Ducey losing TANF support

Critics: ‘Bridge out of poverty’ is a rickety one

Arizona is on track to remain the state with the nation’s strictest cash-aid program for poor families, despite Gov. Doug Ducey’s plan to expand the benefit from one year to two years.

When he gave his State of the State address in January, the governor drew widespread praise for his proposal to give recipients of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program an extra 12 months of benefits, calling it a “bridge out of poverty.”

But within weeks, some of that praise evaporated. If it is a bridge, it’s a rickety one, critics say.

The expansion wasn’t a simple return to the former two-year policy, as many interpreted Ducey’s comments. It would block an estimated 30 percent of recipients from a second year. And it would kick more

people out of the program’s first year if they made more than one mistake, such as missing an appointment with a job counselor.

Currently, the program has a “three strikes” provision that gives a family three mistakes before they are dropped from the program. Most of those mistakes are failures to meet job-search requirements, but they also include failing to get children to school most days or not getting them immunized.

House Bill 2372 changes the three strikes to two, after which families would lose their benefit and exhaust their lifetime benefit. The bill also would require first-year recipients to make no mistakes if they want to qualify for the extra year Ducey has proposed. Those changes would keep Arizona as the state with the most-stringent requirements for the program.

While Connecticut allows up to 21 months of a lifetime benefit, there are no conditions on moving from one year to the second year. About a dozen other states have a twoyear lifetime benefit.

Democrats, whose backing was initially needed to overcome many Republicans’ opposition to welfare in general, bailed on their support. Others who supported the bill flipped to the opposition.

Sam Richard was one of them. He’s the executive director of the Protecting Arizona’s Family Coalition, which lobbies in support of policies to help Arizona’s more vulnerable populations.

He praised Rep. Jeff Weninger, R-Chandler and the bill’s sponsor, for working closely with social-service advocates. But he was less charitable toward Ducey, saying the governor’s January proposal was misleading.

“This is as much of a TANF restoration as a 0.4 percent teacher raise,” Richard said, referring to the outcry over Ducey’s proposal to give Arizona teachers a 2 percent raise over five years, which many people saw as surprisingly small.

The program is still too harsh, critics say.

“Who does it hurt? Children,” said Dana Naimark, president and CEO of the Children’s Action Alliance. Most TANF recipients are children. Besides, the program wasn’t intended to be “a lecture class for adults” in accountability, she said.

Sen. Dave Bradley, DTucson, made a plea to his Senate colleagues to restore the two-year lifetime limit. A restoration would cost less than $3 million out of the nearly $10 billion state general fund and is a lifeline for families hovering at or below the poverty line, he said.

Yet, he said, lawmakers want to cut funding to “the poorest of, really, the poor.” For example, a family of four has to earn less than $5,022 to qualify.

If the goal is to get people off welfare, the Legislature has done that already, Bradley said. That’s because the TANF program went from about 38,000 beneficiaries in 2006 to 12,000 in 2014, he said, even as the unemployment rate doubled.

The average monthly benefit from the TANF program is about $270, but the amount varies depending on the number of children in a household and other sources of income, such as child support.

In January, 80 percent of the 18,851 people on the program were children, according to the state Department of Economic Security, which administers the program. TANF is mostly funded by a federal grant, with the state covering part of the cost.

In Ducey’s first year in office, he signed a budget that reduced Arizona’s lifetime limit from two years to one. The state used to have a five-year lifetime limit.

The 2015 vote to move to one year was punctuated by emotional pleas to not cut the program. Even some lawmakers who voted “yes” said they were reluctant but cited the state’s budget deficit. The cut was estimated to affect more than 2,700 kids from 1,600 families, saving the state about $4 million out of a $9 billion budget.

The move made national headlines, most of them unflattering as the stories focused on the state’s status as the strictest in the nation. The new limits had a delayed start date of July 1, 2016.

Supporters of HB 2372 say critics are playing politics by proclaiming shock at the changes.

“It’s absurd that people are saying (the situation for low-income families) would be worse off than it is now,” said Weninger, the bill sponsor. Seventy percent of the people on the TANF program would qualify for the extra 12 months, based on statistics from the past year, he said.

Christina Corieri, a senior policy adviser to Ducey, said the intent is to reward people who follow the rules. “We are going to treat those who are complying better than those who aren’t,” she said.

Any TANF recipient who incurs a sanction has three days to correct the error without penalty, she said. Recipients also get a chance to challenge the sanction. Those provisions should ensure that a parent who is serious about following program guidelines still gets the cash aid, she said.

The bill passed the committee on a party-line vote and awaits debate before the full Senate. If it passes there, it will go to Ducey for his signature or possibly be rolled into budget discussions, because it carries a $2.8 million price tag for the state.