New York's nonprofit legal groups are in a bind: state funding is down while demand for services is up.

To understand why, it helps to understand the services that local agencies provide. At the Monroe County Legal Assistance Center, for example, attorneys help clients navigate the public benefits system, as well as providing representative for clients in foreclosure proceedings. Empire Justice Center represents clients in mortgage foreclosure cases and the Legal Aid Society of Rochester represents clients during eviction proceedings in the city's housing court. The Society also represents people facing bankruptcy and handles a variety of family law proceedings - particularly cases involving domestic violence. And this is, by no means, a complete list.

For the Legal Aid Society, which handled 14,821 cases in 2007, funding losses this year translated to three fewer attorneys working there; the jobs were eliminated through attrition. Two staff positions were also eliminated.

Alan Harris, president and CEO of the Legal Aid Society of Rochester, recently talked about the impact that the state budget and the current economic climate have had on his organization. The following is an edited version of that conversation:

CITY: How did civil legal services make out in the state budget?

Harris: The [fiscal] year that just finished was the best year for civil legal services in New York State in the over 30 years that I've been practicing. The Assembly provided money, the governor provided money, the State Senate through individual members provided money. I can't remember what the total was, but it was somewhere between $15 million to $16 million statewide.

In this year's budget, the number was zero. But of course, that happened to lots of people. And what you need to know is that happened to us every year, putting aside the two [former Governor Eliot] Spitzer budgets. It wasn't just Governor Paterson. For 12 years Governor Pataki did exactly the same thing - there was nothing in his budgets for us.

We went back to work and through the hard work of the coalition [of state legal services groups], and with friends in the Assembly, $5 million or $6 million was restored. There's money the Senate budgeted, I think it's about $4.4 million is the number they're throwing around, but they haven't decided how much is going to go to civil, how much is going to go to criminal. And if it does go to civil, will it go upstate, will it go downstate?

If the Senate spreads out the money basically the way they did last year, you can say we're down about 50 percent. But if the Senate doesn't, we'll be down a lot more.

Is it just state funding that's drying up?

If only. The Legal Aid Society here in Rochester is a United Way agency, and we've been a United Way agency since 1921. The campaign goal is less than last year, so the United Way is acknowledging that they're not going to raise as much money. I think they're going to do a little bit better than they're projecting, but you can't budget on hope.

The IOLA fund [a state fund that generates revenue for nonprofit legal groups] is in real crisis. It's tied to the interest rates; the interest rates are like, zero. In addition, the money that earns the interest is tied to legal economic activity. There have been low interest rates before, but there was a lot of economic activity going on that required legal help, so they were able to earn money. Now, not only are interest rates low, but there's no activity going on. Zero times zero equals zero.

So you're in a situation where your funding has been cut and more people need services. Are there particular areas that are suffering?

I'm certain that this year we're going to turn away more people than we did the previous year.

We prioritize. Take the family law unit: we might only accept people where there's domestic violence. So that means that you and your spouse may not be getting along and you may want to do something with your marital status or child support or custody visitation, but there isn't any domestic violence so we may not help you, whereas in previous years we would take that case, especially if they're low income.

In our family law unit, incidents of domestic violence definitely increase during bad economic times. Those three attorneys I talked about, two of them were domestic violence. They're no longer providing those services. That's the equivalent of 200 victims.

We try to represent everybody that comes to housing court, but there may be more evictions and we may have to tell people who are in housing court, "We can't help you today. Here's what you do: go up and defend yourself; here's what you can say." Instead of having three or four or five people a day, there could be 10 or 15 a day. There's no way we could represent 10 or 15 people, and we'll have to interview the 10 people and pick three that we can help, and the other seven will be on their own.

What other issues are you facing, apart from the economy?

The home foreclosure crisis really popped up. There are people with bad loans and there are people losing their homes. But funding came along and we actually have programs to address it. With the Empire Justice Center, we've started working on a new project to prevent foreclosures.

The housing unit's trying hard to work with the low-income community not only to prevent foreclosures and prevent evictions, but to try and help low-income folks make the right choices when they go buy a house. I think many low-income folks were directed into mortgage programs that they could never afford. People were told, "Don't worry about it. You're going to be OK."

Our program, [when] someone comes in and says, "Well, we want to buy a home," we look at the mortgage and we represent them as their advocate and we determine whether or not they could afford the mortgage. We've actually told people, "You can't afford it." The mortgage broker's more than willing to give them the mortgage, but we said you can't afford it.