Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

After months spent agonizing over the loss of millions of dollars in funding for civil legal services for the poor, state and local legal aid officials say the Legislature has come through with desperately needed funding.

Combining money from the state budget with other new revenue sources, legal aid services are expected to get about $26 million over the two-year budget cycle, said Betty Balli Torres, executive director of the Access to Justice Foundation.

While that is about $9 million short of what is needed, she said, other funding, such as partnerships with banks, will help close the shortfall.

Three organizations in the state that provide legal services to the poor received additional federal funding that also helps bridge the gap. They include Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas, based in Fort Worth.

Its funding from state sources will drop by $400,000. But because of an additional $733,000 from the federal Legal Services Corp., the organization expects to be in good shape for the rest of this year and through 2010, said Errol Summerlin, its executive director.

The agency had been braced to lose $2.4 million, which would have sapped legal services for the poor by 2010. The organization serves about 19,000 people annually, from Fort Worth to McKinney and Amarillo to Midland. About 4,000 are served in Tarrant County.

"If we were not successful in other fundraising activities or in our legislative initiatives, we would right now be laying off people," Summerlin said. "We were fearful of what the future held."

Because of the restored funding, NorthWest Legal Aid was able to hire a badly needed information technology employee and will hire four new attorneys and four paralegals effective Sept. 1, including one who will be in the Fort Worth office, Summerlin said.

"The turnaround is simply extraordinary in a period of six months, to be going from 'OK, we’re going to have to retrench’, to 'Wow, now we’re able to maintain and actually expand services that we lost in 2008,’ " he said.

Thirty-seven other Texas groups didn’t get the federal funding. The reduced state funding will mean streamlining and belt tightening for most, but they were facing a much more dire situation after seeing a colossal drop in earnings from their primary funding source.

Legal aid services depend on interest generated in lawyers’ trust accounts, a program administered by the Access to Justice Foundation. Because interest rates have plummeted, proceeds are expected to drop to $1.5 million this year compared with $20 million in 2007.

The $18.5 million revenue loss created what was called an unprecedented emergency, prompting Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson to ask the Legislature for $37 million over two years for the program.

"We were truly devastated at the thought of the delivery system crumbling," Torres said. "So we’re elated to be able to preserve what we have."

Jefferson said he was "thrilled by the extraordinary effort by the Texas Legislature to address the crisis that poor Texans are facing with the economic downturn."

"We depend on courts to address the rights of all of our citizens," he said. "There’s a large percentage of Texans who cannot afford to hire a lawyer to represent them."

Jefferson said 40 civil legal aid organizations across the state play a vital role in helping low-income people get access to lawyers in domestic violence, child support and divorce cases.