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One woman's reaction to Christie's cuts

Kim Ferlazzo, 45, juggles three jobs - as a supermarket cashier, a notary public, and a substitute teacher - to try to provide for her family.

Kim Ferlazzo, 45, juggles three jobs - as a supermarket cashier, a notary public, and a substitute teacher - to try to provide for her family.

She is one of thousands of working-class New Jersey residents who would be hit particularly hard by the spending plan unveiled by Gov. Christie yesterday.

"These budget cuts seriously put a hurt on the family life and the family dynamics," said Ferlazzo, of Delran. "It causes a great deal of stress."

A mother of two who is getting a divorce, Ferlazzo said she received a check last year for about $4,000 through the earned-income tax credit, a program for low-income workers, along with a property-tax rebate check for $1,000.

Christie has proposed cutting the state's earned-income tax credit from 25 percent of the federal benefit to 20 percent and essentially slashing property-tax rebates by 75 percent for the fiscal year that begins July 1. If the budget is adopted, Ferlazzo estimated, she could lose from $1,000 to $2,000 through cuts to both programs.

For Ferlazzo, who has two sons, 9 and 22, that translates into necessities such as paying credit-card bills and repairing cars when they break.

Proposed cuts to child-care and after-school programs also worry Ferlazzo, because her 9-year-old relies on a free program where children can work on homework in a supervised environment until 5 p.m. each weekday.

Although the program does not receive state funding, Ferlazzo said that if he had not gotten into that program, she would have tried to place him in one whose entire state aid will be eliminated, New Jersey After 3. Cuts to child care under Christie's budget total $19.8 million.

"That causes me anxiety, to hear that," she said. "Oh, my God, where am I going to get the money to put him someplace after school that is safe? Not everybody has parents or grandparents. That just gives a parent peace of mind, knowing you have someplace safe to leave your child."

Another proposal that would affect Ferlazzo's family is a new $310 deductible for Medicare and a state prescription-drug program for the elderly and disabled. Christie is also proposing increasing the co-payment for brand-name prescriptions from $7 to $15. Co-pays for generic drugs would decrease from $6 to $5. The changes would begin in January.

Ferlazzo earns too much to qualify for Medicaid, but her father, a cancer survivor, relies on Medicare to cover some health-care costs not covered by the insurance he has through work, which has an annual deductible of $3,000.

As a cashier, Ferlazzo said, she meets many senior citizens who must decide whether to buy medications or food.

"You'll find a lot of seniors ... buying macaroni and cheese for a week because they've got to pay their high-blood-pressure medicine, glaucoma medicine," Ferlazzo said. For a lot of them, Ferlazzo said, "these cuts literally mean the difference between eating and choosing to take your medicine."

Christie's proposal includes cuts to many more programs that help lower-income families, including a $32.5 million cut to rental assistance, ending the expansion of preschool education, and requiring developmentally disabled clients to pay 100 percent of their Supplemental Security Income checks for care instead of 75 percent while increasing a personal-needs allowance from $40 to $100 a month.

Other proposed cuts include freezing enrollment in FamilyCare, the state's health-insurance program for lower-income families, for parents as of March 1, and ending benefits for legal immigrants who are not yet citizens on April 1; eliminating the cash-assistance program for able-bodied adults; freezing or cutting various tuition assistance programs for college students; and freezing enrollment and reimbursements in the "Senior Freeze" property-tax reimbursement program.

Advocates for the poor said Christie's budget would have a very serious impact on the impoverished, including the working poor.

"In New Jersey, we've always had a history of protecting the most vulnerable, and I think that his budget is hurtful to the most vulnerable," said Elsa Candelario, executive director of the Hispanic Family Center of Southern New Jersey. "It definitely creates holes in what we ordinarily called the safety-net programs."

Anticipating such critics, Christie said in his speech that they would propose raising taxes on businesses as an alternative to spending cuts. He said those tax increases would only "kill a job market already on life support."

He also said his budget would protect programs that are most vital for the state's most vulnerable populations, continuing to allow enrollment of children in FamilyCare and expanding eligibility for food stamps, for example.

But Ferlazzo, who said she voted for Christie because she felt Gov. Jon S. Corzine did not fulfill his promises, said she was very disappointed.

"I feel as though I have been bamboozled," she said.