INDIANAPOLIS | Those living in a swath of 12 north central counties with some of Indiana's highest unemployment -- and the test region for the state's welfare modernization -- lost food stamps and other public benefits as participation in those programs grew elsewhere, critics said Monday.
The 12 counties including the cities of Kokomo, Anderson, Muncie and Marion saw food stamp participation fall 3.5 percent in the 12 months beginning in November 2007 after the state took away individual welfare case managers and introduced call centers and the Internet as tools for determining eligibility, said the leaders of senior advocacy organizations and others.
In counties still operating under the old system with case managers for each household, food stamp participation grew 14.3 percent over the same period.
A spokesman for the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration said the critics' numbers were wrong and that food stamp participation has increased in modernized counties.
The advocates said the loss of food stamps and other benefits so far has cost Indiana more than $100 million in economic activity at a time when it has had one of the highest jobless rates in the nation. They called upon Gov. Mitch Daniels and state lawmakers to immediately cancel the state's 10-year, $1.16 billion contract with IBM Corp., Affiliated Computer Services Inc. and other companies to automate the welfare process.
Jim Wallihan, president of United Senior Action of Indiana, said welfare modernization has hurt the ability of needy children, seniors and people with disabilities to get necessary services.
"We call the fractured human services system in Indiana this state's Humpty Dumpty," Wallihan said.
"Ordinarily in an economy with rapidly growing unemployment, one would expect that the provision of services such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps, Medicaid would increase, along with the rising unemployment. In fact, the opposite appears to be occurring in Indiana," he said.
One of the critics, former Vigo County welfare director Glenn Cardwell, said the $100 million in lost economic activity figure represented a benchmark because backers of the welfare changes in the Daniels administration have said it would cost the state that much to cancel the IBM-ACS contract.
Cardwell calculated that figure by estimating the economic activity that would have been generated if participation in food stamps and a second program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, had grown in the modernized counties as they had in counties still under the old system.
The U.S. Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees the food stamp program, estimates that $5 in food stamps generates $9.20 in economic activity.
TANF is a stopgap, financial assistance program for the newly unemployed. TANF participation fell nearly 41 percent in the 12-county pilot area but rose 3 percent in counties still under the old system, Cardwell said
Eleven of the 12 counties in the pilot region had unemployment rates in November higher than the state average at the time of 6.8 percent, Cardwell said. That region as a whole also had a higher unemployment rate than any of the other three regions FSSA has carved out for receiving the welfare changes in pieces.
The 59 counties with the changes represent about a third of the state's welfare caseload of 1.2 million people. Still operating under the old system are 13 counties in northwest and north central Indiana and 20 in central Indiana.
FSSA spokesman Marcus Barlow said participation in food stamps has increased in the counties where welfare has been modernized.
"We disagree that people that are eligible for food stamps aren't getting them," Barlow said.
Barlow provided numbers that challenged the critics' without directly contradicting them. The critics said food stamp participation fell from 13,450 to 7,956 during from November 2007 to November 2008. Barlow countered that food stamp use in all of the 59 modernized counties grew from 111,115 in February 2007 to 112,263 in December 2008.
Barlow said TANF participation for all of the modernized counties has risen and fallen over the past three months, from 13,662 in December to 13,885 in January to 13,670 in February.
