current areas of focus include civil rights, education and special education, employment, consumer, C.A.S.H. (low income tax assistance) housing, disability benefits, domestic violence, family, immigration and immigrant access to benefits, language access, public assistance,  (including cash assistance, Food Stamps, child care and child support) and health, (including Child Health Plus, Family Health Plus, Medicaid and Medicare Part D).

In some areas we are able to provide a full range of assistance; in other areas – like education, special education, employment, domestic violence and child support we are stretched too thin to provide all that is needed.

Training, Support, Technical Assistance and Information Sharing

A core part of our mission is to provide support and assistance to the local and regional legal services offices across the state – primarily those outside of New York City.  We work to keep the community as informed and up-to-date as possible on any changes that will impact the rights and responsibilities of their clients. 

Our support is provided by our most senior and experienced staff and ranges from the active monitoring and participation in numerous substantive law listservs, to being available to individual legal services staff to review legal documents, to staffing and leading a number of substantive law Task Forces which bring legal services staff together, generally on a regional basis, to share information and help spot and address emerging issues.

We have been an accredited provider of Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) since May 1998 and we are now accredited to provide credits through non-traditional formats, including web-based and archived trainings.

In 2007, we conducted 83 training events, with a combined attendance of 2,222 participants.  We offered 307 CLE credit hours to assist legal services staff in meeting their continuing legal education requirements.  

We ran 23 Task Force meetings which brought together staff from around the state who work in targeted substantive law areas for information sharing, short CLE presentations and an opportunity to strategize on cases and case development.

We continue to publish two legal journals – our general Legal Services Journal and the more targeted Disability Law News.   Each is published six times a year; they are e-mailed to the community and posted them to the web.  In 2007, the LSJ was downloaded 1,471 times and the Disability Law News was downloaded 2,242 times.

We run a vibrant and dynamic website that has become a critical resource to the legal services community, providing access to information on changes in law, rules and regulations, alerts on emerging legal issues and updates in a host of substantive law areas including: Child Care, Child Support, Civil Legal Services, Civil Rights, Consumer and Community Development, Disability, Domestic Violence, Education, Employment, Health, Housing, Immigration, Language Access and Public Benefits.

In 2007, the website had over 2.3 million hits, an average of 6,467 per day.  Page views numbered over 1.7 million and there were 345,968 sessions, an average of 948 per day.  Some 879,715 pages of materials were accessed during 255,869 visits to the On-Line Resource Center which had 3,405 registered Fair Hearing Bank users who had access to 2,317 searchable summaries and full decisions.

Working with the Western New York Law Center, we added an On Line/On Demand Training Center to the On Line Resource Center. We have an initial library of 19 taped trainings that provide CLE credit to eligible attorneys; in its first year, these trainings were viewed by at least 721 individuals for a total of over 437 viewing hours.

Legal Assistance: Individual Legal Representation

In addition to our training and support services, we also provide direct legal assistance to those in need.

In Rochester we are one of the core legal services providers, with our staff handling cases that involve disability benefits, special education, civil rights, specialized legal assistance for those living with HIV/AIDS,  and consumer law – including foreclosures and predatory lending. 

In our other offices we have tried to complement and supplement the local delivery system.  For instance in the Capital District we have a small project where we provide legal assistance to immigrant victims of domestic violence, with clients coming to us through referrals from the three local DV shelters. 

We also provide targeted foreclosure legal assistance in the greater Albany area, but with new state funding in this area of law, the Legal Aid Society of Northeastern New York will expand its capacity, and we’ll provide more training, support and technical assistance and less direct representation. 

Our White Plains office, where we have two bilingual attorneys housed in two small offices on the Pace Law School Campus, we provide legal assistance to immigrants, primarily immigrant victims of domestic violence, handling everything from VAWA self petitions to specialized U visas to naturalizations and work authorizations.  We currently have 113 open cases in that one office and work closely with small community-based organizations throughout the region, providing technical assistance and support to their staff and taking direct client referrals of immigrants in need of legal assistance. 

Our Long Island office provides a combination of public benefits and immigrant representation.  Thanks to funding from three community foundation grants and support from IOLA, we now have a three-person office on the campus of Touro Law School and we have just started out stationing our paralegal at one of the local Hispanic agencies – Pronto – for intake on a weekly basis. 

In 2007, we closed a total of 837 individual cases, impacting 13,763 people.  37% of those cases were in income maintenance and public assistance, including SSI; 15% dealt with individual rights, including immigration issues; just over 14% were in the area of education; and another 14% were in housing, including foreclosures and predatory home loans.

Through our work, we generated $2.15 million in awards and settlements for these clients, in addition to the benefits generated by our impact litigation.  In addition to benefits we generated for our clients, under our disability advocacy program we generated over $500,000 in cash back to the state from the federal Social Security Administration in the form on interim assistance payments.

We struggle to maintain these services as the need continues to increase.  Like every legal services program in the state we are turning away far too many people in need of assistance.  It is not only heartbreaking for our staff, it also causes further disruption and increased emergency needs among our clients.

Conclusion

We join with our colleagues in urging the Governor and Legislative to include at least $11.4 million in this year’s state budget for civil legal services.  This will allow us to continue providing a level of direct services in our four offices, and also allow us to continue providing critical support services.  Training, support and technical assistance services offer a cost-effective way of meeting the needs of both the clients and the legal services community.  As we enter what will undoubtedly be some pretty rough waters, the need for these services – the glue that helps hold the community together, is more critical than ever.   Clearly, without the restoration of state funding, we will be unable to continue providing these critical services – services that help strengthen the overall delivery system and improve access to justice.

I thank you for your time and look forward to working with you as the budget process continues to unfold.

For more information:
Anne Erickson
518.462.6831