Budget hits the poor
Advocates for the poor, including Catholic lobbyists representing California’s Catholic Bishops, have spoken out against major cuts to California’s welfare-to-work program, CalWORKs, in the state’s new budget. Signed July 28 after tense negotiations between Governor Schwarzenegger and the Democratic-controlled Legislature, the budget slashes $528 million from CalWORKs, which formerly had received about $2.9 billion in state resources.
Steve Pehanich, senior director for advocacy and education with the California Catholic Conference, the lobbying arm of the state’s bishops, said the deep cuts to the program are a reflection of political maneuvering in the state that put off budget concerns until draconian cuts were nearly unavoidable.
“‘Crisis’ and ‘budget’ have become synonymous in Sacramento,” Pehanich said. “We recognize the reality that it is definitely a bad budget year, but our position is that society is judged by how it takes care of the most vulnerable.”
Pehanich said that though many have raised the issue of fraud and abuse of the welfare system in California, in his experience recipients are honest people simply unable to survive financially.
“Most really want to get jobs,” Pehanich said. “I don’t know a lot of CalWORKs participants who like being on CalWORKs.”
The program provides temporary financial assistance, employment services and job skills training to low income parents of minor children. The assistance is limited to 60 months, but under reforms passed as part of the new budget the benefits will last 48 months, with a 12 month hiatus followed by an additional 12 months of payments.
Also, for the first time since the program was created, benefits for minor children can be reduced if the parent is not in full compliance with the work requirements of the program, a minimum of 32 hours work per week. Previously, benefits for the adult portion of the benefit could be suspended for non-compliance, but new regulations allow for the suspension of half the child benefit if parents remain in non-compliance for 90 days.
Linda Wanner, CCC’s associate director for governmental relations, said the cuts to children are of particular concern.
“As budget negotiations were taking place behind closed doors, we kept hearing that the safety net for California’s most vulnerable people was preserved,” Wanner said. “In actuality, it was gutted with drastic cuts affecting our children. It is a sad day for the poor children of California.”
According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, California’s non-partisan fiscal and policy advisor, the cuts to CalWORKs will remove grants for more than 110,000 families and more than 234,000 children.
George Wesolek, director of the Archdiocese of San Francisco’s office of public policy and social concerns, said he is also disturbed by the budget cuts to programs for children.
“The healthy children’s cut is a major blow since we’re trying to expand healthcare coverage,” Wesolek said of the $194 million cut from the Healthy Families program, which provides health insurance to California’s neediest children. “We’re very aware that it was almost an impossible situation. Everybody’s backs were up against the wall, and we knew there were going to be cuts. The problem now is how those cuts are going to impact us on the local level.”
The Western Center on Law and Poverty, a lobbying office and legal service focused on poverty issues, addressed on its website the fallout of the budget cuts to programs like Healthy Families and CalWORKs.
“Enrollment into Healthy Families is frozen and in the first eight days of the wait list more than 22,000 children were waitlisted,” the center said. “Without outside funding the enrollment freeze will continue, turning away hundreds of thousands of children. In addition, more than half a million currently enrolled children will be disenrolled.”
Regarding CalWORKs, the center puts it bluntly.
“The most difficult of the cuts are those to the CalWORKs program,” the center said. “They mark the end of CalWORKs as we knew it.”
In a July 6 letter to the State Senate, the Western Center on Law & Poverty challenged assertions made by Governor Schwarzenegger that CalWORKs is contributing to the state’s budget crisis. In public comments, the Governor called the program “fast growing” and a “budget problem.”
The WCLP letter noted that due to the recession the CalWORKs caseload has “increased to 526,473 families, the first increase in nearly 15 years. But this caseload pales in comparison to the caseloads under the old AFDC program, in which caseload in 1994 exceeded 900,000 families. Even in the height of the greatest recession in 70 years, the state is not seeing anywhere near the caseload size that the counties previously managed.”
By Mike Vick
From August 7, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
