BRATTLEBORO-Like many of you, I have been outraged by the actions of the Trump administration, especially the massive gutting of USAID and potentially freezing of all federal funding for some of our most urgent needs, like food shelves and homeless shelters.
At the same time, the Trumpers are blaming the fiscal crises they are causing through terrible economic decisions on those already marginalized and often struggling - migrants, brown people, poor people, and others.
What is especially heartbreaking is that I see echoes of these actions here at home, in the community I love.
The Brattleboro Selectboard has explicitly said that their Community Safety Plan - which is costing taxpayers an additional $1.5 million - is dependent on the cops being able to refer people in crisis to local human services agencies, all of which were at capacity with months-long waiting lists even before the federal funding cuts.
And at the same time, members of the Selectboard have been advocating for cutting the mere 2% of our town's budget that goes to those same human services they are relying upon. Our town gives no other money to food for children, sheltering unhoused people, services for homebound seniors, or the like.
Recently, there has been a smear campaign against the Human Services Committee to make them the scapegoats for the fiscal crisis that has been created from a combination of increased waste management costs and the additional $1.5 million the Selectboard gave to policing with no plan to pay for it besides raising taxes.
The organizations that receive money from the Human Services Committee have to fill out a 20-page application and give extensive data about their work in order to qualify for this funding. There is intensive and substantive accountability about where those small pools of money go, and those documents are available to the public.
Some people have said that this is "charity," not town services, but I firmly believe that funding human services is a core government function and has been outsourced to private nonprofits only because of conservative administrations systemically underfunding social services, starting with the Reagan administration.
My tax dollars go to fund our local schools, as well as our swimming pool and skating rink, none of which I or anyone in my family has ever personally used. Why are those deemed core town functions but finding beds for people who are sleeping outdoors in 10 degree weather is not?
It is hard to see how we can stop the Trump administration's gutting of federal services, but we have a chance to at least not replicate this crisis here at home and to hopefully try to shore up our local providers' ability to serve our community once these cuts go into effect.
If we believe that Brattleboro should truly be a compassionate community; if we believe that we have to invest in our community at a time when the federal government is attacking our social safety net; if we want to see Brattleboro live up to the ideals and values we claim to espouse; then we must keep the Human Services budget at at least 2% of our total town budget.
Sonia Silbert
Brattleboro
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