Sitting in her office on 6th and Market street, Courtney Mulhern-Pearson shakes her head sadly as a Blue Angel screams by.

"It's funny to see what people spend money on," she said.

Mulhern-Pearson, the director of state and local affairs at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, has been working to organize protests and raise public awareness since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's line-item veto cut a majority of funding to AIDS programs. In the AIDS Foundation alone, the budget for prevention and testing funding was reduced from $2.9 million to almost $513,000. Overall, Gov. Schwarzenegger cut $52 million from HIV/AIDS programs.

"It's disheartening to see California do this, when we were pretty much at the forefront of the epidemic," Mulhern-Pearson said. "We were the leaders and it's really sad to see how far we've been set back. Our funding is behind Mississippi now."

So far, San Francisco has been spared layoffs and service reduction because the Department of Public Health is dipping into its reserves and backfilling what AIDS programs have lost from the state funds, according to Pearson. The department may not be able to do this for long.

Organizations in the city have been able to stay standing because of the backfilling, but many clinics and programs in the Bay Area have crumbled. San Mateo's Board of Supervisors recently cut additional HIV/AIDS funding.

The Billy DeFrank Center in San Jose, a gay community center that provides counseling, group activities and free HIV testing, lost all of their state funding and have been resorting to creative ways to raise money. A sign stands large in front of the building, urging the community to fund the center. The center also holds fun events to get people involved, like a bingo night preceded over by a clown.

While their community programs and counseling groups can be staffed by volunteers (and their paid staff has indeed been replaced by volunteers), the HIV clinic was in danger of closing until a donor offered to fund it for the next six months, while the organization raises money.

The HIV testing clinic is well-known in San Jose for being discreet and welcoming. Plumbers on their way to work often pull into the center's lot to run in for a test, as do people living on the street and sex workers.

Without the option to get tested at the center, Paul Wysocki, the executive director, worries that people won't get tested at all.

"It's so crucial for the public to have this," Wysocki said. "Every barrier you put up to people getting tested is one less person who knows."

"We hope that the Board of Supervisors will (keep funding AIDS programs)," Mulhern-Pearson said. "The hope is to get some of the money that was backfilled, but then again, that's just San Francisco. Alameda and San Mateo got hit really hard."

Because of the budget cuts, Mulhern-Pearson and others working in the AIDS sector expect to see an increase in the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS, as well as people finding out they are infected much later. People with the virus will also have more difficulty obtaining care and medicine.

Those who work with AIDS programs question the economic sense of the cuts.

"We have no way in this society of finding out who's positive unless we educate people and they get tested," said Dr. Marcus Conant, the director of the Conant Medical Group and one of the first physicians to diagnose and treat HIV/AIDS. "If you cut healthcare, you're cutting down on education and the number of people infected will increase. You're cutting money right now but it will cost exponentially more later."

On August 10, Senator Darrell Steinberg filed a lawsuit against Gov. Schwarzenegger, saying he overstepped his authority by using line-item vetoes after the Assembly failed to agree on a budget revision package. Although the lawsuit may help, some think that it focused too much blame on the governor and not enough on the Assembly, which knew what would happen if it failed to agree to a budget plan, according to Mulhern-Pearson.

"The lawsuits were a little bit of a false promise," Mulhern-Pearson said. "Really the Assembly should have gone back and fixed the budget. The hype around the lawsuits distracted people from the fact that they weren't doing their jobs."

The budget revision package included cuts to AIDS programs, but they were not as deep as the slices that came from the governor's pen.

"Early on, we were reassured by politicians that 'no, no, no we would never do that," Conant said. "But they're battling other issues...I think politicians play to the lowest possible denominator in society--who can we cut that people won't care that we cut?"

Although the protests have not resulted in action yet, Mulhern-Pearson believes they were successful in the way they mobilized the community. Now it is a question of how to keep the problem in front of the public eye.

"Very few people advocate," Conant said. "Where do you see people yelling and screaming with their doctors over this?"

Activist Brian Basinger organized protests in which hoards of dissenters boarded busses headed to Sacramento and rallied in front of the Capitol Building right after the budget cuts were announced. Basinger started the AIDS Housing Alliance, the only organization in the city whose employees all have HIV/AIDS, in 2003 to make it easier for people with the virus to find housing.

Basinger has been involved in AIDS activism since its early days; while he thinks Gov. Schwarzenegger was unfairly heavy on the AIDS community, he also blames AIDS activists for "giving up the movement" and allowing such deep cuts to happen.

"I'm blaming people with AIDS for sitting back on the couch and letting this happen and letting themselves become disempowered," Basinger said. "Groups that are seen as politically powerful, governors don't cut their budgets like this. We sat back, we became weak, we became complacent, we did not exercise our political muscle. And so we became vulnerable."