As The City budget season heats up, a delegation of seniors brought more pressure to City Hall on Tuesday by demanding that San Francisco politicians live up to their promises to save services for the elderly.

The seniors delivered empty meal boxes to the office of each supervisor and the mayor to illustrate the pain of proposed cuts to the city's Department of Aging and Adult Services.

While meal-delivery programs already are high priority in San Francisco's budget, proposed state and city reductions to senior programs are expected to have a heavy impact on the nonprofit organizations that provide meals, said Valerie Villela, vice president of the Coalition of Agencies Serving the Elderly.

"It's all connected," said Villela, who is also the director of On Lok Thirtieth Street Services.

The Department of Aging and Adult Services is facing a possible $1.2 million cut under Mayor Gavin Newsom's contingency budget, which represents a worst-case scenario plan. The reductions could affect a variety of programs, including community centers, legal assistance services and elder abuse monitoring.

The proposed cuts are part of The City's larger fiscal crisis, said Darrick Lam, director of the Department of Aging and Adult Services.

"In general, The City has a very dire situation in terms of the budget shortfall, even after the governor released his May revision," he said. While San Francisco saw some relief in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest version of the budget, released on May 13, The City still faces a shortfall of more than $300 million for next year.

In addition to cuts to the Department of Aging and Adult Services, some San Francisco senior services are likely to see a direct hit from the state, including a massive $12.4 million reduction to in-home supportive services, a program run through The City's Department of Human Services, that helps seniors and disabled people live independently.

According to Lam, some of the smaller city-level cuts to his department had already been taken off the table, including $25,000 in hits to naturalization services and housing-advocacy programs.

The mayor's finance staff met in a closed-door session with senior-group representatives after their Tuesday demonstration to discuss the other proposed reductions. 

Newsom must present a balanced budget proposal to the supervisors by June 1, who must approve a final version by the end of July. The looming deadline is likely to draw more and more stakeholders to descend on City Hall protesting possible cuts. On the same day the seniors staged their protest, mental-health advocates were also pushing supervisors to save a Sunset District clinic from closure.