As state and local officials start to balance their budgets for July 1, community caregivers are worried about Hall County's most fragile groups: senior citizens and children.

Numbers are just beginning to roll in for the next fiscal year, but many agencies already foresee budget slashes, said Phillippa Moss, director of the Gainesville-Hall County Community Service Center.

"Many will take big hits to their budget this year, and the clients they serve will experience housing and food insecurity," said Moss, who oversees programs such as Meals on Wheels and Building Better Babies.

"I sent out e-mails about two weeks ago asking our local human services providers how they've been impacted by budget cuts over the past two years, and I'm starting to receive those summaries now," she said. "We're still gathering information, but we've heard of some reductions in funds that will particularly impact children and seniors."

About $1 million in federal stimulus funding will disappear for Georgia's Meals on Wheels program, leaving thousands without service across the state and more than 120 people on Hall County's waiting list.

"We hoped we would be able to lift the waiting list this year, but it won't happen unless money falls from the sky," Moss said. "We can't help new clients because the funding is so precarious. We don't want to bring on a new client and then tell them the party's over in three months."

This is the first time Moss has seen such a tough budget crunch. This year, 1 in 6 seniors live below the federal poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure released in January.

"The cuts aren't massive. They're not huge, but the funding is simply not lining up with the need," she said. "With sustained cuts for several years, the need grows and grows and exceeds the available funding."

The Community Service Center is in a unique spot as it prepares to present budgets to the Gainesville City Council and Hall County Board of Commissioners. It is the only department funded by both city and county.

"The budget pages were released from the city yesterday, and my managers have told me about their division needs for the year and what they anticipate," Moss said. "We don't expect to ask for a dime more than last year. The message we've gotten is that things are looking better, but not great."

Moss is still waiting for direction from county officials.

"Given that they have new administrators who have never interacted with our agency, it will require some education on our part to make sure they truly understand the unique dynamic with human services programs," she said. "We're simple but also complicated in terms of the budget structure. I hope we have sufficient time to explain the programs and benefits."

As lawmakers launch into budget debates under the Gold Dome this week, local groups are watching where priorities fall.

"I don't have a crystal ball. I know we will be faced with cuts because all indications show budgets are still in poor shape and taxes aren't coming in," said Pat Freeman, executive director of Legacy Link, which distributes state and federal funding to senior services in a 13-county area of Northeast Georgia.

"We may have a new governor, but he's faced with the same decline in revenue that previous governors had," she said. "We're naturally a little fearful about what will happen to Medicaid because it's such a huge part of the state budget, and it's how we help take care of families, seniors and people with disabilities."

Groups are also watching how state legislators combine and rename departments for efficiency. For example, one bill would move the Georgia Family Connection Partnership under the Governor's Office for Children and Families.

"That's our biggest concern right now because it's currently a public-private partnership with a lot of private money going into a lot of the work that we do," said Mary Parks, executive director of the Hall County Family Connection Network. "If you put that agency under the governor's office, it becomes public and a lot of private partners won't be willing to support us the way they are now."

Parks recently attended a national conference on drug-free communities, which promoted collaboration between local governments and agencies.

"We're in the best situation right now, and we don't see the need to change the structure of what we're doing, which would make operations more difficult in terms of grants and funding," Parks said. "A lot of what we do well in Hall County comes from private entities working toward the same goal, which gives it a grass-roots feeling."

Building Better Babies, a program created by Moss and Parks to help first-time parents in Hall County, falls under the Georgia Family Connection Partnership.

The program started Jan. 1, but the proposed merger could cause problems for the program in its initial year.

"We've registered several dozen families, but there's still a lot of work to do to manage the logistics. This is another example of how programs are impacted by manipulation and movement with the intent to save money," Moss said.

"It's not as easy as identifying three children's programs and merging them together. Some programs are apples and oranges that just don't go well together."