On Hold For Food Stamps

CAVANAUGH: This is KPBS Midday Edition. I'm Maureen Cavanaugh. It's Tuesday, October 25th. Our top story on KPBS Midday Edition, as high unemployment and a bad economy continue, the need for food assistance has increased in San Diego. And San Diego County officials say they are committed to meeting that need. Will but a new report finds that the phone lines set up to help people apply for food stamps and other benefits, is answering only about 18% of the calls, and wait times have increased to about 40 minutes. Joining us to talk about his report is Adrian Florido, reporter with VoiceofSanDiego.org, welcome back. FLORIDO: Thanks. CAVANAUGH: And Jennifer Tracy is with me. She is with the San Diego hunger coalition. Welcome, Jennifer TRACY: Thanks, Maureen CAVANAUGH: We invited a representative of San Diego County's health and human services agency to join us today, but no one was available. Adrian, let's talk about some of the background the county brings to your story. We discussed several times on this program San Diego's poor record in getting food stamp assistance to eligible people. So how do we stack up against the rest of the country in food stamp assistance? FLORIDO: You're right. The last couple of years, San Diego County has come under a lot of criticism for having one of the least successful food stamp programs in the country. About a year and a half ago, two years ago, a colleague of mine did a special report looking at the county's record, and found that for food stamps, the -- San Diego County was -- had one of the, if not the lowest enrollment rates in the entire country for food stamps, CAVANAUGH: Remind us of some of the reasons for that record. FLORIDO: Well, what we found was that there were a lot of reasons. A lot of them had to do with a lot of bureaucratic red tape that existed within the county to made it difficult for people to apply. Things like the phone line that we're going to talk about in a little bit. Outdated documentation that made it can I have cult for county welfare workers to process applications, often gave them contradictory instructions, made it difficult for them to sometimes make the correct decisions on whether or not to approve or deny food stamp applications. Then also more of a sort of a broader political culture within San Diego County that had focused a lot on rooting out fraud as opposed to actively encouraging eligible people in San Diego to apply for food stamps for welfare for cal works. And those are all issues that the county has gone -- after all this criticism came out, within working to try to address. CAVANAUGH: Exactly right, and the phone line that we're working about today was recommended streamlining the phone line, getting was recommended as a way to help low income people apply for assistance, people didn't want to spend all day in county offices as they had been on lines waiting to see somebody, they thought this phone line might be a more direct way for people to be able to access the benefits. So what's the problem? FLORIDO: Well, you're right. In the wake of a lot of this criticism, the county started looking at what sorts of things it could do to improve has enrollment rates and make its food stamps program more successful. One of the things that it did was try to undertake sort of a broad reform of the way that it processes applications to try to stream line it in some ways, and one of the things they did to do that was create this phone line, which people could call to update their applications to start their applications, so as not to have to go into a county waiting room and wait for hours and hours sometimes to just get to some very basic information or submit a single document. Early on, this phone line got a lot of callers. But very quickly became inundated with people who wanted to use it, and faced really high wait times. In the wake of a lot of the criticism in the last couple of years, the county brought together this committee of stakeholders, of advocates for the poor as well as the county officials to make recommendations about what it could do to improve. And one of the things that this group identified was this phone line, which a year ago already had very long wait times of. The county approved the recommendations, there were about 70 of them. And essentially made a commitment to improve the phone line, but a year after it approved these recommendations, the phone lines waits have actually increased to about 40 minutes. And that's if you can even get into the cue. A lot of people, about 80 -- more than 80% of people can't even -- aren't even lucky enough to be put on hold CAVANAUGH: Their calls are dropped FLORIDO: And they're asked to call back later CAVANAUGH: That's one of the news bits in your report at VoiceofSanDiego.org about this food stamp phone line. Jennifer Tracy from the San Diego hunger coalition, element get you in on the conversation. Tell us why -- okay, you call the county, and you're on the phone, and you're waiting and waiting and waiting. Or your phone call gets dropped, and you have to caught back, what kind of impact does that make on people who are calling for food stamps and benefits? TRACY: A lot of people are calling in because maybe they've already applied, and they're waiting to find out what's going on with my case, what else do I need to turn in to compete the process, why didn't I get my benefits this month, what's going on with my next month of benefits? And so what ends up happening is that if people don't have a way to find out what's going on, that I might miss a deadline to turn something in, and their case gets closed. Or they might have to wait an extra week or two weeks until something -- they find a document and process it, so they can put the benefits on their EBT card. What ends up happening is that people end up going without food for a longer period of time. CAVANAUGH: And a lot of people who are calling in to find out the status of their benefits, they're not calling in from home TRACY: They might be calling in from working so they maybe have a half an hour for lunch, and if the whole time is half an however hour, once you get in, you don't have to talk with someone to work out whatever the issue is. So it's a big barrier for people. CAVANAUGH: You tell the personal story of one of these people in your article calling in, just trying to get some information. FLORIDO: Uh-huh. I speak with a woman who lives in Imperial Beach, who has been on food stamps for a few years, and has been trying to get in touch with the county because she said that the father of two of her children had stopped paying child support, and want she wanted to get her stamps increased to make up for that. She estimates she's called to the county line several dozen times, enough to master this technique, to not get her call dropped, the line opens at 8:00 in the morning, and if she calls at 7:58 exactly, she'll get through the upon automated menu in the right amount of time to be dropped into the queue and get right in. If she calls at 7:57, she won't get in. If she calls 7:59, she's a little too late, so by the time she's gotten through it, she'll have to wait chose to an hour. She's lucky because since she lost her job studying to become a paralegal, and doesn't have a full-time job right now, and so has the time during the day to wait CAVANAUGH: To actually make the calls and wait to get answered. FLORIDO: But was very cognizant of the fact that a lot of people like you just mentioned who are on food stamps, have very low paying jobs, day jobs that don't give them more than 15, 30 minutes during their breaks, to call this number. And if they have to stay on hold longer than 40-minute, it's impossible for them to get through, and the line closes. Some of these working people trying to get food stamps, just to get their benefits have to sacrifice a day of work to actually go and stay on the phone long enough to get through CAVANAUGH: And in your report, Adrian, the county says -- you quote the county as saying food stamp recipients have increased 80 percent in the last two years. Is that why there are delays on the phone line? Or are there other reasons as well. ? FLORIDO: That's one of the reasons that they say there are delays, is that there's just, you know, in the last couple of years, bye-bye a huge increase in demand for food stamps. Just getting to the numbers from the county right now, to look into those numbers more specifically. But that's one of the reasons that they give -- they also say that, you know, this is sort of a new system that they have. I mean, it's two years old now, but I think within -- in the context of the state and the country, they say there aren't a whole lot of call centers for enforceable services. So they're still trying to work out the kinks. They started with about 50 operators N the call center, when they started two years ago. In the two years since have creased that number by about 20, and are now working with a consultant, they say to find out how to versus what to do in order to make sure that the call times decrease of the one thing to note is that they though they have increased the number of operators in the call center by about 20 people, that's really only a shift. It's not actually new hires, necessarily. It's people in the past are working in these county offices to help people in person, now being shifted over to the call centers. So one of the criticisms that a lot of advocates who I've spoken to have is that the county isn't actually increasing staffing, they're just shifting people around so they're not actually making a dent in the demand CAVANAUGH: Ron Roberts and Greg Cox have announced a big put pride aside initiative and claimed improvements in the over-all food stamp program, and I'm wondering, Jennifer, in your opinion as an advocate for food assistance in the county, has the county done things to improve their food stamp outreach over all? TRACY: I think they have. One thing is they've patterned with 211 San Diego, who's able to accept some of the general information calls that come through, people that just want to know, we work with them to provide training and support to a number of organizations throughout the county that help people with the process. They're partnered with a variety of organizations to do web cam interviews in rural areas so people who don't have transportation might not have phone access can have their interview without having to go to an office. So in some cases, I think we're the envy of other counties in California in the sense that our county has been willing to partner with so many nonprofits and community organizations throughout our region. And I think that's a really big deal that we should be applauding. CAVANAUGH: But we still have a pretty low rate of eligible people who are actually signed up for food stamps TRACY: We have a lot of barriers in our community. A lot of myths and stigmas. We have a huge county with a lot of different populations and rural areas where it's hard for them to either navigate the system or even get to an office so we have additional barriers to over come. And I think the only way we can do it is by working together CAVANAUGH: We did receive a statement from supervisor Greg Cox about this program, and it reads in part "the Board of Supervisors today took action to support health and human service agency's efforts to expand efforts to the cal fresh program. To accept dollars to improve technology, coupled about additional workers and our existing partnership with 211 will assist with stream shiner the process. I want to get your reaction to that, Jennifer" TRACY: This is a grant that our county apply plied for a number of years in a row, and I think the fact they've shown such great improvements and partnerships helped with in process. The funding they're getting is going to make hay big difference in terms of their ability to process applications, address lost documents and make sure that things go through efficiently. And also make sure that the community organizations that are helping people and people themselves have greater access to information without having to call in and wait on a phone line to talk to somebody. So it's bringing us into the 21st century, which I think is a great idea. CAVANAUGH: And if I correctly read your article, Adrian, the people on the front lines, who are taking these calls from people who want to apply for benefits or inquire about their benefits, really say they're pretty stressed out. They feel that there are perhaps not enough people to give people all the time they need for their individual claims. FLORIDO: The local center on policy initiatives conducted a survey earlier this year, in which they talked to a lot of county eligibility workers, and heard from them that that was a big issue. That they were so inundated with calls, and there was so much pressure to them to get through, that they often felt they couldn't give people applying for food stamps or just calling for information as much attention as they needed or deserved. Also some of the changes we mentioned earliering are the county was undertaking to make its processes more efficient, had really made it harder to hold individual workers accountable for making wrong decisions when it comes to whether or not someone is eligible for food stamps. Of one other thing the county did was eliminate what they used to do, which was have a single eligibility worker responsible for a person's entire application throughout the entire process, and instead made it more of a task based system, where kind of every worker is able to do every task so that -- the idea was to make it more efficient. So if you came to the office, and the person who you'd been working with wasn't there, someone else could help you out. And there were some issues apparently that were also the result of that. And that's something the county is also still trying to work out CAVANAUGH: My final question, for people who are on hold, okay, who are stuck in this process, can't get through, do you have any tips or alternate avenues that they might want to explore? TRACY: Sure. We have a variety of partners that we've trained in the department with the county of San Diego to provide support for application assistance, follow-up, and things like that, people can go to our website, San Diegohungercoalition.org, and if you go into the food stamp or what is now call cal fresh section there , is a list of our partners that's available of the it's called eating right when money's tight brochure, and this were partner from all over the county that can help people follow up on their application and find out what's going on. CAVANAUGH: I have been speaking with Adrian Florido, reporter with VoiceofSanDiego.org, and Jennifer Tracy with the San Diego hunger coalition. Thank you both TRACY: Thanks Maureen. FLORIDO: Thank you.