Need is up, funding down for legal aid agencies

Every time the Federal Reserve "assures the nation that interest rates will be kept at these historic lows for quite some time, the light at the end of the tunnel seems farther and farther away," she said.

Nationally, interest on lawyers' trust accounts has fallen from $371 million in 2007 to a projected $93 million this year, "a precipitous and devastating drop," said Betty Torres, president of the national association of programs handling interest on lawyers' trust accounts. Torres runs the program in Texas, where legislators passed a one-time appropriation to help. But that is not typical, and as the year wears on, "the strains are worse," she said.

A growing gap

Virginia's groups are being advised not to fill vacancies as funds hover at about $700,000 for the year, down from $4.6 million last year, said Mark Braley, executive director of Virginia's Legal Services Corp.

The District program dipped into reserves when funds fell from about $2.5 million in fiscal 2008 to just more than $1 million the next year -- and a predicted $576,000 this fiscal year. But reserves could not patch the hole, and some District groups have lost funding, said Katia Garrett, executive director of the D.C. Bar Foundation, which awards grants. "We had to make painful decisions," she said.

With more people drifting into poverty, "a system that already was not meeting most of the need is teetering on the brink of disaster," said Melanca Clark, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

Annual income limits for free legal aid vary slightly by state and by program, but a family of four generally must have an income of less than $27,500 to qualify.

Downloads of self-help legal forms have doubled in Maryland and Virginia in the past year and substantially increased in the District, according to the federal Legal Services Corp., which offers the forms as part of its congressionally established work. Federal funding to the organization increased by $10 million to $400 million for the fiscal year that will end in July, but that increase "is not enough to cover the gap" at local levels, said Karen Sarjeant, the vice president for programs. As a result, she said, manageable problems -- such as an eviction -- spiral "into something much worse that takes more to remedy."

Burgos waited in a cold rain on a Wednesday night outside a program office run by the Montgomery County Bar Association at the Gilchrist Center for Cultural Diversity in Wheaton. Until he lost his job, he said, he was able to make some payments on a mortgage and a home-equity line on the two-bedroom condo where he, his wife and two young children live. He can cover one lien while he hunts for a job, he told a lawyer, but not both.

"I came because they see a lot of problems and know how to help people who can't help themselves in these circumstances," he said.

At another desk, Rosa Requena of White Oak clutched an envelope holding her most recent credit card bill. At 61, she was about to have eye surgery and had not worked for about three years since losing her job as a nanny. She had disability health insurance, she said, but the credit card debt weighed on her. "I try to talk to the card company, but I cannot get them to discuss it," she said.

Requena held out the monthly statement: a balance of just over $400 for purchases at Giant and an international food mart.

Doing more with less

The Maryland Legal Aid Bureau opened 17,600 cases in the past year -- up 1,100 over the previous 12 months -- and also referred more cases elsewhere. The bureau, the state's largest provider of free civil aid, is operating with $1 million less in interest proceeds, an 11 percent cut.