The House Human Services Committee voted Friday to support a 60-month cap on the state’s family welfare program.
The committee’s endorsement came with a number of caveats and changes, but it keeps in tact the main precept of the Shumlin administration’s proposal — that the state should limit welfare benefits.
The proposal enacts a firm five-year cap on Reach Up benefits. It pushes back the onset of the cap, giving all but 20 families who are currently under sanctions, seven more months to prepare for it. The proposal also offers a handful of exemptions that would extend the cap for some families, and it carves out a one-time appropriation to provide additional services to families approaching the 60-month limit. (See end of story for a more detailed rundown of the changes.)
“Our big goal was the same as the governor’s,” said Rep. Anne O’Brien, D-Richmond, who sits on the Appropriations Committee and worked with members of the Human Services committee to draft the changes. “Many of us feel there should be a time limit.”
“But, we are providing them with a kind of off-ramp,” O’Brien said. “Our proposal includes supports for families to transition off Reach Up.” Those supports, she explained, are to be funded with the money saved by cutting off cash assistance to families after 60 months.
The modified proposal — the product of drawn-out deliberations — was sent to the House Appropriations Committee on Friday. On Monday the budget-writing committee will decide whether it will modify the language in the fiscal year 2014 budget bill to reflect the recommendations from the Human Services Committee.
A handful of members, including the Human Services Committee chair, Rep. Ann Pugh, D-South Burlington, remain adamantly opposed to the recommendations sent to Appropriations.
“The part that for me is totally unacceptable and unjust is holding responsible those families who are doing everything they’ve been asked to do,” Pugh said. “They are doing everything in their family development plan and they are still not at the financial level to leave Reach Up. To put all of the onus of responsibility on them when in fact it is a system failure, I think is morally corrupt.”
There’s also clear evidence, Pugh said, that capping benefits won’t move people out of poverty. “Research does not support the efficacy of hard caps,” she said.
Low-income advocates didn’t find the proposal much more palatable. Christopher Curtis, a lawyer at Vermont Legal Aid, said, “It really flies in the face of all the evidence which shows that arbitrary time limits without supports don’t help families get out of poverty.”
Curtis said he wasn’t comforted by the proposal of additional “supports” for families nearing the cap.
“The cost of cutting people off arbitrarily because of a time limit has been shown over and over again to cost more both to the families and to the state in other budget areas than the savings that they will achieve,” Curtis said. “Pitting one population of Reach Up participants against another is a dubious way of achieving any savings.”
Erhard Mahnke, coordinator for the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition, expressed similar concerns.
“Honestly, I don’t think the House Human Services proposal makes a huge amount of difference,” Mahnke said. “Studies show hard caps are not effective, and I don’t see there being enough supports, including housing supports, to make the transition work.”
Either proposal, Mahnke said, would reduce people’s ability to pay rent, and given that the federal sequester has put funding for subsidized housing on shaky ground, the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition has “deep concerns about the impact [of a Reach Up cap] on housing stability.”
David Yacavone, the commissioner of the Vermont Department of Children and Families, pushed the Shumlin administration’s proposal to cut off for one year families that have been on welfare for three years or more as of Oct. 1. The cap for any access to Reach Up would be five years under the governor’s plan. Yacavone was amenable to the committee’s counter-proposal. “I think it’s trying to be sensitive and balanced, and I like that,” he said.
Though the committee didn’t wholly embrace the administration’s proposal, Yacavone said he was encouraged to see them come around to the concept of a time cap.
“It’s not our position,” Yacavone said. “But it’s still positive that people appreciate that the ‘t’ in TANF is for temporary not for timeless, and I think people understand that some folks need a deadline.”
The consensus reached by the committee was tenuous, and members were still wavering after the votes were cast. The agreement seemed on the verge of unraveling Friday when Rep. Michael Mrowicki, D-Putney, changed his vote against the proposal, withdrawing his support, and making the final vote — 6-5 in favor — closer.
Even the four-person subcommittee charged with drafting the proposal, which had representatives from both the Human Services and Appropriations committees, failed to reach a full agreement.
House Human Service Committee’s proposed changes to the Shumlin administration’s Reach Up proposal
• The time limit would be a hard cap of 60 months. Shumlin proposed an on-again, off-again 60-month cap — after 36 months, families are bumped off the program for one year but allowed to come back for the next 12 months. They are bumped off again for one year and then allowed to return for a final year.
• It delays the onset of the cap from Oct. 1, 2013, which was proposed by the Shumlin’s Administration, to May 1, 2014. That would give families more time to prepare, but it also means the state won’t see the $6 million in savings that the administration banked on in its FY 2014 budget proposal.
• This reprieve would not be extended to “sanctioned” families that aren’t complying with the program’s work requirements — about 20 families currently fall into this category. These families would still lose their cash benefit on October 1, 2013.
• The Reach Up program grants deferments to people for various reasons, which allow them to stay on the program without being sanctioned for failing to meet the normal work requirements. The time that families spend on deferment would not count toward their 60-month total. Deferments are granted if participants cannot work, if they have been victims of domestic violence, or if the family is caring for an infant.
• The committee’s proposal also includes a one-time appropriation that would use the savings from removing families from the program after 60 months to provide “wrap-around” services for families about to be affected by the cap. Under this proposal, the $6 million that the administration expected to save would not be realized in fiscal year 2014. If the Appropriations Committee supports the Human Service’s proposal, they will need to find an additional $4 million to compensate. (The Shumlin administration recently revised its caseload forecast, which frees up $2 million that would partially make up for the loss of savings.)
• The cap would not apply to any “child-only” cases — smaller grants that are given to caretakers intended for solely for children rather than entire families.
• The commissioner of the Department of Children and Families (DCF) can waive the cap for families that experience a catastrophic event.
This story was updated at 9:54 am on March 23.
