Barriers keep food stamps from needy

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Barriers keep food stamps from needy

Friday, October 26, 2001

By HEATH FOSTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Quang Tran, shown with 9-year-old Joseph, the youngest of her four children, needed food stamps to tide her over for a month until she started her new job. It took her three weeks and eight visits to the state community service office before she got help. "I just started crying and said, 'Just tell me if you are going to help my family or not,"' she recalls. Paul Joseph Brown / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Click for larger photo

When single mother Quang Tran was laid off last year from her $14.85-an-hour job as a Boeing assembly line worker, she didn't waste any time reinventing herself. The energetic Vietnamese American used her unemployment benefits to pursue a beauty school degree, and by June she had landed a job at Hair Masters in Lynnwood.

But the divorced mother of four children, ages 18, 15, 13 and 9, learned she would have to wait a month for her first paycheck, and her refrigerator was nearly empty. Her unemployment benefits exhausted, she applied in a panic for food stamps.

It would take more than three stressful weeks and eight visits to the state community service office for Tran, 45, to get help feeding her family. At one point, she was told she wouldn't qualify because the car she drove to work -- a 1997 Chevy Lumina with 200,000 miles -- was worth too much. Finally, she broke down in tears in the welfare office.

"I was so upset and stressed, I just started crying, and said, 'Just tell me if you are going to help my family or not!'" said Tran, who now receives $147 a month in food assistance. "I didn't have any income and I was just so worried."

Food stamps are supposed to be the safety net that prevents low-income families who have lost jobs or work hours from going hungry. But despite concentrated state efforts in the past two years to make food stamps more accessible, formidable hurdles remain for hungry Washington families who need help from the $19 billion-a-year federal program.

These continuing barriers are especially troubling as Washington slides closer to recession and state officials gird for an increase in food stamp applications from the jobless.

"The food stamp program is just completely out of step with the realities that low-wage workers in this state face," said Linda Stone, a hunger expert with the Children's Alliance who is leading a lobbying effort to reform the bureaucratic program.

"We have lots of families that are showing up at food pantries because they can't get the food stamps they desperately need."

To get an average of about $72 a person in food stamps a month, the poor are required to produce a dizzying array of documents, ranging from statements from their landlords verifying their rent to the value of a family burial plot. A car worth more than $4,650, regardless of whether it's used to get children to day care or parents to work, or a family rainy day fund of more than $2,000, disqualifies them from help.

And for those who manage to get food aid, the program is hypersensitive to changes in income. A worker like Tran who sees her income fluctuate can be forced to reappear with new documentation monthly, or be cut off. In food bank lines in Seattle last week, many families reported that they have simply given up on the program.

Already, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that one in every 100 Washington households is "food insecure" -- at times hungry or on the brink of hunger. And after a year of relative stability, some food banks around Washington are beginning to see increases in the number of visitors at their doors, particularly those in rural areas with high unemployment rates.

Comparing the first eight months of this year with last year, Seattle-based Northwest Harvest has seen a 7.2 percent increase in the number of visits to the 300 food banks it supplies across the state, Executive Director Shelley Rotondo reported.

"With the unemployment rate rising, the increase in utility, fuel, and medicine costs, and the Boeing layoffs coming, we are very concerned that the ranks of those we serve will be swelling even further," she said.

Many of the most egregious problems with the food stamp program could change this fall when the Senate takes up a version of the farm bill passed by the House earlier this month.

Despite the anthrax scares that have sidetracked Congress, Senate debate is likely to begin on the measure next week, when senators are expected back in their offices, according to Seth Boffeli, an aide to Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.

A coalition comprising anti-hunger groups and many states, including Washington, is lobbying for an increase in the food stamp amount available for families and senior citizens, a simplification of the program's complex qualification rules, a repeal of the 1996 decision to cut off legal immigrants from food stamps, and new criteria for judging states' success in administering the program.

Driven by a desire to eradicate food stamp fraud, the Agriculture Department assesses financial penalties as high as $2 million when states make errors calculating families' benefits. But the anti-hunger program doesn't reward states when they succeed in delivering benefits to hungry people, said Jon Atherton, director of the state Economic Services Administration, an arm of the Department of Social and Health Services.

After the implementation of welfare reform in 1997, Washington saw a precipitous dropin the number of people on its food stamp rolls. Some found better-paying jobs in the booming economy at the time and no longer needed aid. But the massive publicity around welfare reform led many needy people to conclude wrongly that food stamps were subject to the five-year lifetime limit that now applies to cash assistance.

At the same time, the DSHS was struggling to correct a high error rate in the food stamp program and made changes that critics complained made the application process even more bureaucratic and unfriendly to the poor than before.

By September 1999, the number of people getting food stamps had plummeted from 445,010 to 305,519, a 31 percent decline from 1997 levels.


Senior citizens scramble for fresh produce at the University District Food Bank. Some food banks are beginning to see more people at their doors. Paul Joseph Brown / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

An Agriculture Department study released a month later found that Washington was doing the eighth-worst job in the nation in feeding its hungry. After a massive outcry from advocates for the poor and internal concern on the part of frustrated social workers who had to apply the program's labyrinthine rules to real people's lives, the state began a statewide food stamp education and outreach effort.

Since then, about 17,000 more people have signed up for the program. And Atherton said DSHS will soon introduce a new food stamp application that has been cut from seven to three pages and will be available online -- a move that has won kudos from outreach workers.

DSHS also will launch a program in November that will allow a Social Security benefit application to be an application for food assistance as well.

Yet, the program fails to reach many needy people who qualify. A family earning 130 percent of the federal poverty level or less, or $1,585 a month for a family of three, is eligible. But a July 2001 report by the Agriculture Department estimated that only about 64 percent of those eligible for food stamps in Washington were receiving them.

Atherton acknowledged that some of most daunting barriers in getting food stamps into the hands of the needy come from federal requirements that are beyond Washington's control, and also from budget constraints.

Stone, head of the Western Region Anti-Hunger Consortium, a lobbying group, said a version of the farm bill introduced Oct. 17 by Richard Lugar, R-Ind., ranking minority member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, would put much more power and flexibility in the states' hands.

Commuters' cars would be exempted from the asset calculations, states could reassess families' eligibility just once every six months, and in calculating a family's income state workers could use standard average deductions for utility bills, child care and medical expenses, rather than forcing families to produce actual receipts for each expense.

The bill would also put $10 billion more into the food stamp program in the next decade, compared with the $3.3 billion in the House version. That would allow the states to increase the food stamp amount they offer families; some families now go through the tortuous application process only to receive $10 a month on an electronic debit card.

Yolanda Hernandez, a caregiver at a Kent retirement home, is raising her 4-year-old son on her own. She takes home about $250 a week working full time but qualifies for just $28 worth of food stamps.

Once her rent, utility, phone, child care and gas bills are paid, Hernandez said she can afford to buy only the basics; she and her son eat mostly cereal, soup, pizza, hamburgers and hot dogs. She skips breakfast so her son can have more, but still feels guilty that she can't afford the fresh fruit, especially the grapes, blueberries and strawberries he loves best.

"My boy would eat all day long if he could, he's growing so fast," said Hernandez, 29. "Sometimes I have to tell him that if you eat all your food, there won't be any left tomorrow."

Stone said anti-hunger groups around the country will now begin a massive lobbying effort behind Lugar's proposal. The challenge will be to persuade the Senate to make the investment despite the myriad budget pressures facing the federal government in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Yet, Boffeli in Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Harkin's office said there's optimism a reform will pass before Congress recesses for the holidays.

"Senators Harkin and Lugar are committed to seeing that the investment in food stamps increases," he said.

P-I reporter Heath Foster can be reached at 206-448-8337 or heathfoster@seattlepi.com

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