18 Counties Given Food Stamp Reprieve

The Clinton Administration, citing job shortages that make it harder for the poor to find work in California, agreed Wednesday to give Los Angeles and 17 other counties a six-month exemption from welfare reform requirements that would cut off food stamps to nonworking single adults.

But the administration rejected a request by Gov. Pete Wilson to exempt the entire state so that all 58 counties would have time to create public service jobs that would allow recipients to avoid the cuts.

“While we appreciate the state’s goal of . . . providing work opportunities to recipients, [federal law] does not give [us] the authority to waive these requirements to give the state time to design and implement such programs,” said Yvette S. Jackson, deputy administrator of the federal food stamp program.

Jackson said only those areas of the state that showed high unemployment or a lack of jobs could escape the food stamp cuts mandated by Congress. In addition to the 18 counties, she said several cities, including Oakland, East Palo Alto and Sacramento, would qualify for the exemption because Department of Labor studies showed they had job shortages.

Corinne Chee, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Social Services, said that the decision was a “disappointment” and that the Wilson Administration would continue to press for a broader exemption.

“The bottom line is that we are not asking for a change in policy, we’re just asking for more time,” she said.

Of particular concern, Chee said, was the decision to exempt parts--but not all--of certain counties. “It’s just another administrative burden to the eligibility workers who have to figure all of this out,” she said.

Chee estimated that the latest federal decision, coupled with an earlier exemption granted to 25 small counties with high unemployment, will now mean that at least 124,000 adults will get a reprieve from federal food stamp cuts.

Besides Los Angeles, other Southern California counties given the exemption were Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside. Two cities in Orange County--Santa Ana and Stanton--also got the exemption, as did seven communities surrounding San Diego.

Left to face potential cuts, Chee said, are about 40,000 recipients, including those who live in some of the state’s largest cities, such as San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego.

Some advocates of the poor consider the cuts affecting able-bodied single adults to be the harshest part of a new federal welfare act signed into law in August. Starting this spring, adults who fail to find work within three months are scheduled to lose federal food assistance.

The act provides exemptions for areas within a state if unemployment exceeds 10% or jobs are scarce. It also allows counties to provide public service jobs that will permit individual recipients to fulfill the work requirements.

Despite the piecemeal nature of the federal exemptions, many county officials and advocates said the decision would give much of the state relief from a requirement in the welfare act that they were having to implement quickly.

“It buys us time,” said Laurie True of the nonprofit California Food Policy Advocates.

She said most counties in the state would now have sufficient time to create community service jobs that would prevent recipients from losing food stamps.

Said Margaret Pena, a lobbyist for the California State Assn. of Counties: “Given the complexities created by the new welfare law, the more time we have to implement the changes the more equitable will be our treatment of those in need of aid.”

In Los Angeles, Mary Robertson, program deputy for food stamps, said the county already had planned to avoid the cuts by providing public service workfare jobs for recipients who couldn’t find employment in the private sector.

She said most of the single adults receiving food stamps were already participating in Los Angeles’ workfare program in order to meet the requirements of General Relief, the county program that provides cash assistance to the poor.

She said she expected by June to have workfare jobs for the remaining 10,000 food stamp recipients who were not on General Relief and could have been subject to the cuts.

In Alameda County, which got only a partial exemption, officials said they did not anticipate major administrative problems but were concerned about inequities.

“How can we tell someone who lives in Hayward that they have to find a job but if they lived in Oakland they wouldn’t have to?” said Kathy Archuleta of the Alameda County Social Services Department.