It's taking much longer than expected for hungry people to get emergency food in Milwaukee County. FoodShare, formerly known as food stamps, is a federal benefit, meant to keep people in crisis from going hungry. Federal officials will visit Wisconsin Wednesday to look into the delays. If the problems aren’t fixed fast enough, the state could be penalized. WUWM's Ann-Elise Henzl reports.
Milwaukee County had been running the FoodShare program here. But earlier this year the state took over, because people had to wait so long to get benefits.
Sherrie Tussler of Hunger Task Force says the delays have actually worsened since the state got involved.
"For emergency food benefits, the state is responding within 100 days. Under the law, people should get benefits within seven days if they have little or no money for food, and within 30 days for all other applicants," Tussler says.
Tussler believes state officials underestimated how hard it would be to distribute food stamp benefits here.
"The state felt that it understood how Milwaukee County operated, how challenging some of our populations are. We've got homeless people, transient people, people who have disabilities, people who don't speak English. And there were a lot of assumptions that Milwaukee would be like Madison, and Milwaukee isn't anything like Madison in terms of administration of this program," Tussler says.
The state admits food stamp distribution is not going smoothly. Mark Thomas is deputy secretary of the Department of Health Services. It administers the program.
"It's surely not our plan to have desperate folks that are in need wait an inordinate amount of time for services. It's not the way in which business is to be conducted, it's unacceptable. We not only want to clear up the current backlog, but continue to take a look at all of our entire process," Thomas says.
Thomas says the state has been flooded with FoodShare applications because of the bad economy. In addition, when the state expanded its BadgerCare program to adults without children, thousands signed up for FoodShare when enrolling in the health plan.
Thomas says the state has been working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get on track.
"We not only met with them, we gave them the information where we were at that time in terms of backlogs, and what our plans were, we shared our plans with those folks," Thomas says.
"They did say that they were going to address the issue," says Alan Shannon of the USDA. He says Wisconsin has outlined initial plans for getting the backlog under control.
"They temporarily redeployed approximately 50 state staff to help answer the phones and conduct interviews, and they've closed the phone lines on Fridays to allow more time to process applications," Shannon says.
Shannon says the USDA only recently learned how slowly food stamps were being approved for Milwaukee County residents. Now the agency will monitor progress closely, including during a visit to Wisconsin Wednesday.
"We need to get data on a regular basis to be able to determine whether the backlog is being whittled down or not, and we haven't talked about any of those things with the state yet. Typically when a state has a challenge like this we work with them on a regular basis, and there's a lot of communication back and forth," Shannon says.
But if Wisconsin fails to expedite food stamp approval, Shannon says the USDA could cut the amount of aid it sends the state to administer the program.
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