substantially, also has a problem. This is the very situation presently faced by elderly persons and others who are tenants of the Boston Housing Authority.

BOSTON HOUSING AUTHORITY RENT INCREASE CASE

On or about June 30, 1976, numerous tenants of the Boston Housing Authority were notified that their rents would be increased in accordance with a review of their income. Among the tenants are a substantial number of older persons, for whom, in many cases, the rent increases represent a significant financial hardship. Our office, and other offices of the Greater Boston Legal Services, received numerous complaints about the proposed increases. As a result a lawsuit was filed against the Boston Housing Authority during the week of July 26, 1976. That same week, the Boston Housing Authority decided to delay the increases until a further review takes place. On July 29, Judge E. George Daher of the Boston Housing Court enjoined the Boston Housing Authority from further implementation of the rent increase until the court determines that the proper procedures are being followed.

The lawsuit does not challenge the legal right of the Boston Housing Authority to raise rents. Rather, it challenges the method by which the rent increases were being implemented. In particular, the lawsuit asserts that affected persons must be given adequate explanation as to how their rent increases are computed and an opportunity for a meaningful hearing prior to implementation of the increase. This is particularly important because many tenants' rent were incorrectly calculated. What is asked for is no more than the tenants are entitled to under the State regulations governing public housing, and the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution allows.

At the present time rent increases are suspended. Negotiations between the housing authority and attorneys for the tenants are in progress in an attempt to reach agreement on a procedure which will adequately protect the interests of the tenants. Thank you. [Applause.] Senator KENNEDY. Just as a point of information, the hearing is going to adjourn at 11:40, so we have about 17 or 18 more minutes left here. However, if you have to leave, feel free to do so. OK, Mr. Bergman.

STATEMENT OF JAMES A. BERGMAN, NEW ENGLAND REGION DIRECTOR, LEGAL RESEARCH AND SERVICES FOR THE ELDERLY PROGRAM, NATIONAL COUNCIL OF SENIOR CITIZENS, INC., BOSTON, MASS.

Mr. BERGMAN. Thank you, Senator. My name is James Bergman. I am with the legal research and services for the elderly program, which is part of the National Council of Senior Citizens. Since I have been given permission to submit written testimony, I will do that and will summarize my comments from the written testimony.1

1 See p. 178.

First, I think that most of the people who have testified today have eloquently stated what the problems are that are faced by older people which require legal assistance to resolve. I think that Mrs. Cass and Frank Manning have done a very eloquent job and the last thing I am going to try to do is to improve upon their comments. Instead, I would like to talk about the response in New England, and especially in Massachusetts, to the legal problems that have been pointed up here today.

It is interesting to me that New England, as well as probably California, according to most people who are knowledgeable, are supposed to be the leaders in the country in providing legal services to older people. In fact, that probably is the case, but I think it is one thing to be a leader when the competition isn't too tough, and it is another thing to be a leader when the competition is tough. In this case, I am afraid the competition is exceedingly weak.

New England may, in fact, be a leader in providing legal services to the elderly and to low-income people, but the fact is that the response has been exceedingly meager. I would like to highlight three programs that have been especially good in providing legal services to older people to point out what can be done when a good program is funded. I might add that the interesting thing is that the programs that have been funded over the last 8 or 9 years have almost exclusively been funded by either title III of the Older Americans Act or by the Office of Economic Opportunity through the original LRSE program. I might add that I was fortunate enough to have been the director of the original Council of Elders legal program where Mrs. Cass helped teach me about the ways of the world. I may have been born and raised in Wisconsin, but I grew up under Mrs. Cass and the Council of Elders.

COUNCIL OF ELDERS LEGAL PROGRAM

As I said, the Council of Elders legal program was funded by that original OEO program, and the other programs that I will mention have been funded exclusively by title III of the Older Americans Act. And that by itself, I think, tells a little bit of a story of how legal services for the elderly have developed in this country.

The original Council of Elders LSRE program, which began in 1969, was somewhat unique in three different ways at that time. One was that it hired older people as paralegals, and found out very quickly that that was probably the best way to do outreach. It was also one of the best ways to find and help older people.

Second, it took an approach that I think was different from most of the programs in that it hired a downtown law firm instead of having staff attorneys. Thus, with a combination of older people as paralegals-and I think the oldest at the beginning was 79-and a downtown law firm which was an exceedingly strong law firm in the city, the legal project had a very good one-two punch.

The third thing, the program, while it handled direct cases, focused very much on legislative activities as a means of attempting to resolve problems affecting many elderly persons. For example, while it may be that a person's major problem is income, once you have gotten him adequate social security benefits and old age benefits, this person still

might be living on nothing more than about $210 a month. Now, that is pretty inadequate, and maybe the best solution is to go to the legislature and fight for increases in old age benefits, which was one of the things at that time the program did, along with groups like Frank Manning's organization.

We also worked with Frank on drafting the original legislation to set up a State Department of Elder Affairs, feeling that if we could focus attention at that high a level in State government, we could probably get better and more resources for older people. I think that the Council of Elders legal program demonstrated that legislative action is a very important part of any legal program for older people, because the program can hit the problems of thousands of people in the same time span that it would take to handle maybe 5 to 10 individual cases.

CAMBRIDGE-SOMERVILLE LEGAL SERVICES

Another example of a way of approaching the legal problems of older persons has been carried out by the Cambridge-Somerville legal service program under a title III grant for the last 2 years. That program is focused very much on what is called high impact litigation, or class action suits. And it has been successful in getting a Federal judge to order the Cambridge office of the Social Security Administration to take no more than 45 days to process SSI applications for persons who are not disabled. As most of you know, when SSI came into being, we all received tens and hundreds of complaints from people who filed their applications, but it took months and months to get those applications handled so that the persons could get on SSI. In one class action suit the Cambridge office was ordered to process all applications within 45 days, and now they somehow are able to do it in 30 days in most cases. I think it proves the point that you can use that kind of litigation to get the job done for more than just one person. That same program also filed a suit which challenges the privacy issues created by title XX applications. The suit basically makes the point that if you require people to give information that they don't want to give-and I think Mrs. Cass very eloquently put it, that older people don't always want to tell you everything-that they will often refuse to provide the information even if it means that they will be denied services which they need. I think that while that case is still in court, it has highlighted some very important issues, and Congress has already begun to respond to some of the privacy issues.

STATEWIDE LEGAL SERVICE PROGRAMS

A third kind of program that has been started, and in fact runs in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island, is statewide. legal service programs which handle mostly individual legal problems of the elderly. Normally these programs have begun under a title III grant to hire an attorney who is also the director, and then they supplement the programs with VISTA volunteers and CETA employees who serve as paralegals. The result in those programs in each case is that they handled individual cases so that more and more older people could get access to legal services.

The New Hampshire program, I think, is a good example of how that can be done. The program is operated by New Hampshire Legal Assistance, but has a special elderly component within it so that when people apply, they are not applying necessarily to New Hampshire Legal Assistance, which some older people may have objected to because it is a so-called poverty program, but they are applying to a specific program which serves the elderly. While the legal project staff may use the New Hampshire Legal Assistance offices as their base, they go to meet elders in title VII meals sites, in senior centers, in elderly housing units-anywhere that older people might be. The attorneys and the paralegals go to these group sites, but they also go to the homes of senior citizens, and when you are dealing with rural areas, the willingness of a legal program to go to the home and to the apartment of an individual is critical if the program is going to serve people who need services. To sit in one office in Concord, N.H., would never serve the people of New Hampshire.

I think these programs have been very successful, but again, the response has been meager in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, which all have statewide legal programs. Legal programs for the elderly in these four States have a total of 10 attorneys, and 13 paralegals, for an older population of over 525,000 people. This is the model for the country, and yet those are the figures which confront us.

SEVEN LAWYERS FOR 937,000 OLDER PERSONS

In Massachusetts, we have seven lawyers and 12 paralegals for over 937,000 people over 60, and of those seven lawyers, four of them are in Boston, and of the 12 paralegals, 9 of them are in Boston, so that the model for the country is a very meager model. The programs may be doing a good job, but you can see the coverage.

I think it is legitimate, though, to mention what the legal service programs are doing that are not specifically geared to the elderly. Basically, the response is the same as it was in the late 1960's when OEO estimated that about 6 percent of the total caseload for legal service programs, for OEO programs, was elderly. In talking with legal service programs in the New England States in the last 6 months, we determined that basically that has not changed. The average still runs from 4 percent to 10 percent of the total caseload. Thus, there has been virtually no change in the last 7 years in the proportion of older people who get served by legal assistance programs, and yet the elderly population has risen by 1 to 2 percent up to about 15 percent of the total population, and the elderly still represent about half again as many poor people as younger people do. It appears that legal service programs which are supposed to focus on low-income persons are, in fact, not making such a response in terms of the elderly. I would wholeheartedly endorse the Senator's suggestion that the Legal Service Corp. be mandated by law to begin to provide services at least in proportion to the number of low-income persons in the population, because I think there is no other way they are going to respond as quickly as they need to.

I think on their side it can be legitimately said that up until a year ago those programs were funded basically at the same level they had been in 1969, but now that they are getting increased funds, I think more action should be taken.

PRIVATE BAR ASSOCIATION'S RESPONSE

I would like to deal very briefly with bar association's response by citing a case that recently came to my attention. A gentleman in western Massachusetts who is 67 years old, happens to be blind, hard of hearing, has a pacemaker, and walks with crutches, only with great difficulty. The gentleman just recently had a complaint filed against him in court for stealing a dog. It just so happens that the gentleman denies that he stole the dog, but does admit that he would like to have that dog because he thinks it's the same German Shepherd that he had raised and trained himself to be a seeing eye dog, and which was either stolen from him or else ran away.

In any event, the person who finally ended up with the dog had it stolen from him and has now filed a complaint against this gentleman, thinking, in fact, that he tracked it down and wanted it back so he took it. The gentleman, I also should mention, is on SSI, so he is not exactly a wealthy individual. When he went to court he asked for a public defender to be appointed and was told that they would like to but unfortunately he had too much money in the bank, so no public defender.

He then went to Western Massachusetts Legal Services, the Legal Service Corp. funded program, and was told that they also would like to help him, but unfortunately it was a criminal complaint and by statute they can only handle civil complaints.

The gentleman, knowing that he was going to have to appear in court, and knowing that if he didn't appear he would probably be convicted, or stood a good chance of being convicted, sought out through the Home Care Corp. in western Massachusetts, a lawyer, and finally found a private attorney who said that he would be happy to take the case for the nominal fee of $200 on a complaint that was for theft of property worth less than $100. The gentleman is going to retain that attorney. He is going to go to court. He is going to pay that $200 out of his own pocket because it is the only way he can get justice done. And yet I think it typifies some of the problems in the response of the private bar in this State and other States.

INFLEXIBILITY OF FEE SCHEDULE

The three major things that the case highlights are: (1) The inflexible nature of the fee schedule which the private bar maintains, and the fact that in many cases the private attorneys are not willing to take into consideration the needs of the individual client that they are dealing with; (2) I think it points out the inflexible nature of some of the federally funded programs that provide legal services; while I understand the need to set certain levels so that the programs don't promise more than they can deliver, there must also be some flexibility built in so that when a gentleman like this comes in he