Cold War Veterans Blog

BLOOMBERG LEAVES NEW YORK CITY’S 400,000 VETERANS OUT IN THE COLD

IGNORES VETS’ $5 MILLION REQUEST FOR SERVICES IN PRELIMINARY BUDGET PROPOSAL

CITY HALL -- Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg failed to include city veterans’ only budget request in today’s announcement of his preliminary budget for Fiscal Year 2008. The Coalition of Veterans Organizations, or COVO, a coalition of veterans organizations unified in making a $5 million request of the Mayor to fund Veterans Resource Centers across the city, made the following statement regarding the proposal’s omission from the budget proposal:

“Since 9/11, this city has watched its men and women answer the call to duty over and over again, with some losing there lives. Yet today, veterans are still faced with an under-funded Veterans' Administration and a city administration that has not done a correct and proper job in providing much-needed services. Specifically, the administration has historically under-funded the Mayor’s Office of Veterans Affairs, delayed making selections to the city’s Veterans Advisory Board, and provided a delayed and confusing fix to the City Employee Extended Benefits Package.

Despite a $3.9 billion budget surplus, our city’s veterans today received yet another “NO” from the Administration.

It is long overdue to honor our troops' sacrifices and our returning veterans with more than just bureaucratic hassles, runarounds and token gestures. The Mayor and his administration fail to understand that veterans, and more importantly our newest veterans, are looking for help with housing, education, jobs, healthcare and a host of other issues. They need knowledge of the array of programs that are available to them here in the city. They need some place where they can find all this information. Funding to create resource centers in each of the five boroughs would have been an important step towards showing a real commitment to veterans.

Supporting our troops and veterans is not only a national obligation, it is a local obligation as well. Poor treatment of veterans during a time of war is a disservice to all who have served. It is long overdue for our local elected officials to renew there commitment to its veteran’s and it starts with the Mayor.”