Motion: Agency head should pay for aid program failures
Attorneys for welfare recipients say Human Services Department disregarding court orders, leaving growing numbers without help
More than six months after a federal judge appointed an outside expert to oversee welfare programs at the New Mexico Human Services Department, the agency is lying to its clients, falsifying records, leaving growing numbers of needy people without help and willfully disregarding court orders to improve efficiency, lawyers for welfare recipients claim in a court motion filed this week.
“The department has made shockingly little progress towards compliance,” the attorneys said in their 20-page motion that seeks to personally fine the state secretary of human services for any failures. “Eligible New Mexicans are without food and medical assistance because defendant has a backlog of tens of thousands of unprocessed cases, the vast majority of clients cannot get through by phone and systemic changes required by multiple court orders have not been enacted.”
In May, 2,046 New Mexicans went without emergency food assistance to which they were entitled, up from 1,167 in April, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers in the long-running, classaction lawsuit. It claims the Human Services Department had not processed Medicaid renewals for more than 50,000 New Mexicans or emergency food assistance for 2,000 people.
Even basic communication was in disarray. A customer service center answered 35 percent of Englishlanguage calls but only 19 percent of Spanish-language calls, “a clear civil rights violation” of those not fluent in English, the plaintiffs say.
More important, they claim managers of the call center illegally directed staff members to “withhold information from clients and give local field offices false information.”
The motion includes an April 17 email from Gwen Brubaker, staff manager for the call center, saying call center employees will not conduct interviews with clients after 3:30 p.m., when office hours are winding down.
“Please make sure that staff are not saying this to the clients, including in emails to offices or in case notes,” Brubaker wrote. “They do not have to justify why they are not doing the interviews, just say to the client that they are not available and to the office that the client has requested the interview to be rescheduled.”
Brubaker did not return a message Wednesday seeking comment.
Joseph Cueto, a spokesman for Gov. Susana Martinez, acknowledged that he had received a request for comment from The New Mexican, but he did not respond to the myriad complaints by the plaintiffs.
They filed a motion in U.S. District Court asking that a judge impose fines against state Human Services Secretary Brent Earnest of $100 a day for each violation of court orders in the case.
Sovereign Hager, a lawyer for the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty who helped write the plaintiffs’ motion, said Earnest should pay the fines out of his own pocket, not with taxpayers’ money.
“We want the court to sanction him personally because we don’t want to take money from poor applicants,” Hager said.
Though Earnest is targeted by the plaintiffs, their lawsuit dates to 1988
The department has made shockingly little progress towards compliance.” Attorneys for welfare recipients on Human Services Department, in court motion
and has spanned the administrations of five governors. It claims the Human Services Department has illegally withheld federal benefits to New Mexicans by denying or delaying assistance to which they were entitled. The suit named the Cabinet secretary, not the state department itself, as the defendant. And those suing sought to remove the department from state control.
U.S. District Judge Kenneth Gonzales settled on a less extreme measure, ordering that a special master with expertise in public benefits monitor the department’s compliance with the court’s orders.
Gonzales found Earnest in contempt of court last fall, saying he had not “diligently attempted in a reasonable manner” to comply with court orders and failed to exercise managerial oversight to comply with federal law.
A hearing on the motion seeking additional fines and sanctions against Earnest is scheduled for Thursday in federal court in Las Cruces. Earnest is under order by Judge Gonzales to appear at the hearing.
In their motion, lawyers for welfare recipients claim that Earnest is treating the appointment of the special master “as an excuse to slow down compliance efforts and operate without deadlines or accountability.”
“Being held in contempt did not compel defendant to make significant progress,” their motion states. “Therefore, this court should use its authority to issue sanctions against defendant until critical compliance measures are met.”
The motion also outlines continued problems with the state’s processing of federal benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, and Medicaid, which provides health coverage for low-income people.
The state is not meeting requirements to to add newborn babies onto Medicaid within three days following notification of birth from the health care provider, according to the motion.
“In many cases, it is taking over a month to enroll eligible infants into Medicaid,” the plaintiffs say. “As a result, many infants are discharged from the hospital and even the neonatal intensive care unit without medical coverage and the means to pay for necessary medical supplies.”
Cases of overdue Medicaid renewals have more than doubled since January, to 53,912 such cases in May, according to the plaintiffs. But plaintiffs’ lawyers acknowledge in the motion the department has made progress in decreasing overdue renewal applications for food assistance. A total of 4,620 applications were outstanding this month, down from 36,587 in January.