ERIKA ROSENBERG
O-D Albany bureau

As a half-dozen people in wheelchairs rolled into a second-floor office of the state Capitol, the receptionist behind the desk stiffened.

"Do you think you could move back into the hallway? It's a little crowded," she said to activists from Rochester and New York City here to protest policies of Gov. George Pataki.

"We're fine," said Bruce Darling, a leader of the group, whose members insisted upon a meeting with a Pataki administration official.

"Mark will meet with you, but he can't meet with you right now," said the receptionist, who would not give her name. "You're giving me a hard time. You're trying to intimidate me. We went through this last year."

Then, the protesters turned up their volume. "What do you want?" they shouted. "A meeting. When do you want it? Now."

Within 20 minutes, the protesters got what they came for -- a meeting with Mark Kissinger from Pataki's staff.

That story has played out several times over the past two years, as disabled people have banded together with people with AIDS and mental illness and used confrontational tactics rare in Albany.

The unusually tight coalition has won not only attention to its causes but also legislative victories, securing a new program to help disabled people work without losing their government health benefits, for example.

Now, members of the groups are angry that their successes seem to be slipping away. The start of the new health program has been delayed indefinitely. Pataki proposed changes they say would weaken a law the groups successfully pushed for in 2002 to get more disabled people out of institutions and into homes and apartments.

And, in what many take as a particular affront, Pataki wants to cut cash benefits to about 600,000 disabled and elderly people to save $26 million toward closing an $11.5 billion budget deficit.

Utica's Resource Center for Independent Living Executive Director Burt Danovitz said he isn't concerned about the agency's funding as much as he is concerned about funding for people with disabilities.

"Taking away money from people with supplemental security income is one of the worst budget proposals I can imagine," Danovitz said. "This just has to be reversed."

Most of the people who use RCIL's services are living below poverty level and can't afford additional cuts.

"The disability community feels under attack," said Michael Kink, organizer for Housing Works, which serves people with AIDS and HIV. "They're taking money away from our folks, not providing health-care security and weakening plans to get people of nursing homes and adult homes."

So the groups, some of whose members have been arrested in past protests, are preparing for an active spring.

"I don't think this community will allow this to be much more delayed," said Harvey Rosenthal, head of a mental-health group, referring to the new health program. "If it's not up by (June), I think all hell will break loose."

Before 2000, the groups for people with AIDS, the mentally ill and the disabled worked separately on their issues.

That year, the organizations realized they had a common interest in seeing the Medicaid government health-insurance program expanded to allow disabled people to pay premiums to keep their insurance even if they worked full-time and exceeded the program's income limits, an effort called "Medicaid buy-in."

So they started working together. One of the first big events was a protest outside Pataki's offices on the second floor of the Capitol. Some 100 people attended, and several were arrested for chaining themselves to the door, guarded by state troopers, to Pataki's inner sanctum.

"At the door were people with psychiatric disabilities chained to people with AIDS chained to people in wheelchairs," Kink said.

It took more work over the next 18 months, but the groups won the buy-in program in January 2002.

Kink said the confrontation in the Capitol was crucial to the eventual victory.

"At that point we weren't getting listened to," he said. Civil disobedience is "about making the people who think they have all the power and make all the decisions recognize that they can't exclude people."

But those tactics aren't embraced by all the groups. Two have a long history of public protest: Housing Works, an outgrowth of the aggressive AIDS group ACT-UP, and ADAPT, a national disability-rights organization with an especially active Rochester chapter of more than 100 members.

Lawmakers say the groups have been successful but are mixed on their use of civil disobedience.

"They're particularly effective in pressing very hard-nose, pragmatic arguments," said Sen. Raymond Meier, R-Western, Oneida County. They stress, for example, that getting disabled people out of institutions is not only humane but also cost-effective for the state, he said.

"I think civil disobedience really detracts from their arguments," Meier said. "They had my attention" before the protests.

But Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, D-Kingston, Ulster County, sees it differently.

"The disobedience came when people were confronted with improper resistance," such as shutting off Capitol elevators, Cahill said.

"For a group that doesn't have a lot of money to give in campaign contributions and isn't able to grease the skids in the traditional way, we've gotten a lot done," he added.

Contributing: Mary Christopher, Observer-Dispatch