By MATT CHANDLER
Buffalo Law Journal

Hattie Starks had nowhere to turn.

The 89-year-old thought signing a power-of-attorney form and naming one of her sons to oversee her affairs was the smart thing to do as she advanced in years. It now appears that the decision cost her everything she owned.

"I didn't know what the power of attorney was," Starks said, sitting in the living room of her Buffalo apartment. "The next thing, they just opened my door and took everything they wanted."

After she had a stay in the hospital to treat a blood clot earlier this year, Starks said, two of her children involuntarily placed her in an assisted-living facility and looted the apartment she had lived in for 15 years, taking everything, including her clothing and her Bible.

After that incident, she says, she paid $1,300 per month to live in a small room she shared with a stranger. According to Starks, one of her sons, invoking his power of attorney, allotted her $25 per month for personal use.

Scared and feeling as though she had no options, Starks, with the help of another son, Milton Mobley, approached Legal Services for the Elderly Disabled and Disadvantaged of Western New York Inc. seeking assistance.

"I had nothing, and they were the only help I had," Starks said. "If it wasn't for legal aid, I don't know where I would be. I was so sick, I might not have even been here today."

For every Hattie Starks in Western New York, there are thousands more in need of civil legal services they don't have the money to pay for. U.S. Census data suggests that 20 percent of indigent people nationally are getting their legal needs met.

In New York, a multimillion-dollar shortfall in legal-services funding could mean that even fewer will be served.

For 2010, IOLA - the Interest on Lawyer Account Fund, established in 1983 to fund civil legal services - is telling providers to expect a 44 percent reduction in funding from this year. The IOLA Fund, highly vulnerable to fluctuating interest rates, disbursed $31 million in 2008 to fund civil legal services throughout the state. It is projected to fund just $6.5 million next year.

Local legal-services agencies currently get one-eighth to one-third of their funding from the IOLA Fund. The ECBA Volunteer Lawyers Project Inc., for example, gets 12.5 percent of its budget funded by IOLA, while Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo Inc.'s civil-legal-services unit draws 33 percent of its budgeted income from the fund.

The state Senate is convening a series of statewide hearings, including one in Amherst Dec. 16, to discuss the funding crisis.

The heads of the five civil-legal-services providers in Buffalo sat down with the Buffalo Law Journal for a roundtable discussion of the issue and its potential impact on thousands of needy Western New York residents.

• What kind of direct impact will these funding cuts have on your individual programs?

"We anticipate layoffs of an attorney and one-and-a-half paralegals from a staff of nine. The consequence of that will simply be less cases handled. Last year our civil unit handled roughly over 1,000 cases, and we would see a reduction of probably a third of those cases."
- David Schopp, executive attorney, Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo Inc.

"I have already cut in anticipation of the IOLA cuts, and our intake was already down 17 percent. If I have to do additional cuts next year - and we are talking about another 17 percent - where are these people going to go?"
- Karen Nicolson, CEO, Legal Services for the Elderly

"For us, we are not going to lay anyone off, but we didn't fill an attorney position when someone left, and that represents about 200 public-assistance cases we won't have the staff to handle."
- Joseph Kelemen, Western New York Law Center

• What will happen to the thousands of people seeking services who could be turned away?

"They will fall into the self-represented category, meaning they go to court without a lawyer."
- K. Nicolson

"There are real shifted costs when they cut programs like ours. We are then less able to prevent eviction, more people end up in emergency shelters and the county spends an inordinate amount of money each month to keep families in these shelters."
- William Hawkes, executive director, Neighborhood Legal Services Inc.

• Are you expecting real substantive change to come from these public forums?

"We feel comfortable that (senators) are genuinely concerned about the issue. We've been talking to them for quite a while, and they get it. They want to build publicity for the issue so they can then help us find the funding. We have to believe that the senate is going to do something. We are already stretched so thin and further cuts to our programs will just decimate the poverty population."
- K. Nicolson

• If these funds are lost, won't people turn to the government for assistance, shifting the cost from your programs to federally funded assistance programs?

"Absolutely.... Not only does (funding for legal services) stop (clients) from having legal problems, but it puts money back into the local economy.

"When you give a poor person a dollar, they spend it. They don't have the luxury of saving it. All of our programs help our clients put money into their pockets, which stimulates the rest of the economy."
-- Bob Elardo, managing attorney, Volunteer Lawyers Project

"We lost a state grant this year that funded our grandparent advocacy program. These are the people who do step up when a parent is unable to take care of a child.

"When you have a family with a couple of children and the grandparent cannot get the legal assistance, you can quickly see how expensive it becomes on an annualized basis to keep these kids in foster care when there are relatives ready to step up."
- W. Hawkes

• If you have a chance to speak to state senators, what is the key point you would make?

"I understand that times are tough, but this is a hard, hard place to cut. You are taking money and services away from the poorest (people) in Erie County."
- J. Kelemen

"It's not like we can just back off for a year and then rebuild next year because rebuilding staff and structure when the funding is available will take longer to recover. If we can just make it through this year and keep what we've got, it's going to keep the momentum going in the right direction."
- Lisa Gradascevic, chief attorney, Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo Inc.

Nicholson is bringing Starks and Mobley to the forum next week to speak before the Senate committee. She wants to remind people that the numbers volleyed around in such discussions impact real people living throughout Western New York.

Having seen what his mother has gone through, Mobley says it's a message he's all too familiar with.

"We couldn't have gotten Mama home without legal aid," Mobley said. "The things they did for her were unbelievable. If you take the money away from these programs, there is gonna be a lot of chaos in this community."