Some of Maine's neediest residents could see cutbacks in so-called homemaker services under a budget plan proposed by Gov. John Baldacci. In an effort to find $750,000 in savings over the next two years, the state would trim back funding to Catholic Charities of Maine, which provides cleaning and other services to older residents with physical, developmental or psychiatric disabilities. State officials say they'd only reduce the number of hours provided to the homemaker recipients, but critics fear the reductions will go deeper.

Brenda Gallant visits dozens of homemaker service recipients as executive director of the Maine Long-Term Care Ombudsman Program. As she reaches the front door of Myrtle Brown's home in Augusta, she carefully makes her way through an icy driveway. "We're here to see Mrs. Brown," she says.

"Yes, come in please." Myrtle Brown is confined to a wheelchair, as she sits at her kitchen table. She has poor eyesight and requires the use of an oxygen tank. Now in her eighties, she finds some of the simplest daily tasks to be beyond her ability.
That's when Judy Peace from Catholic Charities of Maine steps in.

"She does my washing, she does my floors, she does my dusting, my dishes, if I need it," Brown says. She says she can't imagine what might happen without the help she gets from the program. "Oh God no, I'd be lost," she says.

Yet funding for those basic services that Brown receives are at risk under Gov. john Baldacci's $438 million supplemental budget. The administration wants to reduce funding for the homemaker services program contracted through the Catholic Charities of Maine by $750,000 dollars.

"I think that these services should be a priority for our state," Gallant says. "They're definitely a wonderful asset to our state."
Gallant says Maine has seen tough times before. But she says that by reducing the kind of basic housekeeping services that allow elder Mainers and those with disabilities to stay in their homes, the state could inadvertantly push these residents into long-term care facilities.

"There's no way to avoid taking care of our citizens, and I don't think that's the Maine way," Gallant says. "We care about eachother, we want to do things in the right way, and this is a cost-effective program. There will be immediate costs if we don't provide this care, because people will have to go elsewhere."

"These people are very independent," says Don Harden of Catholic Charities of Maine, who keeps tabs on about 2,000 recipients of homemaker services all over the state. "You're talking about your elderly neighbor who physically is able to do most things, is sharp as a tack, but just needs help with those small tasks of day-to-day living."

In addition to helping people with some very basic needs, Harden says the homemaker staffers sometimes offer the only human contact that a recipient might encounter dfuring any given week.
"I think the thing that we don't really get reimbursed for is relationship, and for a lot of the people that we serve, that is the only person that comes into home during the week and is oftentimes the most important person," Harden says.

"What we're proposing, instead of someone getting 12 hours of service, they get 10, and really looking at who really needs it," says
Maine Health and Human Services Commissioner Brenda Harvey. Harvey says she doesn't believe the proposed cuts will push Mainers into higher-cost care.

"Our intent with these proposals -- we thought long and hard about these -- is not to push people to higher-cost services, that would be a short-sighted and very poor long-term outcome for the state. We think we were more responsible than that in what we put forward."

As the Legislature's Appropriations Committee considers the proposed program reduction, panel member Sen. Richard Rosen, a Bucksport Republican, says the state's financial situation can simply no longer accommodate business as usual. "Now, with the very severe, difficult recession, Maine taxpayers are even more stressed and less able to pay for and fund all these services," he says.

The Appropriations Committee will review the cutbacks to the homemaker and other programs on Tuesday.