The Senate Appropriations Committee has settled on a five-year time limit for Reach Up, the state’s family welfare program. As part of the budget bill it passed this afternoon, the committee finalized its adaptation of the administration’s welfare reform plan.
The committee left the other half of the administration’s most recent proposal — a stricter approach towards families that don’t comply with the program — on the table. Currently, the Department for Children and Families (DCF) docks the cash grants of families that fail to meet the program requirements, but they never totally terminate assistance. Under the administration’s newest proposal, presented to the Appropriations Committee less than two weeks ago, families would be kicked off the program for six months after being sanctioned for four months. The committee opted instead to study the sanction policy before radically changing it.
Senate Appropriations had no shortage of choices, between the administration’s two proposals, the House’s version, and the Senate Health and Welfare Committee’s recommendation. It considered a number of options — “hard” caps, “soft” caps, caps with benefits, on-off caps, no cap at all — before deciding upon the five-year limit.
All three final proposals — from Senate Appropriations, the House, and the administration — allow for certain exceptions from the time limit. These grant extra time to domestic violence victims, people who can prove that they can’t work, and caretakers with children under 1 year old.
The Senate Appropriations Committee followed the administration’s lead, cutting down the maximum deferment for someone taking care of an infant from two years to one.
The committee also declined to include one of the safeguards built into the House plan, which also caps benefits at five years, but allows families to continue to receive a “child-only” grant — a somewhat diminished version of the same cash benefit.
Senate Appropriations Chair Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, said the committee supplanted that with a safeguard of its own making. The bill it passed allows the DCF commissioner to grant exceptions to the five-year cap for families that are complying with the program’s work requirements and/or participating in community service employment.
“We said we’ll assist the whole family. If the mother is working and doing everything we will continue to supplement her wages,” Kitchel said.
Christopher Curtis, an attorney with Vermont Legal Aid and a dogged opponent of Reach Up time limits, says he’s not comfortable with such decisions being left to the commissioner’s discretion.
“It’s encouraging that the committee is looking to make some important exceptions for parents that are meeting their obligations,” Curtis said, “but what’s concerning is access to the exceptions is entirely at the discretion of the commissioner … It’s applied entirely arbitrarily.”
Advocates are also frustrated by the flurry of end-of-session policymaking, which, they say, has led lawmakers to make haphazard decisions.
“The bad news is that this plan essentially endorses time limits on Reach Up without adequately studying the impacts on those families and on the budget … the plan is confusing because the language around deferments and exemptions was really put in at the last minute and has not been subject to careful review,” Curtis said. “It is troubling when new information like that is really being examined for the first time right before the end of the session.”
The lack of consensus, Curtis argued, is a cautionary sign that it’s too soon to restructure Reach Up.
“This is now the 6th or 7th iteration of a plan to amend the Reach Up program and it really just shows how controversial and complicated the program really is. What’s telling about the whole thing is how little unanimity there is about what to do,” he said.
The policy changes made by the Appropriations Committee reflect an attempt to recalibrate the balance of responsibility between parents and government, according to Kitchel.
“The dilemma here is what happens when a parent for no good reason refuses to support their children,” Kitchel said.
Kitchel pointed to new language in the bill that requires Reach Up case managers to conduct a review of a family after 18 months and 36 months on the program. Lawmakers have been concerned by the high caseloads — about 60 families on average — that they’ve heard case managers have to juggle.
“We are saying to government, you’ve got to have a decent caseload ratio, you need to do a review, you need to make sure that when families that have not moved [off the program] for whatever reason, you understand the factors and you figure out a different way of serving them,” Kitchel said. “So there is a lot on the Reach Up case managers and on the Reach Up system.”
The Senate committee’s plan also makes its clear that time spent on a welfare program in another state will count towards a family’s five-year maximum, if the out-of-state program is affiliated with the federal program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Some other states track this; Vermont currently does not.
“There’s been some discussion that those time limits have influenced people moving into Vermont,” Kitchel said.
