O.C. to End Food Stamps for 1,100 Adults

About 1,100 Orange County residents become ineligible for food stamps today, and more than 30,000 stand to lose other benefits over the next few months, as the county begins the long process of implementing welfare reform.

The action marks the first time since reform legislation was passed by Congress last year that Orange County recipients have lost benefits. But it’s only the beginning of a complex process that will ultimately affect hundreds of thousands of poor people.

Beginning today, the county’s Social Services Agency will stop providing food stamps to 1,100 able-bodied adults without children who, under new federal guidelines, will not become eligible for food stamps for 33 months.

Next week, county officials will start interviewing thousands of legal immigrants to determine if they are still eligible to receive food stamps. It is expected that 14,000 of those legal immigrants will lose their food stamp benefits beginning in April.

By August, about 20,000 legal immigrants--mostly elderly, blind and disabled people--stand to lose federal Supplemental Security Income benefits.

The coming changes have government agencies, as well as local charity groups, scrambling to assess the effects, especially among the county’s large Asian and Latino legal immigrant communities.

“These people depend on food stamps for their daily needs,” said Mai Cong, president of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County, a nonprofit group.

Cong said that welfare reform will be felt most harshly by elderly and frail immigrants, who will have trouble finding jobs or other sources of income.

Reacting to such concerns, county Supervisor Charles V. Smith is organizing a crisis team made up of municipal officials and others to assess how to deal with the changes.

Anaheim Mayor Tom Daly said the county’s expanding economy could soften the impact of welfare reform for some, but that others might still face hardships.