Immigrants’ Food Stamp Cut Delayed

Responding to appeals from local officials, Gov. Pete Wilson late Thursday agreed to allow counties to extend the deadline by four months for trimming as many as 430,000 poor legal immigrants from the food stamp rolls.

The action was taken almost two months after Los Angeles County had devised a bureaucratic maneuver to delay the cuts in food stamps to about 150,000 of these immigrants. And it comes as counties are facing an April 1 deadline to begin cutting legal immigrants off food stamps, as required by welfare reforms adopted by Congress last year.

State welfare officials were scrambling Thursday night to notify counties of the extension agreement, hammered out in negotiations with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the food stamp program.

“In essence, [legal immigrants] will be allowed to retain food stamps right up until the last point”--the end of August, said Bruce Wagstaff, who oversees welfare programs for the state Department of Social Services.

“It’s a big administrative bonus to Los Angeles County,” said Wilson’s press secretary, Sean Walsh. The county, he said, will be able to take advantage of a simplified “desk review” of food stamp recipients to re-enroll them without contacting them.

“Now, we’ll be able to get all the people [food stamp recipients] in under the wire,” Walsh said.

It was not immediately clear how many cases Los Angeles County and other counties had already processed to extend the benefits of legal immigrants.

Two weeks ago, Wilson reversed an earlier position and agreed to seek federal permission to save food stamp benefits for thousands of single able-bodied adults who would have lost them this month.

Citing that action, counties, including Los Angeles and San Diego, urged the administration to allow them to undertake a streamlined review of food stamp cases for legal immigrants.

“Certainly taking advantage of opportunities to continue federally funded nutritional benefits for poor [immigrant] children and their parents are of equal concern as continuing eligibility to able-bodied adults,” Bill Horn, chairman of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, wrote to Wilson on March 10.

Stretching out the time, Wilson officials agreed, would allow for a more orderly transition to the welfare system set up by the new federal law, give charities time to expand food programs and allow people to find work.

“I want to be as helpful as possible to assist legal immigrants in the transition to other services once the federal welfare reform law takes full effect at the end of August,” Wilson said in a prepared statement issued after a hastily called news conference.

Welfare officials welcomed the move.

“The upside is that for some counties it will provide them the option to provide food stamps as long as legally possible,” said Frank Mecca, lobbyist for the County Welfare Directors Assn., as well as “give people the maximum time to pursue other means of support or seek naturalization” as citizens.

But Mecca said the timing of the decision would force counties to make “a difficult last-minute correction . . . because the state pursued this fairly late and just now got federal approval.”

In California, the federally financed program provides free food to 3.2 million poor people, including families, single adults, children and legal immigrants. To receive the stamps, recipients are certified annually after proving they meet certain income thresholds.

Even before Wilson’s announcement, Ventura County welfare officials had been planning to recertify food stamp recipients so that they could continue to receive benefits until Aug. 22. There are roughly 2,700 legal immigrants who are receiving food stamps in the county.

“All this does is assure us that we can stay on the course that we wanted to be on,” said Helen Reburn, deputy director of the county’s Public Social Services Agency. “Many of these people have families, and because they are low-income they have a hard time without the help of food stamps.”

Nancy Rimsha, staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, said the extension approved by Wilson “is a good move.”

“It’s a very complicated procedure for the counties to figure out [who should be cut from the food stamp program]. The counties have been under great pressure to make these determinations by a certain date. Any alleviation of that pressure is welcomed because it prevents mistakes from being made,” Rimsha said.

“Now they have more time to reevaluate cases, and it will result in fewer errors. People in the immigrant community are in a panic over this,” she said.

Times staff writers Carlos Lozano in Ventura and H.G. Reza in Orange County contributed to this story.