Opinion ID: 2334397
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Based on its funding sources and similarity to ALSC, ANDVSA should be considered a public agency.

Text: As of 1979, ALSC received approximately 78 percent of its funding from the national Legal Services Corporation (LSC), which was created by Congress as a private nonprofit corporation to distribute federal funds to local grantee legal assistance organizations. [21] ANDVSA's Legal Advocacy Project (the legal services arm of the organization) currently receives over 99 percent of its funding from the Department of Justice's Office on Violence Against Women (OVW), a federal AmeriCorps grant, and the State. [22] OPA argues that ANDVSA's funding structure is distinguishable from that of ALSC because LSC, a federally-created agency, provided (and continues to provide) direct funding to ALSC, while ANDVSA receives its state and federal government funding through discretionary grants rather than as budget items. In addition, OPA distinguishes the organizations' funding sources, noting that although LSCwhich it describes as ALSC's somewhat `parent' corporationhas a board appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, ANDVSA has no equivalent parent organization. We do not find these distinctions to be meaningful. OPA provides no explanation for why funding received from the government through discretionary grants is less significant for purposes of designating a public agency than funding received through the normal state or federal budget process. More importantly, it is not clear that ALSC receives or ever did receive guaranteed budget funding rather than grants: though the record does not include detailed budget information about the status of ALSC in 1978-79, its 2009 accounting records label the majority of its funding from LSC as a Basic Field Grant, and designate other government funding as, for example, Family Caregiver Grants and Domestic Violence Grants; and ALSC's 1978-79 accounting statements include a broad category of grants and contracts from LSC and a number of other sources. OPA implies that these contributions are non-discretionary or otherwise different from the grants that fund ANDVSA. But as ALSC explains in its amicus brief: [S]ometimes a grant is issued to ALSC in lieu of a budgetary allocation and sometimes this is done because of budgetary and/or political concerns.... [C]ontrary to OPA's intimation, the application for funds from LSC is a competitive one and other nonprofit law firms could [compete] against ALSC ... for those funds. Similarly, OPA's description of LSC as ALSC's parent corporation is called into question by the affidavit of ALSC's executive director Andy Harrington, who stated that [a] review of the regulations reflects that LSC does not refer to the individual programs as LSC entities or LSC branch offices, nor does it refer to itself as the parent of the individual programs.... The most common term the regulations use to refer to the individual programs is `recipients'.... The LSC-ALSC relationship does not seem to extend far beyond funding; as Harrington's affidavit makes clear, LSC places restrictions on how its funding can be used, but it does not create individual legal services programs, hire or fire those programs' directors, or appoint board members. Indeed, ANDVSA draws a compelling parallel between ALSC's relationship with LSC and its own relationship with the OVW, a federal agency that supplies most of ANDVSA's funding. Like LSC, OVW requires that ANDVSA comply with federal regulations and imposes other special conditionsincluding regular progress reports that are made available to the publicfor ANDVSA to maintain its funding eligibility. We conclude that the grounds OPA proposes for distinguishing between ALSC's and ANDVSA's funding structures and sources are not persuasive. [23] Indeed, based purely on the extent of government funding, ANDVSA might be considered to have more in common with the 1978-79 ALSC than the current ALSC does. ALSC received the majority of its fundingabout 78 percentfrom LSC in 1979, compared to 47 percent in 2009; ANDVSA's Legal Advocacy Project currently receives over 99 percent of its funding from federal and state government sources. We do not intend to establish a threshold for the proportion of government funding an organization must receive to qualify as a public agency; however, given that it is funded almost entirely by government sources, ANDVSA qualifies as a public agency based on its funding. We also emphasize that this holding extends only to ANDVSA and does not reach the question whether any other organization is a public agency for purposes of AS 44.21.410(a)(4).