Gray Matters Final for July 23, 2013
Two Grants Give Senior Legal Services Shot in the Arm
By Carol Harrison
A pair of 18-month grants for focused legal services won’t save the day, but it could temporarily double the amount of legal assistance available to low income residents on the North Coast.
“It’s a real shot in the arm,” said Jake Smith, managing attorney for the Redwood Regional Office of Legal Services of Northern California.
One grant funded largely by the National Mortgage Settlement Funds will add approximately six full-time attorneys to LSNC, which serves low income residents in 23 Northern California counties.
The other funded primarily by the Department of Managed Health Care could add as many as 12 full-time attorneys.
LSNC is a nonprofit firm that relies on federal, state and local funding to provide civil representation. It contracts with Area 1 Agency on Aging and other agencies on aging in the north state to provide Senior Legal Services to people age 60 and older.
Smith said the Eureka office, which serves Humboldt and Del Norte counties, could get one full-time attorney to take on health consumer problems and another to handle foreclosure prevention and eviction defense.
“I’m a little concerned that the services are limited to fairly narrow focus areas, but it is great to have more legal services for low-income clients, who often can’t afford to hire an attorney,” said Charlaine Mazzei, executive director of Del Norte Senior Center.
“Legal service is a constant request at our receptionist desk. We get multiple calls daily,” said Joyce Hayes, executive director for Humboldt Senior Resource Center. “This is great news.”
Smith thinks the grant will allow LSNC to have more of a presence in senior centers and to work more closely with HICAP, the Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program affiliated with Area 1 Agency on Aging.
“This is an opportunity, however focused and temporary, to give seniors valuable help that has been diminishing for years,” he said. “It could double our staff.”
The Eureka office has one full-time lawyer, two part-timers and no paralegals.
“It’s good news, no matter how temporary and focused the work might be,” he said.
“It’s fantastic,” Area 1 Agency on Aging Executive Director Maggie Kraft said. “We’ve got people up here whose home is their only asset. If they get behind or have to refinance for medical reasons and lose it, they have nothing. They can’t afford the rents up here, so anything that helps them to keep owning their home is a blessing.”
Smith said interviews are underway. New hires are expected to be in place by LSNC’s all-staff meeting in October.
“We have yet to decide how to distribute the resources with respect to the population in Northern California, but I’m hoping for two,” he said.
The main LSNC office is in Sacramento. Eureka is one of five regional offices.
“It will take time to hire them, get them up to speed, and then wind down by the deadline, but we’ve done it before. It’s not a new concept,” Smith said.
It is, however, a welcome change in the face of ongoing funding cuts elsewhere.
A1AA will disperse $36,000 in federal funding to Senior Legal Services next year, $4,000 less than a year ago.
Even the Bertha Russ Lytel Foundation in Ferndale, which Smith said has funded LSNC with very few strings attached for the past 20 years “can’t do that anymore.”
“We will be lucky to get anything at this point,” he said of the potential $18,000 loss.
Smith started at the regional office in 1979 as one of six full-time attorneys.
“We had three full-time paralegals, too,” he said.
But the last five years have been “terrible.”
“Reductions have relentlessly chipped away at the legal help available to people age 60 and older,” he said. “We’re probably down 20 percent in funding in that time.”
Even so, with the help of an active professional volunteer community at clinics and Senior Law Day, Smith’s regional office filed 844 cases last year, almost 90 percent of them in Humboldt County. Seniors accounted for 371 cases locally and 57 in Del Norte.
“The Humboldt County Bar Association has really stepped up,” Smith said. “It accounts for somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of our cases. There’s so much need for legal services.”
Smith said the top three legal needs on the North Coast come in the categories of public benefits, housing and health, and personal services such as wills, power of attorney and advance health care directives.
“We also see families with elder members who need help with finances or care decisions through power of attorney and conservatorships arrangements,” Mazzei said. “The paperwork can be very intimidating and many families can’t afford to have an attorney help make sure everything is done correctly.”
The focused nature of the grant may indirectly provide help in these areas. Foreclosure and health consumer work that currently occupies staff will soon be handled by the newcomers, freeing up existing staff time for other needs.
But Smith cautioned that funding cuts from other sources will have an impact.
“We may not have the funding for some of the broader, bigger cases that can impact more people,” he said. “The cuts are particularly bad because we are the most rural of the offices. We don’t have as many people to serve, but the people we serve are spread out. We have an obligation to reach out. That is very much at risk.”
Legal Services of Northern California is located at 123 3rd Street. For more information, call 707-445-0866.
Area 1 Agency on Aging paid Carol Harrison to write this article.