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CHELSEA, MA –
Democratic State Senate candidate Jeff Ross came out publicly this
week urging the State House and Senate Committees on Ways and Means to
override Governor Deval Patrick’s line-item budget veto of 58
earmarked Workforce Training Fund programs. In separate compelling
letters to Representative De Leo, Chair of the House Ways and Means
Committee, and Senator Panagiotakos, Chair of the Senate Ways and
Means Committee, Ross urged the committees to consider the devastating
effect of these cuts on communities in Chelsea, Somerville and other
towns throughout the Middlesex, Suffolk and Essex senatorial district.
Ross visited Centro Latino de Chelsea, one
of the organizations whose training programs are about to be
eliminated, and met with the kids that benefit from these programs.
“These are exactly the sort of win-win programs that we need to grow
and enhance. They represent the best of what government can do to
jumpstart development, to improve youth services and to enrich entire
communities, especially those that are most vulnerable,” said Ross.
The Workforce Training Fund earmarks
eliminated by the Governor fund special programs run by labor and
community non-profit organizations, which provide education and
training to mostly low-wage low-skilled workers in communities with
high levels of unemployment or a high concentration of low-skilled
workers. Importantly, they provide work training to teenagers and
recent high school graduates who urgently require these skills to
successfully enter into the workforce. In Mr. Ross’s district, these
include such well-established programs as the Centro Latino de Chelsea
workforce development program, the 1199 SEIU Training and Upgrading
Fund, and the Center for Teen Empowerment At-Risk Youth Project in
Somerville.
These programs keep our youth off the
streets and equip them with essential job skills that enable them to
become successful members of society. By providing training, which is
not otherwise available in schools or the workplace, the Workforce
Training Fund programs also have a very positive economic impact on
communities in the district. “The wholesale elimination of these
programs will have a devastating effect not only on these
organizations, but on the communities they service,” said Ross in his
letters to legislators.
Using his line-item veto authority,
Governor Deval Patrick cut the $10,473,000 earmarked projects fund
entirely out of the FY’08 budget that he signed on July 12, 2007. The
largest of all the line-item reductions in the FY’08 budget, this cut
represents about 25% of the overall cuts from the budget submitted to
the Governor by the legislators. Addressing these earmarks, the
Governor’s statement said that they are inconsistent with the mission
of the Workforce Training Fund program and they would push the Fund
into further deficit.
Ross said, “The mission of these programs
is to provide education and training to low-wage, low-skilled
workers. Although Governor Patrick kept grants in place that benefit
corporate training programs, he cut programs run by community
non-profits that target the youth and those who need them most. We
need to expand these programs that reach out to at-risk youth and
low-income neighborhoods, not cut them out.”
Ross has made advocacy on behalf of those
most at risk for injustice a central theme in his now 6-week old
vigorous campaign for the State Senate seat vacated by another
champion of the minorities, Jarrett Barrios. In his career as a human
rights attorney and community work, which included volunteering for
the Chelsea Collaborative, a sister organization of Centro Latino de
Chelsea, Ross has been an outspoken and hardworking advocate for the
rights of working families, minorities and the underprivileged.
“From living through the L.A. riots and
racial hostility that stemmed from the Reagan cuts to social programs
to witnessing the impending wholesale elimination of the earmarked
programs under Workforce Training Fund – these are exactly the types
of problems that inspire me to run for public office,” says Ross. “I
am in this to fight for the rights of communities that are disparately
impacted by second-class treatment with regard to public
transportation, lack of housing, education and health care gaps,
traffic pollution and environmental toxins, public safety and many
other issues affected by an uneven playing field.”
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