DC Council Makes Bad TANF Benefits Cut Worse

Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul!

DC Council Chairman Vincent Gray has pushed through a budget gap-closing plan for this fiscal year that takes cash assistance away from families in the District’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to fund adult job training — maybe some other things as well.

I say pushed through because Councilmembers didn’t get the final plan until the wee small hours of the morning the vote was scheduled. No time for them — or the public — to work through the details or come up with vote-ready alternatives.

I, for one, am feeling hampered by the lack of a clear account of the total package. But the stepped-up raid on TANF is clear enough.

As I previously wrote, Mayor Fenty seized on Councilmember Marion Barry’s now-repudiated proposal to impose a five-year lifetime limit on TANF benefits for poor D.C. families.

Under his gap-closing plan, maximum benefits would have been cut by 20% for all families who’d been in the program for more than five years, whether consecutive or occasionally over a long period of time.

Gray’s version adopts this cut for the current fiscal year, then increases it by 20% each year so that post-five year benefits are fully phased out in Fiscal Year 2015.

No circuit breaker if the planned improvements in the TANF program don’t get fully implemented on schedule or deliver sufficient results. No exemption for victims of domestic violence or other singular hardships, though the District could still have used federal funds to support many, if not all of them.

Half the money saved will be invested in job training programs that target TANF recipients. Maybe Gray used some of the rest to restore the mayor’s proposed cuts to the adult job training programs operated by the Department of Employment Services.

But it’s hard to know how funds freed up in one area have been shifted to undo or mitigate proposed cuts in another.

Not hard at all to know that the phase-out of TANF benefits will work extraordinary hardships on for families who, for various reasons, can’t achieve sustained self-sufficiency. Or to know that it would never have materialized if Gray had decided to balance the budget by a reasonable mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers.

By the time of the vote, Councilmembers had a range of revenue-raising proposals in hand. Councilmembers Michael Brown and Jim Graham reportedly favored the single new top income tax bracket advocated by a large number of local organizations.

Councilmember Tommy Wells had a new income tax reform plan that would have created three new top tax brackets, the first beginning with a minimal increase at $75,000.

Councilmember Barry wanted to revive last year’s proposed expansion of the sales tax — anathema to the health club crowd, but still, I think, a good idea.

He’d also picked up on Councilmember Graham’s thoughts about increasing the tax on commercial parking fees. To these, added an increase in the District’s egregiously low minimum franchise tax.

But Gray decided to postpone any consideration of any sort of tax increase until next spring, when he has to produce his proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2012.

Fat lot of good that will do the TANF families who’ll be pushed out of the safety net.

Mayor Fenty Wants Five-Year Lifetime Limit On Full TANF Benefits

I thought the proposed five-year lifetime limit on TANF benefits and other D.C. public assistance was dead.

Councilmember Tommy Wells, Chairman of the Human Services Committee, said he wouldn’t move it forward. Councilmember Marion Barry, who cosponsored and apparently initiated the bill, said he wouldn’t vote for it anyway.

“Imperfect and incomplete,” he called it. Really just all about starting “a dialogue on how to break the cycle of generational poverty, government dependency and economic disparity in the city.”

But the time limit has resurfaced in a different form in Mayor Fenty’s plan to close what’s now a $188 million gap in the current budget.

Scrolling through many lines I find inscrutable, I see that the Department of Human Services intends to reduce funding for TANF cash assistance by more than $4.6 million “to more closely align with federal policy.”

The proposed Budget Support Act, which would make District laws consistent with the gap-closing plan, shows that the purported alignment means an across-the-board 20% cut in the maximum TANF cash benefits available to participants who’ve been in the program for a total of more than five years.

This would mean that a District family of three could receive, at most, $342.40 per month — about 77% below the federal poverty line. This when the current maximum leaves the family short $133 per month, even if it has one of those scarce housing vouchers, plus all other standard forms of assistance.

We’ve been cautioned by Council Chairman Vincent Gray not to object to a budget cut unless we’re offering ideas for balancing the budget. Don’t know if the new top tax bracket I’ve joined in supporting would count. The latest letter that Save Our Safety Net has drafted for us says it would raise at least $65 million.

Still, a plan for using the new revenues to protect all under-funded safety net and other core programs is well beyond my expertise. So I’ll confine myself here to noting that nothing in federal policy suggests — let alone mandates — a TANF benefits cut at the end of five years.

States can set their own benefits levels wherever they choose. The federal government’s five-year lifetime limit sets the standard for the caseload that can be partially funded by the block grant. States may exempt up to 20% of their caseload from this limit without financial penalty based on “hardship or domestic violence.” They are also free to use their own funds for a higher percentage.

No exemption whatever in the benefits reduction section the Budget Support Act would add to the District’s public assistance law. Rather, a guarantee that families who, for a variety of reasons, haven’t become — or remained — fully self-sufficient will be plunged into even greater hardship than they are now.

Mayor Fenty tells us that “we cannot afford to ask [residents] to shoulder a bigger financial burden” in these “tough economic times.” I guess poor parents constrained to rely on TANF don’t count.

District Aims For A Better Winter Season For Homeless Families, But …

Here in D.C., another fall means it’s time for another winter plan, the document that spells out how the District intends to ensure that all residents have shelter during severe weather.

Once again, I’m chewing over the provisions for homeless families. And I’m not the only one.

The Operations & Logistics Committee, which develops the nuts and bolts of the plan for the Interagency Council on Homelessness, met again late last month to hash over a couple of last-minute changes advanced by the Department of Human Services. One of these was a major shift in the plan for homeless families.

Here’s how things seem to stand now.

The Operations & Logistics Committee figured that the District would need 31% more units for families than were available at the start of last winter’s season. That meant 215 additional units.

But according to a presentation at the last ICH meeting, the Committee assumed that 100 “beds” (the math indicates that means units) would be available at DC General on November 1.

The assumption reflected a goal put forward by DHS — 100 families moved out of DC General to more permanent housing by the end of October.

Why DHS and/or the Committee assumed that the units vacated would remain empty until the winter season begins isn’t clear to me. It’s not as if there aren’t families waiting to move in right now.

In any event, I gather the Committee didn’t feel altogether comfortable with the projection. So DHS agreed to add 100 overflow units at DC General, to be ready for occupancy on December 1. Then it changed its position.

What it plans to do instead is fast-track funding to place more families in permanent supportive housing, transitional housing and temporary housing units scattered around the city. Units identified in the plan total 180, bringing total capacity to what it would have been with the additional overflow units at DC General.

DHS told the Committee it had already moved 45 families out of DC General — 15 into PSH and the rest into housing temporarily subsidized with federal Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing funds.

If I’ve got the numbers right, this means it will have to find housing for an additional 55 families in the next couple of weeks. The DHS representatives at the meeting seemed confident they could do this.

DHS plans to line up an additional 80 units and have them ready for occupancy so that it can swiftly move some families out of DC General — or perhaps divert them from the shelter altogether — as the winter season progresses.

DHS argues that the funds required to renovate units at DC General would be better spent on more suitable, stable housing situations. Also more consistent with the five-year strategic plan ICH adopted in April.

No one, I think, would raise principled objections to this. Surely housing is a better option than emergency shelter units like those at DC General. The big question is whether the DHS housing initiative can keep pace with what’s likely to be a continuing high level of need.

I’m not thinking here only about families who will lose their housing — and others who will run out of money for motel rooms or wear out their welcome with friends and relatives.

What about the families whose housing is only temporarily subsidized? Will they be able to pick up the full cost of rent some months from now? Or will they be back where they started, in urgent need of shelter?

Well, that won’t happen till this winter’s over. Hard to tell whether DHS has thought so far ahead.

Members of the Operations & Logistics Committee voiced some reservations along these lines. Clarence Carter, head of DHS, responded, “When we have to do something else, we will do something else.”

But that was before Mayor Fenty directed the agency to cut its budget by about $11 million. And didn’t we hear reassuring words like these last year?

UPDATE: I’ve just learned that the Mayor’s order doesn’t actually cut agencies’ budgets. It puts certain categories of spending on hold and prevents spending commitments in other categories that could complicate upcoming decisions on budget cuts.

UPDATE II. This posting reflects some misunderstandings about the role of the Operations & Logistics Committee and its estimate of family shelter needs. A followup posting provides clarifications and some additional information based on the DC Council Committee on Human Services’ hearing on the plan.

The Morning After The Day Before In Washington, DC

Well, the District’s mayoral race is finally over. Thought it would never end.

So many rallies and what were billed as debates but turned out to be mainly speechifying and  mud-slinging.  A glut of news articles and campaign endorsements styled as news articles. (You know what paper I’m talking about.)

Knocks on doors from dutiful “volunteers.” Flyers through the mail slot and incessant robocalls.

Numerous voter guides, i.e., candidates’ responses to questions posed by diverse public interest organizations — or more often copy-paste from campaign materials. And who would blame those who sometimes decided to take a pass when there were so many?

And yet when I walked into the ballot booth, I still didn’t know what differentiated the candidates — except, of course, for personal style. I’m the last person to say that’s not important. But, in a way, I’d have welcomed a clearer choice on substantive policies and priorities.

Maybe differently-run campaigns would have surfaced clear, bright lines. More likely there weren’t any. And that, I think, is a good thing. Because it means we’re closer to being “one city” than the campaign coverage or ward-by-ward results would indicate.

True, there’s a deep economic fault that splits our community into haves and have-nots. There’s an aggrieved sense of neglect among the latter. There are still festering racial hostilities.

But, in general terms, we agree on what needs to get done. No Tea Party upsurge here.

So Vince Gray will face a lot of challenges. But I, for one, am glad that the choice was more on matters of style and judgment than radical policy differences. Because we’re going to face more difficult times and do need to pull together.