Scranton and Lackawanna County's public housing authorities are feeling the pinch but have so far avoided the broad personnel and program cuts similar agencies across the nation have had to make in the face of reduced federal funding.
"A lot of housing authorities are hurting, and we'll be hurting too if this is where it is going to stay," James Dartt, executive director of Lackawanna Housing, said Tuesday.
Lackawanna Housing anticipates a $600,000 to $700,000 hit and the Scranton Housing Authority projects a shortfall of possibly $1.3 million or more as a result of the automatic federal budget cuts known as the sequester.
"We are hoping, as all housing authorities are hoping, that this is just a one-year shot," SHA executive director Gary Pelucacci said.
In Scranton, the sequester had its biggest impact on the Section 8 housing choice voucher program. The vouchers, allocated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, allow families to find housing in the private market.
With less money to work with, the SHA is no longer adding families to the Section 8 program and is instead reducing numbers through attrition, Mr. Pelucacci said.
"When we lose a family off the program, we have not been reissuing that voucher to another family," he said.
The SHA has not had to resort to dismissing people from the Section 8 program as other authorities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere have done, he said. The authority, which is allotted 1,006 Section 8 vouchers by HUD, had 888 families in the program at last count.
"We are not helping out as many families as we should be for our allotment, but by the same token we don't have to ask people to leave the program," Mr. Pelucacci said.
He said the SHA found itself in a better position to weather the cuts than many other authorities because it had funding reserves.
Lackawanna Housing is "kind of in a holding pattern" with regard to the sequester cuts, Mr. Dartt said. The authority board will be briefed on where the agency stands when it meets Thursday, he said.
"We are hoping this sequester gets resolved," Mr. Dartt said. "We are really waiting to see what happens."
Mr. Pelucacci said the preliminary numbers for fiscal 2014 that have been filtering out of HUD and the White House have been encouraging.
"Even though they are not at the 100 percent (pre-sequester) level, they are up to a level most housing authorities can function at," he said.
Contact the writer: dsingleton@timesshamrock.com