Photo by Marilina Sanz
(lr) NACo President-elect Randy Johnson, President Michael Hightower
and Michael D. Brunkow general manager of the Bloomington, Minn. Radisson
Hotel, pose outside hearing room during a break in NACo's second welfare
reform hearing.
As the legislature wrapped up its session
in the state capitol a few blocks away, county officials, state officials,
representatives of congressional offices and the media met at the offices
of the Association of Minnesota Counties (AMC) to discuss the important
opportunities and challenges counties in that state are facing as they implement
welfare reform.
The AMC forum was the second of four hearings on welfare reform implementation that NACo is conducting across the country.
The welfare reform hearings are an initiative of NACo's President Michael Hightower to assess how counties are gearing up to implement welfare reform and to identify the challenges that they expect to face in the process.
"Counties are going to play a pivotal role in welfare reform," Hightower said. "These hearings will help us to find out how counties across the country are preparing to meet the opportunities and challenges involved in moving people from welfare to work."
Chaired by Hightower and NACo's President-elect Randy Johnson, the Minnesota hearing focused on the recent passage of the Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP), Minnesota's welfare reform legislation.
Although the legislation was just a little more than a week old, the program already has a track record of success in the eight counties throughout the state where it was piloted.
The MFIP legislation requires welfare clients to go to work quickly. With a 60-month lifetime time clock of public assistance, Minnesota requires two-parent families to go to work immediately or engage in a direct path to find employment.
Although counties can decide to require a shorter time frame, the state requires that single parents work by the end of the first six months. Parents who don't comply will face sanctions of 10 percent of the assistance the first month and 30 percent after that. However, rent will be paid during the sanction period directly to the landlord so as not to put the parent's children at risk of homelessness.
MFIP not only requires work, but it also supports work. Families on assistance are eligible to receive childcare, health care and job training. When clients begin to work, the program assures them that their income will always be higher. Support services are provided until people reach 129 percent of poverty.
Flexibility is another objective of the legislation. By combining Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) and food stamps, the legislation aims to make the program easier for families to access and easier for counties to administer. Also, the legislation includes a broad definition of work to enable counties to work with the realities faced by each family.
Although the new MFIP legislation will not be fully implemented until Jan. 1, 1998, Patrice Bataglia, a county commissioner from Dakota County, one of the MFIP pilot sites, says early results from evaluations done by outside organizations such as MDRC (formerly Manpower Development and Research Corporation) support MFIP's initial success. In Dakota County, Bataglia stated, not only are more people working, but more people are working longer hours. During the pilot, Dakota County's highest rate of MFIP families working was 54 percent.
To make MFIP or any other welfare reform effort work requires not only a change in the mindset of welfare clients, but also a cultural change within county human services agencies.
Ken Ebel, the director of human services in Sherbourne County, another MFIP pilot site, stated that to make welfare reform really work, human services workers need to change their relationships with clients. "Workers are no longer just administrative agents ensuring a client's eligibility, they are now in a more supportive relationship with clients ... helping them navigate a new path to a new life."
Although county human services and employment professionals in the MFIP pilot counties have found that a portion of their clients are able to find work quickly, others have been identified as harder to serve.
As Kevin Delleher from Houston County pointed out, many welfare recipients in his community fall into a gray area. They are not people with substance abuse or mental illness. They may, however, have learning disabilities that have prevented them from entering the work force.
To reach out to this group, Houston County is working with existing nonprofits in the community to destigmatize sheltered workshops and to use these programs to train may welfare clients.
In Anoka County, the county's job training center is the focal point for moving welfare clients to work. Jerry Vitzhum, the director of the center, noted that given rising poverty rates and falling wages, counties need to ensure that they are linking people with jobs that will truly lift them out of poverty and give them living wages. Anoka County has been actively working with the private sector to provide jobs that will move welfare clients to real self-sufficiency.
Child support and child care are critical areas in which greater assistance is needed to ensure that welfare families can move to self-sufficiency. "Eighty percent of single-parent families are headed by women and these women cannot often get out of poverty without the assistance of the absent parent," says Bataglia.
Child support enforcement efforts are key to increasing collections.
The availability of assessable, affordable and quality childcare is a primary concern of welfare families. In Dakota County, Bataglia noted 670 new childcare slots will be needed to accommodate new welfare clients as they move into work and the county already has a waiting list of 700 people for the slots that they have.
Rural counties in Minnesota are facing different challenges than their urban counterparts in the implementation of welfare reform.
Colleen Landkamer, county commissioner from Blue Earth County, pointed out that transportation assistance takes on whole new challenges in rural communities. In Blue Earth, 20 percent of welfare clients live outside the area covered by the existing transit system and the system is not responsive to the needs of those people who work the second or third shifts at factories.
To meet transit and other supportive services needs, Landkamer said counties need to build partnerships with other sectors of the community to connect welfare clients with formal and informal support systems that will help them overcome obstacles to work.
A report on the four hearing that NACo is conducting on welfare reform will be available at NACo's Annual Conference in Baltimore in July. Additional information on welfare reform is also available through NACo's NICH (National Information Clearinghouse) at <www.naco.org.>