Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 6, 1994 TAG: 9403060046
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Discussion turned to welfare reform - specifically, Virginia's attempt to overhaul its welfare system by exchanging a two-year limit on benefits for the means to economic independence.
Gott's comments, which followed a presentation on a program that seemed in sync with reform efforts, were less than supportive. Why then, one legislator asked, was she against the proposed measures?
"I said, `Because it won't work,' " Gott said. "If it would work, I'd be for it. It takes at least four years to get people off welfare. Two years is not long enough."
Gott said her comments were politely acknowledged. But legislators appeared already to have embraced proposals that would fundamentally retool the way the state's welfare system works.
Welfare-reform plans have been endorsed - quickly and almost unanimously - by members of both houses of the General Assembly. Two weeks ago, slightly different plans breezed through the Senate, on a 35-3-1 vote, and the House of Delegates, on a 97-3 vote.
This week, the Senate plan will come to the House floor for a vote, and the House plan will get a Senate vote.
The plans call for thousands of poor families to receive job training, child care, transportation and health care in exchange for a two-year limit on welfare benefits. Participants would seek private-sector jobs within a year of going on welfare rolls or take public-service jobs.
They would be forced off the rolls completely after another year, whether or not they had a permanent job. The measures would deny extra benefits to mothers on welfare if they had more children while in the program.
The plans would cover 9,000 families over a three-year period - 3,000 each year. The cost? An estimated $10 million to $14 million in the first year; double that amount in the second year.
Supporters call the measures innovative, placing Virginia at the forefront of the national welfare-reform effort.
"It's a step in the right direction," said Del. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem. "We need to go a few steps further, but it is refreshing to see it."
Welfare reform's wholehearted endorsement across party lines gives some indication of how eager people are for change, Griffith said.
"It doesn't matter if you're liberal or conservative," he said. "You can see that the welfare system needs to be overhauled. What's been done in the past hasn't worked."
Del. William Bennett, D-Halifax, who sponsored reform legislation, said the efforts partly have been in response to a public that is tired of mere talk.
"The public is tired of pouring money into a system that is recognized as not working," he said. "And they want us to try to take the first step."
The proposed plans are just that - an incremental first step, Bennett said. By no means are they overnight cures, he said.
"We did not get into this mess overnight," he said. "Everyone says the system is not only broken, but so broken that we need to look at non-welfare alternatives. But we won't get to that point in two to three or four to five years.
"When you're dealing with people and public policy, you're talking about an art, not a science. You've got to proceed very carefully, but you've got to proceed."
Clearly, Virginia - whose welfare payments are among the lowest in the nation - has jumped aboard a welfare reform train that is moving slightly ahead of the national curve.
Several states are considering welfare reform, said Sherry Steisel, who heads the human services committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures. But only five have introduced time-limit measures such as those proposed by Virginia legislators, she said.
Wisconsin, Florida, Vermont, Iowa and Colorado have received federal permission to cut off Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits after a set period. Virginia would require a similar waiver for its welfare-reform plan to become law by July 1.
Such a waiver would require the state to show that the federal government would not incur any additional costs under the proposal and that there would be rigorous evaluation of the control groups.
"A waiver is designed to test an idea," Steisel said.
In his 24 years with the Bedford County Department of Social Services - 15 as director - Leighton Lankford has seen reform efforts come and go. Not one, he said, has amounted to much more than paper shuffling.
Though he is hesitant to fully endorse Virginia's reform proposals, it "seems to be heading in the right direction," he said.
"They're attempting to deal with the very real issue of disincentives for people who are receiving welfare," he said. "Politicians are really looking at the core of the problem - that the system has fed on itself for so long, we need to help people work their way off of it, rather than maintain them."
Others say the plans - though they are on the right track - simply won't work. The plans do not offer enough time for welfare recipients to reach self-sufficiency, they argue.
"We've gotten people off welfare," Gott said. "And when people get skills and training, they stay off. But we're talking about sticking with people until they get the skills."
Ted Edlich, executive director of Total Action Against Poverty, agrees: Two years of training to prepare some welfare recipients for the job market is insufficient.
Welfare recipients come to the system with all levels of education and skills. Some are college-educated. Some are literate but have not finished high school or have no job skills. Some have barely more than an elementary school education.
People in the first group, Edlich says, "could get their lives together" under the proposed reform plans. Those in the second group could finish their high school education or GED, get two years of education at a community college, come away with skills in a specified trade and "you'd never see them again because they can make it," Edlich said.
It is the third group that Edlich worries about.
"These are people who have major deficits," he said. "Twenty-five to 30 percent of people on AFDC fall into that category. That group is going to have the hardest time."
But Bennett says that argument assumes that the two-year limit is a "drop-dead deadline." It is not, he says. The plans include provisions for welfare recipients who are making a good-faith effort to meet plan requirements but cannot for various reasons. In those cases, provisions are made for continuation of benefits, he said.
Edlich, as did Bennett, served on the Commission to Stimulate Personal Initiative to Overcome Poverty, led by Lt. Gov. Don Beyer. The group conducted a two-year welfare-reform study, which led to a package of proposals to overhaul welfare in Virginia.
The commission wanted legislators to change state laws to give an estimated 75,000 AFDC recipients - close to 4,000 of whom live in the Roanoke, Bedford, Franklin County and Montgomery County areas - incentives to get jobs.
Yet Edlich finds Virginia's reform proposals lacking a good foundation. Such a foundation, he said, would include health care, income supplements and tax credits and jobs - including some sort of public employment in areas of high unemployment.
While the proposals have incorporated some of those elements, they must include all to succeed, Edlich says.
"Unless the foundation is in place to make welfare transitional, then work will not pay, people will not be able to support themselves, and you'll end up with greater costs in foster care, crime, imprisonment, school problems. You're not going to have any cost savings."
Keywords:
GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1994
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