Open Door Clinic operates a clinic at the Del Norte Community Wellness Center. At a discussion with Congressman Jared Huffman on Monday, the organization’s CEO Tory Starr said he was worried about being unable to serve patients should their federal funding be frozen. | Photo by Persephone Rose
Nearly a week after a judge temporarily blocked a Trump Administration directive to freeze federal funding, Open Door Clinic CEO Tory Starr said his organization is still bracing for the worst.
Open Door operates more than 14 clinics across Humboldt and Del Norte counties, providing behavioral health, medical, dental and obstetrics care to 60,000-plus patients and employing nearly 800 people.
During a virtual roundtable discussion hosted by Congressman Jared Huffman on Monday, Starr said that while a judge hit pause on the directive Jan. 28, guidance he’s received from the Health Resources and Services Administration suggests that federal dollars could still be at risk.
“Direction from HRSA [states], ‘No, we’re not freezing funds. We’re going to go in and look at your services and if you’re doing things around gender-affirming care or if you’re doing things around DEI, we’re going to [pull] your funding,’” Starr said. “When we see data around health equity, we know there are certain populations — people of color and the disadvantaged — who have poorer health outcomes. This assault is very disturbing for the people we serve from the standpoint that they’re the ones who need help the most.”
Starr joined leaders in education and public safety as well as those in the nonprofit sector providing nutrition and rental assistance to seniors as well as child care vouchers to working families and CalFresh benefits to the community as a whole.
Representing the northern half of California’s 2nd Congressional District, including Humboldt, Del Norte and Trinity counties, every one of them said their funding was at risk and, as a result, their ability to serve local residents.
“Close to 25 percent of the population in our area is either over 60 years of age or disabled,” said Maggie Kraft, executive director for the Area 1 Agency on Aging, which serves seniors in Humboldt and Del Norte counties. “That’s much higher than the state average [and] that happens in rural areas.”
During the roundtable, Huffman warned that while Judge Loren AliKhan provided a reprieve by blocking a memo from the Office of Management and Budget — which the Trump Administration said it has rescinded, the New York Times reported — an organization in his district already had their funding pulled.
“The word in the last 24 hours is that one of our nonprofits in the southern end [of my district] had a grant pulled because it involves climate change education,” he said. “It’s a huge and abrupt disruption to that nonprofit’s whole operation.”
Huffman said the funding freeze affects programs included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which involves transportation and broadband projects.
The freeze impacts Title I, Title II, Title III and Title IV funding as well as Secure Rural Schools funding, all of which help pay for education programs.
The funding freeze also affects tribal communities, Huffman said, pointing out that healthcare centers on tribal lands that offer counseling and suicide prevention programs are in the crosshairs.
“All that goes away if the funding freeze rolls out as represented,” he said. “I wanted to pull all of you together — each represents an important perspective and an appropriate constituency that has reason for concern.”
Huffman said he wanted to take everyone’s stories back to Washington D.C.
Kraft said her agency focuses on helping people live independently by making sure they’re eating, that they have access to legal support and ensuring their homes are safe. If the federal dollars making those services possible disappear, people will be isolated and at risk of premature death, she said.
This is especially concerning in a disaster-prone area like the North Coast, according to Kraft. She noted that during the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles County those who were hit the hardest were people with disabilities and older adults.
Kraft said that the loss in federal funding would put more pressure on families to take care of their elders. Medicare and CalFresh may not be available anymore, she said, and neither would housing assistance, fall prevention and transportation assistance to medical appointments.
“We give money to nutrition programs in Del Norte and Humboldt,” she said. “We give money to legal services. We give money to the Family Resource Center to support caregivers who are often forgotten. If this is resolved badly then we’ll be gone. If this is resolved after April then we just won’t be here because we don’t have the money to go past April.”
While his department relies on the federal Firefighters Grant Program for large capital items, much of Tim Citro’s concern lay with the impact the loss of those dollars would have on “proactive preventative programs” that serve vulnerable populations.
The Humboldt Bay Fire chief pointed out that if the Area 1 Agency on Aging doesn’t have the dollars it needs to sustain its programs and if local healthcare clinics close, more people are apt to call 911 for help.
This impacts call volume, Citro said, and results in the fire department having to increase its services, which are limited to transporting people to the emergency room.
“Now you’re impacting the rest of the community through our local healthcare system getting overloaded,” he said. “It has a huge ripple effect through everything and when those ripples happen, we’re usually the first ones to know about it.”
Speaking for education in Del Norte County, Del Norte County Unified School District Superintendent Jeff Harris said the federal dollars that DNUSD relies on will impact services for homeless and foster youth as well as Native American students.
Those dollars also support much of the district’s workforce, Harris said. Last year DNUSD had more than 200 vacant positions it was unable to hire for. This year, that number has decreased to about 50 or 60. Much of those federal dollars go toward professional development.
According to Harris, Title I and Title II moneys are paying for training for teachers that are working with DNUSD under provisional internship permits and short-term staff permits — which allows districts to address staffing needs by hiring individuals who are not yet fully credentialed.
Harris said the potential freeze on federal dollars also affects a grant that pays for eight to 10 psychologists and social workers who provide counseling as well as the Del Norte Indian Career Pathways grant, which provides college and career support for more than 800 students.
“And then we roll into, and I know it’s connected to school, but it’s not school, the Klamath Promise Neighborhood Grant, which is a $30 million grant to provide economic resiliency, healthcare and a variety of community supports in the Klamath area and also Del Norte as a whole,” Harris said. “Six million dollars of that over five years has gone to support the work that we’re doing with students in schools. Every dollar that goes away because of a lack of federal funding is a dollar that comes out locally and we just can’t sustain that.”
