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State provides groups with about $17 million for food in past 2 years
By Carol Biliczky
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Friday, Jun 26, 2009
Ohio food banks are massing to do what their library counterparts already have: forestall state cuts to their budget.
They are asking their 12 food banks statewide to get out the word to their supporters and hammer state legislators to keep funding their program.
Gov. Ted Strickland's proposal would ax funding to food banks as one way to help close a $3.2 billion deficit in the state budget for the next two years.
''The message on the table is, 'Let's activate,' '' said Dan Flowers, president of the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank.
Statewide, the members of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks received $8.5 million a year or $17 million for the two-year biennium that will end Tuesday.
Association executive director Lisa Hamler-Fugitt said she is ''scared to death'' legislators will follow Strickland's suggestion as they hammer out a state budget that would start Wednesday.
She said she is upset that higher education has been largely spared from cost-cutting while food banks statewide stand to lose 25 percent of their funding for shelf-stable products and regional farm surplus.
In Akron, the food bank used state money to buy almost 3.6 million pounds of food valued at almost $1.2 million last year. That represented 23 percent of the food it bought, Flowers said.
If the state money were to disappear, ''We would just distribute less food,'' Flowers said. ''We couldn't make that up.''
The Ohio Library Council has mounted a similar campaign to thwart Strickland's proposal to cut funding by an additional 30 percent.
Maggie Ostrowski, spokeswoman for Senate President Bill Harris, R-Ashland, said legislators' offices had been inundated with calls from library supporters. She said Harris' office received thousands of e-mails on Wednesday alone.
The worst-case scenario for food banks would be to return to the days when they got no funding from the state. Ohio began to support food banks in 1996 with $1.5 million a year, and assistance has ''risen modestly over time,'' Hamler-Fugitt said.
The local food bank serves eight Northeast Ohio counties.
Carol Biliczky can be reached at 330-996-3729 or cbiliczky@thebeaconjournal.com.
Ohio food banks are massing to do what their library counterparts already have: forestall state cuts to their budget.
Get the full article here.
Comments
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cuyahoga falls, oh
Posted 11:07 PM, 06/26/2009
What A shame these places help the poor,elderly and homeless too.Ohio wake up and care about the very people that have fallen on bad times after all some of us did put you in the offices you now look down upon us from.Hmmm where will you go if you lose you jobs and moneys tight?
