Almost every day, Providencia Rosario walks a short distance from her home in the Vladeck Houses on the Lower East Side to eat lunch and dinner and hang out with some friends. Her routine is generally the same. Rosario spends her time at the Henry Street Settlement Good Companions Senior Center, located in the Vladeck Houses. The center is open to anyone over 60 and provides three hot meals and activities daily.“I come here almost every day; otherwise I would be home alone and I’d feel lonely,” said Rosario, 82.
She attends one of the seven senior centers on the Lower East Side, all of which were threatened last year with either budget cuts or having their doors shuttered permanently.

Every year, the state budget must be passed by June 30. Recently, this has become a task for New York’s governor, due to the troubled economy. Cuts have to be made, and often the Title XX fund, which provides the Department for the Aging with money for services such as senior centers, is targeted. To save their centers, senior citizens sign petitions and write thousands of letters to the governor while local politicians fight for the seniors’ interests.

“This year, more seniors in my district wrote to Governor Cuomo than any other council district,” said Council Member Margaret Chin of District 1 in Lower Manhattan in a press release. “This budget dance has to stop. It is unfair to our seniors and it is unfair to our communities.”

For the last two years, the executive budget has proposed a $25 million cut to Title XX, which could shut down 105 of the city’s 256 senior centers.

This year, seniors and politicians are preparing early for any proposed cuts to senior citizens’ programs. Thursday, Dec. 1, council members met in front of City Hall to make a preemptive statement to the governor, demanding he stop trying to tap into senior citizen funding. The city also asked seniors to write in, and they have received over 15,000 letters.

“We’ve just asked Governor Cuomo not to waste our time, but save our time to do meaningful things,” said Po-Ling Ng, assistant executive director of the CPC senior center at 168 Grand St. “Our seniors and staff worry too much. It’s really abuse—we don’t feel secure in our senior life anymore.”

Even before City Council and seniors called on the governor to prevent budget cuts this month, Ng attended State Sen. Daniel Squadron’s town hall meeting in November to bring up Title XX. She praised the state senator for standing up for senior citizens last year and asked him to do the same this year.

“Year after year, Title XX and senior centers are the first programs on the budget chopping block,” said Squadron in an email. “We’ve been successful in protecting Title XX in the past, but this year, senior centers  cannot be put at risk. Some programs should simply never be on the chopping block in the first place.”

Manhattan has 60 senior centers, with 11 below 14th Street.

“The Department for the Aging funds nearly a third of its senior center budget through the use of Title XX discretionary funds,” said Department for the Aging Commissioner Lilliam Barrios-Paoli in a statement. “Any loss of state funding would impact seniors profoundly—we would potentially have to close upward of 105 senior centers across the five boroughs.”

Not only are senior centers worried about being closed, they also fear any more funding cuts. Due to the economy, they have already been forced to keep tighter budgets, sacrificing activities and programs that keep seniors active. Center directors also point out that fundraising isn’t easy in an ailing economy, either.

“The Title XX money not coming through would be devastating for senior centers, ours included,” said David Garza, executive director of Henry Street’s senior center. “Alternative sources of funding are just nonexistent in this particular economic climate.”

Henry Street’s senior center is usually packed during lunch and dinnertime, and when the seniors aren’t eating they are taking part in activities such as bingo, tai chi and computer classes.

“I come here to hang out with my buddies,” said Charles Garcia, 64, at Henry Street. He often plays pool or dominoes with his friends, and also stops by for lunch or dinner. “It’s like a boys club, but for old guys.”

By Dan Rivoli

Rep. Jerrold Nadler may have won re-election to his Upper West Side-based district with a lopsided 75 percent of the vote. But the “shellacking”—in the words of President Barack Obama—Democrats took on Election Day throughout the country sent Nadler back to a familiar place: the House minority.

Most of Nadler’s career in the House has been spent in the minority, save for the first two years of his tenure after being elected in 1992 and the four years since Democrats took over Congress in 2006.

In a post-election interview with the West Side Spirit, the nine-term lawmaker discussed his work chairing a committee on constitution, civil rights and civil liberties, legislative achievements, funding for New York and his agenda for his 10th term.

Nadler focused on reacting to recent Supreme Court decisions, such as co-sponsoring the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, a law that increases opportunities to remedy pay discrimination, or a bipartisan effort to amend the Americans with Disabilities Act.

As the outgoing chair of the judiciary subcommittee, Nadler said he is likely to see his national security legislation scuttled. He was working on a State Secrets Act, which would limit the president’s ability to cite the protection of state secrets in cases against the government.

“That probably won’t go anywhere now,” Nadler said.

During his time as the highest-ranking Democrat on his civil liberties committee, Nadler said he spent his time fighting Republican proposals to “attack” a woman’s right to choose and rights for gays and lesbians.

“I was the main line of defense on that,” Nadler said. “I probably will revert to being the first line of defense against crazy proposals.”

In addition to his civil liberties work, Nadler is a senior northeast Democrat on the transportation committee, responsible for securing transit funding for the region.

Nadler hopes that a $450 billion transportation reauthorization bill can pass, but is wary that there will be additional funds for other projects.

“[That] is the minimum we have to spend over that time period to keep the roads, highways, bridges [and] mass transit [in] a decent state of safety and repair,” Nadler said, “without even talking about any major new initiatives.”

Nadler criticized Republicans’ promised cuts in spending—save for entitlement programs and defense.

“It’ll gut the housing programs, the education programs, transportation—you name it,” Nadler said. “We will feel very hurt by it in a myriad of ways.”

As a critic of the war in Afghanistan, Nadler believes that the new Congress will be more sympathetic to the Obama Administration’s goals.

“Let their 35-year civil war continue if they want to. We can’t solve that civil war for them,” Nadler said. “I think that view is going to have less sympathy in a Republican Congress, than it did previously.”

Nadler, in explaining the massive loss of Democrats this election, believes that unemployment was still high for the voters. The unemployment rate, Nadler said, would have decreased with a larger stimulus bill. One amendment he introduced out of principle, he said, would have increased each figure in the stimulus bill by 75 percent.

The other reason for Democrats’ loss, he said, was political.

“I do think the president should have used the bully pulpit to explain why we needed more stimulus,” Nadler said, “and to blast the Republicans when they kept blocking more stimulus.”

For the next two years, Republicans will set the agenda Nadler and other Democrats will abide. But he believes some of his priorities will help stimulate an economy in recovery.

“I hope we’re going to try to do things to stimulate the economy somewhat, such as the transportation bill,” Nadler said. “We can do other things such as extend the unemployment insurance.”

The Democrats have blown it big time. The situation in the Senate ended with a mess that has put some of the most morally corrupt politicians in New York history in the collective driver’s seat. State Sen. Pedro Espada is the beneficiary of a lot of money in the form of pork that has come his way because he had the deciding vote. To put it mildly, the Democrats, who should hold the light to lead the way through this morass, paid the guy off. Disgusting. Not only that, the ruling clique that is running the place can’t even decide who their leaders are. There seems to be a situation resembling something Woodrow Wilson once warned about, “Secret agreements, secretly arrived at.”

For their part, the Republicans have no real bench. Virtually every major statewide office is up for grabs this year and the GOP has no one of substance to run. Rudy Giuliani, who knows something about playing hardball, has left himself vulnerable by his sponsorship of the hopelessly corrupt former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik. The blissfully retired George Pataki is being pushed and pulled out of retirement for everything. John Faso, who ran and got beat (badly) by Eliot Spitzer for governor, is being called on to run for so many offices that he can’t afford the luxury of honing his message. Faso should be talking state issues and staying away from the Obama bashing he is engaging in. You do that if you are running for the U.S. Senate, and even then it’s stupid. Obama is still popular in New York and Faso should be talking like a moderate instead of an ideologue.

Meanwhile, the Democratic big boys have assured that a fairly weak Kirsten Gillibrand will have the race of her life if the Republicans can convince a moderate big name Bloomberg-type to run against her.

The Grand Old Party is trying to resurrect the body of Rick Lazio from Long Island for a gubernatorial run. He could be the next Pataki if David Paterson’s numbers stay as low as they are.

The oft-quoted Brennan Center at NYU spoke of dysfunctional government. They have been all for changing the rules, but what they don’t get is that it isn’t about the rules alone. It is about the people.
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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.