The House giveth. The Senate taketh away. Well, not in all cases, but enough to be noticeable in the proposed state budget that the Senate released last week.

Advocates for the poor say they’re glad the Senate budgeted $13.5 million for children’s dental care and $3.3 million to cover school-lunch co-pays. But, in the areas of low-income housing, health coverage, and college assistance, they say the Senate falls short.

For one thing, the Senate failed to match the governor and House in increasing the state’s Housing Trust Fund to $140 million. Currently at $100 million, the fund is a primary source of grants to build low-income housing in the state. “The Senate’s budget is a huge step backwards,” says Ben Gitenstein, executive director of the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance.

Enrollment levels for the state’s Basic Health Plan are another disappointment. Though health and human services advocates would like to see the health plan’s enrollment returned to its 2001 levels, which would mean adding 20,000 slots, the Senate budget adds just 3,000. The Senate also budgeted nothing for Opportunity Grants, a program that provides additional financial aid so low-income students can go to college. The House budgeted $15 million.

Like the House, the Senate also provided no increase for welfare or General Assistance - Unemployable grants, but did go along with funding a new program that would provide an extra $100 a month to helping families exiting welfare.

—Cydney Gillis

33 million little pieces

It takes money to run the nation’s Urban Indian Health Program (UIHP): $33 million, to be exact. But if President Bush has his way, next year, the UIHP will be running on empty. Literally.

For his Fiscal Year 2008 Budget, Bush has proposed chopping every single dollar of federal funding for the UIHP. His rationale? That the needs of those currently being served by urban Indian health organizations can be addressed, instead, by other community health centers.

But his wish to gut the program — which funds 34 urban health organizations, serving 150,000 Native people annually across the country — is being challenged by Congress. In a March 29 letter, 31 Congressional members — including local reps Jim McDermott and Davd Reichert, and national luminaries Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers, Jr. — asked that the FY08 dollars for the program be retained, at least at their current level.

In certain respects, Bush’s fiduciary shock-and-awe campaign against the UIHP is a repeat performance. The FY07 budget he presented to Congress also included a total fiscal evisceration of the program, based upon the same contention that its services duplicated those already provided by other health centers. Kept alive through a continuing resolution set in motion in October 2006, the program just had its FY07 service budget fully restored on March 22.

Rebecca Corpuz, associate director of the Seattle Indian Health Board, says UIHP is the local organization’s primary source of funding. Serving roughly 10,000 urban Natives annually through its medical and dental programs, she says the local Indian Health Board brings culturally sensitive health care to an ethnic population that faces numerous health issues. Dismantling UIHP, she believes, would devastate the Seattle Indian Health Board and be detrimental to the health of local Natives. “We’ve been in business since 1970,” says Corpuz. “We’re pretty much a part of the health care system in Seattle.”

—Rosette Royale

WTO settlement reached

The City of Seattle has agreed to wipe clean the criminal records of the approximately 175 protesters arrested at Westlake Park Dec. 1, 1999, in the course of the WTO anti-globalization protests. Plaintiffs in a class-action suit will divvy up a $1 million settlement. And the Seattle Police Department will train its officers to guard against future violations of the Fourth Amendment.

City Attorney Tom Carr said in a press statement that he believed a January jury decision finding fault with the city’s arrest procedure would have been reversed on appeal; however, he settled at the behest of the city’s insurer, which would rather pay up than fund an appellate trial. At the heart of the trial was a debate over whether police had sufficient reason to arrest each and every one of those assembled at Westlake Park that morning. Since the jury concluded that they did not, and that they were dutifully carrying out a city order, the city was found to have violated the constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure.

—Adam Hyla