Brenda Konkel can’t say for sure whether Dane County’s decision to cut $95,000 in funding from the Tenant Resource Center was personal. But, she says, it sure feels like it was.

Konkel, who has often been critical of how Dane County and Madison serve the homeless community, now finds the group she has headed for 20 years about to lose a third of its funding.

“It feels like retribution. They’ve tried to cut us several years in a row, and they finally cut us,” she says. “This is a one-third cut to our budget, and it feels like they want to hurt us. And it hurts.”

The Tenant Resource Center, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary, provides housing counseling for both tenants and landlords regarding their rights and responsibilities. Konkel is the group’s executive director. Dane County has contributed funding for 17 years for services in the county but outside the city limits.

In the $282 million budget requested by the county’s Department of Human Services, this $95,000 in funding will now go to Community Action Coalition for South Central Wisconsin.

Lynn Green, director of Dane County’s Department of Human Services, says that the county is required to put out requests for proposals for contracts at least every five years. The bids went out for these services this year and reflect a desire to consolidate housing services in one place.

“CAC won the competition fair and square,” she says. “I’m not into retribution. But beyond that, trust me, this system is set up so that cannot happen.”

The Tenant Resource Center now employs the equivalent of 7.5 full-time positions. If the cut goes through, Konkel says the center will be forced to cut 2.5 of those positions.

The center also gets about $100,000 from the city of Madison and $12,000 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide services around the state, in addition to private donations.

The county cut will mean the center provides services to those in Madison and elsewhere around the state, but not in Dane County outside the city. “So it creates this doughnut,” says Konkel.

She notes that a few years ago, the center made an outreach effort to those outside the city, “particularly to seniors. It was effective, and we’ve been getting a lot more calls from outside the city.”

The center currently employs both Spanish and Hmong speakers, and Konkel worries it will have to cut some of those staffers.

“We’ll be losing a lot of experience, people who speak different languages; it’s not good,” she says. “This cuts right to the core of our organization.”

Green says the county received just the two bids for the service. Since the contract with CAC has not yet been signed, there’s limited information about how the two group’s bids were scored and judged by the four-member panel that reviewed them. But Green notes that two of the panel members were people outside of county government.

The move toward having CAC fulfill the tenant counseling was done in part to consolidate services within one agency. CAC is already providing housing and case management services for the county, so, Green says, it’s a natural fit to fold tenant services into the same organization.

“Not only will you not see negative impacts, you’ll see improvements,” Green says. “We have had two providers of information and referral. We combined that money and put it out looking for one provider, so the community wouldn’t be having two referral numbers out there. We will be serving everyone throughout the whole county, and we’ll continue to provide mediation services.”

While Konkel says Community Action Coalition has the resources to help the homeless or those at risk of homelessness, she questions how well prepared the group is to help people sort out the intricacies of rental law.

“For people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, this makes sense,” she says. “But what about the 40% of our [county residents] who are just tenants — they didn’t get their security deposit back or they need to break their lease or they need repairs.”

“People get confused because I often talk about homelessness,” she adds. “But all day long we help regular old tenants with regular old tenant issues. Because of all the law changes in the past few years, I don’t know of anyone else qualified to help people.”

Konkel worries that despite losing the county contract, the Tenant Resource Center will still get numerous people calling and visiting from outside its reduced service area. And she sees a duplication of services, with her center providing information to those in the city and the CAC providing similar information to those in the county outside the city.

The Tenant Resource Center trained CAC staff about tenant-landlord issues, an area that has evolved in recent years, after the state Legislature passed laws superseding local ordinances.

“If CAC is going to get paid for it, they’re going to have to provide the service,” Konkel says. “I’m not confident they understand tenant-landlord law as well as we do, because we train them.”

She also fears that CAC won’t provide as comprehensive a service, because it relies on a phone system and does not have walk-in service at its offices, 1717 N. Stoughton Road.

Fred Schnook, executive director of CAC, said in an email he could not comment at this time. “The CAC is currently in negotiations with Dane County regarding their request for proposal. As such, it would be inappropriate for me to discuss any service strategy until such time as the negotiations are concluded,” Schnook wrote.

Dane County Supv. Heidi Wegleitner, an attorney who specializes in tenant rights, says that Tenant Resource Center’s expertise will be hard to replicate.

“They have been doing this for decades,” she says. “From my experience, the staff knows the intricacies of landlord tenant law. I don’t see that duplicated by any provider. They’re not attorneys, but they’re giving information that is desperately needed. I don’t see how another provider could step in and take over that service.”

Wegleitner has been in the center’s office and says “it’s just nonstop, person after person after person, sometimes in emotional states” coming through the center’s doors. “The walk-in service they provide is exhausting.”

Since the contract has gone through the bidding process, Wegleitner isn’t sure if there’s anything the county board can do to restore the center’s funding.

“The RFP process wasn’t intended to cut services to our community, so maybe there’s something that went wrong there,” she says. “I don’t know for sure how this will be addressed, but I have a lot of questions, and we need to figure out how we’ll fix this.”