The department’s Food and Nutrition Services unit, which also administers the food stamp program, recently received $175,000 to hire nine temporary employees to process Crisis Intervention and Low Income Energy Assistance Program applications. The employees will work from approximately Sept. 1 through May, said Allyson Martin, program manager for the Food and Nutrition Services Program.
Martin said that Low Income Energy Assistance applications are taken in November and a one-time payment to those eligible is made in February. The average payment is about $80, she said.
Martin also said that the state this year cut the county’s allotment of crisis intervention funds — assistance county residents can apply for when a crisis situation interferes with their ability to pay heating or cooling costs — from about $1 million to $411,832. There is a limit of $600 per fiscal year, from July 1 to June 30, that can be received by a single applicant, she said.
According to Martin and Becky Morrow, the department’s director, the nine temporary employees will provide additional manpower needed to efficiently process applications for crisis intervention and energy assistance funding. Without these employees the workload would fall on the shoulders of the 52 Social Services employees, including the program manager, who already are backed up processing and reviewing food stamp applications.
“These positions will be desperately needed to run these programs adequately,” Morrow said in a recent letter to County Manager Ken Windley. “This administrative money is state/federally funded. There is no local match.”
Morrow told The Robesonian that the nine temporary employees, to be hired at a cost of about $92,000, have all worked with the county Social Services Department in the past. She said that if the nine employees were hired through local temp agencies, instead of by contract with the county, the cost would be about $150,000.
“What we are looking at is experience in these programs,” Morrow said. “These people have worked with us before and have the experience.”
Morrow added that the remaining $83,000 of the $175,000 in state and federal money available to administer the programs can be used to fund salaries of other DSS employees working with crisis intervention and low energy assistance.
The need for more DSS employees in the Food and Nutrition Services unit to process food stamps and other assistance applications is at a “crisis level,” according to Martin. Applications for food stamps, she said, are coming in at such a rate that there’s not enough staff to quickly process them.
Applications for food stamps have risen significantly since July 1 when the income requirements for food stamps expanded from household incomes at 130 percent of the federal poverty level to 200 percent, according to DSS officials. The change means that a family of four with a total income of up to $44,100 may now be able to receive food stamps. A family of two can now make up to $29,136 and receive benefits.
Martin said that since January the number of new food stamp applications per month has averaged about 1,000. The number jumped from 1,259 in June to 1,511 in July, Martin said, with the rate of applications coming in by mid-August indicating that by the end of August the monthly number of new applications could be as high as 2,000.
According to Martin, each of the 52 employees responsible for processing food stamp applications is handling about 140 applications a month. A “good amount” for a single employee to handle is about 80 a month, she said.
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