A few years ago, Scott Walker decided to cut the number of Economic 
Support Specialists (ESS) in order to save money. The problem was that the ESS workers were the people that are supposed to help hungry people get enrolled into the income maintenance program, which would include food stamps, health care coverage, etc.
In fairness, Walker and the County Board do have a valid point in that the state has regularly been underfunding this program, as they have been doing for decades.
The reduction of staff is part of a pattern that Walker has shown, reducing staff until the program starts to fail, in the hopes of making the Board more receptive to allowing Walker to privatize the program. That is exactly what he proposed to do to the call center of the ESS program.
The Board resisted this move and chose instead of increasing the number of authorized positions in the call center from 25 to 30. Instead of taking advantage of this turn of events, Walker opted to only have a handful of these fully funded positions filled. This, as one would surmise, made the situation even worse.
Eventually, these actions caused a number of things to happen. One was that the federal government started to put pressure on the State of Wisconsin, whose numbers were below acceptable levels due to the problems in Milwaukee County. In turn, the State increased pressure on the County to improve their performance.
But when a class action lawsuit was filed against the county and the state, claiming that people’s rights were being violated by the county not processing their claims in a timely fashion, the state threatened to take over the system. Walker welcomed them to it, and that is exactly what happened.
The state came up with a very confusing idea of doing a hybrid sort of takeover, in which the state would manage the entire ESS program, but the actual workers would be county employees. Besides causing confusion, the entire take over process has cost tax payers more money than if Walker had just filled the positions in the first place.
But while the county and the state played their game of finger pointing and denying their own responsibility in the factors that led up to this crisis, they have forgotten to take care of the hungry.
The federal government has been in conversation with the state regarding their concern on the poor performance of the ESS program. One of these conversation took place on November 17, 2009. The conversation was followed up with an email which we have reproduced here (page 1, page 2 and page 3)
The were four major concerns expressed by the feds:
- The unacceptably low claim processing rate
- The backlog of unprocessed claims
- ESS Workers were not doing thorough interviews with applicants, and
- The Foodshare program was being underfunded in favor of the recently expanded BadgerCare.
As can be seen in the following chart (which is the fourth page of the missive from the feds), there was a distinct drop when Walker decided to let the call center be severely understaffed. This was only exasperated during the state takeover:
This is simply unacceptable and both the county and the state administrations should be called out and face consequences for this. I understand that the state would probably just point out that they were in a state of transition, which can cause chaos in any program, but people are going without much needed aid while they are trying to figure out what they are doing.
The interview process is has two concerns tied into it. One is that if the ESS workers are not doing sufficient interviews, people might not be receiving all of the benefits that they are eligible for. In these dire economic times, every bit of help becomes vital.
The other side of the interview coin is that without sufficient in depth interviews, it could open up the Foodshare program for fraud, such as had happened with child care services.
On the bright side, the letter did point out that the state appeared to poised to finally have worked its way through the backlog created by the county’s failure and the transition.
There is enough blame to be spread between the county and the state. But regardless of who did what, it is now imperative for the state to fix the problems as soon as possible. Besides the obvious point that there are people out there going hungry when they shouldn’t have to, it could end up costing the tax payers a lot more than they bargained for. The courts gave the state two years, until March 2011, to get the program back on track, and almost half of that time is already gone.