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Mary Haley managed to get a part-time job (20 hours a week) answering the telephone for the crisis-intervention support unit at $4.80 an hour. Her total annual income: $5,400 plus $3,000 in child support from her ex-husband. How to erase that tax bill? "The in-kind program was my only hope." She was hired at $4.30 an hour to do clerical and case work for Hartford's juvenile crime prevention center. In her cramped, cluttered office —a stainless steel desk, two telephones, unvacuumed carpet, small white teapot, a naked light fixture overhead, with one of its two bulbs burned out—Mary is talking between phone calls. "The in-kind tax program is super," she says. "I couldn't hang onto the house if I couldn't work off my tax liability. We've been there eleven years. We have friends. The school is only a block away." Mary Haley is also a part-tune student now at Greater Hartford Community College. She hones her writing skills. "I like to write poetry, but there's so little money in that." Most important is home. When classes and her two jobs are over, it is there for Mary to go to. It is there for the kids too. And the dog. "Beats the hell out of welfare," says Hargreaves.
Iva Morill just turned 81. She has owned a frame duplex in southwest Hartford since 1945. Last July the bad news came. Her taxes were delinquent by more than $1,000. On an annual income of $2,080, how could she pay up? Without children, and wheelchair-bound for 25 years, Iva Morill had expected the notice. "I would lie in bed at night, worrying about my taxes."
Now Iva, in a crisp, fresh, lavender dress, is sitting in her small, neat-as-a-pin duplex. "Something about the in-kind program came with the tax notice. I hadn't worked since I had been in the wheelchair, but I knew I could." Iva is dark-haired, feisty and determined. She went to city hall, hired on as a tax division clerk, particularly to process parking tickets. When Hargreaves offered to have her picked up and returned home each day, Iva rebelled: "I'll take care of myself." An independent Vermont Yankee, she drives her own car.
"I enjoyed the work," says Iva, who has already knocked off $1,000 of her indebtedness at $4.30 an hour. "I felt good about working." Before a spinal injury incapacitated her, she was a nurse and a census enumerator. Afterward no one would hire her. "Lots of people who are capable of working don't get the opportunity," she says. Except for a pet rabbit named Kortina, she lives alone. The linoleum floors in her living room gleam. The white curtains above the radiator seem to have just come from the wash and the ironing board. "I'm going to do more work for the city," she says proudly. "I wish more people in more towns could do the same thing."
"Cities should not be in the business kicking people out of their homes," says Hargreaves. If Hartford were in that business, Doris Guiheen, 50, would no longer live in her tiny home with the white, sun-blistered shutters and the green clapboard siding. She is divorced and hard of hearing, and her arm movement is restricted. She was $6,000 in arrears when the tax notice came.