A LOT of government decisions provide cause for citizens to get upset ... even angry. But now Georgia has made one in connection with its budget cutting because of the wheezing economy that should get everybody raging, howling mad.
The Georgia Department of Veterans Service, to meet Gov. Sonny Perdue’s orders to slash all agency budgets by 6 percent, and prepare for 8 and 10 percent, has determined to do it all in one whack — and at the 10 percent level.
It has notified all 82 residents living in state’s one and only retirement home for veterans in Milledgeville that they will have to move by Nov. 20. The entire assisted-living facility will be closed down.
The state’s nursing homes for veterans in the same complex (three of them, based on intensity of care needed) will remain open. One assumes that the Alzheimer’s unit, in the same building as the one being eliminated, will simply be relocated to one of these ... but one never knows, does one?
Calling it what it is, “a very painful decision,” Veterans Commissioner Pete Wheeler explained: “As we considered the many options to reduce our state operating funds over the next two fiscal years, it became overwhelmingly apparent the choice that would impact the fewest veterans in our state was to close the domiciliary care unit at the Milledgeville state veterans’ home.”
THE “SAVINGS” would amount to $2.7 million (and the state would lose the $1.3 million in federal funding that goes to the operation).
Even granting that all budget cutting is a numbers game, don’t human beings count for anything at all in the process?
Perhaps some of those veterans now being evicted will qualify for other government housing programs or have relatives able to take them in. Nonetheless it is also predictable that some, perhaps even most, won’t. As one the current residents, Wayne McCormick, a Vietnam veteran, put it: “I ain’t got nowhere to go, I had to come here. We homeless. Everyone in this building is homeless.”
As most know who work with the homeless, in Greater Rome or elsewhere, a very large percentage of them are veterans of our armed forces. They may not be as old as those in the Milledgeville facility (average age 74) but the last thing the state should be doing is leaving yet more of those who served their country without a decent place to live.
Frankly, given the American military has a fundamental creed of “leave no one behind,” one doubts there is a single veteran in better circumstances who wouldn’t feel appalled by this latest bureaucratic choice. While “leave no one behind” applies to the battlefield, it should equally apply on the homefront.
Georgia needs to do more for its homeless and elderly veterans, not less.
THERE’S NOTHING else to cut? There’s nowhere else to cut?
Well, there’s sure something to get mad about.
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