| Releases & Statements
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Frank Sobrino, Press Secretary
O: (212) 669-4193
Thank you Chair De Blasio for holding
this important hearing.
One of the keys to promoting economic
self-sufficiency is ensuring that low-income New Yorkers are able
to put food on their families’ table while they look for
work. There is no better tool for achieving this aim than the
federal Food Stamp program. Food stamps not only provide vital
assistance to New Yorkers in need, they also pour more than a
billion of federal dollars into our city’s economy. Unfortunately,
hundreds of thousands of eligible New Yorkers fail to take advantage
of the program because the city makes the application process
unnecessarily stringent and difficult.
I am proud to have successfully advocated
for several common-sense reforms to the food stamp application
process in my first term, among them cutting the application form
down from 16 pages to 4 pages and getting after hours enrollment
centers to keep their doors open as late as advertised so that
people could come after work. Since those reforms were enacted,
200,000 more New Yorkers have enrolled for food stamps. There
are still approximately 700,000 eligible New Yorkers who are not
enrolled, however. Clearly, the time has come for another round
of reform.
The Bloomberg administration had an
opportunity to take a major step forward on this issue when it
committed to pursuing the federal Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents
(ABAWD) waiver. Over the past four years, I have repeatedly urged
the administration to seek the ABAWD waiver, which allows some
able-bodied adults ages 18 to 49 to receive food stamps for longer
than the normal federal limit of three months in any three-year
period. I was pleased that the message finally seemed to have
gotten through. Unfortunately, at the eleventh hour, Mayor Bloomberg
overruled his two top social service officials, reversing their
decision to apply for the waiver.
In the wake of this decision, the
administration stated that the waiver is “not consistent
with the Mayor’s goal of helping New Yorkers become self-sufficient.”
With all due respect to the Mayor and his staff, I believe the
logic behind this statement is faulty. The ABAWD waiver would
actually promote self-sufficiency among New Yorkers who have lost
their jobs by alleviating some of the worry about where their
next meal is coming from, allowing them to focus on job training
and looking for work.
The recent rejection of the ABAWD waiver is not the only instance
in which the city has consciously passed up an opportunity to
make food stamps more accessible to New Yorkers. In October of
2004, the Commissioner of the State Office of Temporary and Disability
Assistance (OTDA), Robert Doar, wrote a letter to the Human Resources
Administration (HRA) Commissioner advising her that in order to
strengthen the city’s “commitment to maintain and
promote access to the Food Stamp program …OTDA encourages
HRA to exempt certain groups from the Automated Finger Imaging
System requirements of Food Stamp eligibility.” Despite
this prompting from Commissioner Doar, and despite a number of
reports, including one by the USDA, which show that requiring
finger imaging for Food Stamp applicants is an ineffective way
to prevent fraud and a deterrent for eligible New Yorkers, the
city has refused to accept the exemptions offered by the state.
I consider it an embarrassment that a progressive city like ours
has to be told by a Republican-controlled state agency to do more
to help people in need.
The administration can hardly argue
that requiring finger imaging for Food Stamp applicants is consistent
with the Mayor’s goal of helping New Yorkers become self-sufficient.
On the contrary, finger imaging reinforces the stigma associated
with the Food Stamp program and places another unnecessary obstacle
in the way of vulnerable New Yorkers, especially the elderly,
the disabled, and individuals who work during food stamp office
hours—all of whom are eligible for waivers from the state,
if only the city would accept them.
When the city isn’t rejecting
state and federal assistance, it is failing to enforce it own
policies to make the application process less of a hardship for
vulnerable New Yorkers. Under current state and federal law, HRA
is required to waive the face-to-face interview requirement for
food stamp applicants who are in “household hardship situations,”
a term that can be interpreted to include those who are working,
disabled, facing transportation difficulties or caring for a household
member. Existing HRA policy directs food stamp offices to grant
this waiver, allowing eligible New Yorkers to be interviewed over
the phone. But field offices frequently ignore the policy, a problem
that still persists three years after I first identified it in
a report on HRA’s administration of the Food Stamp program.
Recently, the City Council passed
a bill to ensure that HRA follow its own guidelines for the provision
of waivers, but Mayor Bloomberg vetoed it. Again, it is difficult
to understand how a scenario in which food stamp offices ignore
city policy is consistent with the Mayor’s goal of helping
New Yorkers become self-sufficient.
At a time when the Bush
administration is slashing funding for social services, it is
incumbent upon the city to avail itself of every existing policy
and every identified opportunity to keep federal dollars flowing
into our economy and to keep increasing participation in the Food
Stamp program, which, let’s not forget, costs the city close
to nothing and helps New Yorkers in need feed their families.
A renewed commitment on the part of
the Bloomberg administration to do everything in its power to
remove obstacles to food stamp enrollment, will help bridge the
gap between 700,000 New Yorkers in need and the millions of dollars
in federal aid that is waiting to be claimed. It would also help
bring HRA policy into line with the Mayor’s stated goal
of promoting public health by giving low-income New Yorkers greater
purchasing power to buy more nutritious food. There is no better
way to promote self-sufficiency than to show people that if they
take the necessary steps to support themselves and their families,
the City of New York will be there every step of the way to ensure
they get the help they need and deserve.
Thank you.
###
|
