West Virginia lawmakers are moving forward a bill to change the work requirements for food stamps. The bill expands work requirements to older adults — able-bodied people between age 53 and 59 — and will likely affect thousands of West Virginians. But changes to the bill removed able-bodied adults with dependents from the requirements, resulting in far fewer people affected than the original version.
The bill’s lead sponsor, Sen. Rollan Roberts, R-Raleigh — who called the bill “people driven” — said the changes made were with the consideration of many challenges that West Virginians may face while finding work, including living in rural areas that do not have access to public transportation or many work opportunities.
“I think we have more resources than we have ever had in our state,” Roberts said, reiterating his remarks at the meeting.
SB 562 does not change any of the work, training and volunteer work rules set in the federal guidelines for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. But it does instruct the state Department of Human Services to assign all able-bodied adults without dependents between the ages of 17 and 60 to an employment and training program unless they qualify for an exemption. It also gives DHS the power to designate other exemptions based on challenges people may have accessing work, but limits those exemptions to 20% of the total number of participants.
Critics of the bill had said the original language would have cut 75,000 people off the benefits. Kent Nowviskie, deputy commissioner for programs and policy for DHS, said under the new version, fewer than 8,000 would be affected.
In a follow-up interview, he said the number was a quick estimate and it will take time to say how many people the bill will truly affect.
The bill also requires DHS to submit annual reports to the Legislative Oversight Commission on Health and Human Resources Accountability for the next three years.
Roberts is not currently a member of the commission, but said he asked to be assigned to it to ensure the program is working. He added that he and the other sponsors of the bill worked with Workforce West Virginia and found that there are more recipients of SNAP benefits in West Virginia’s most populous counties. He said he wanted to encourage those recipients to find work and get off SNAP.
“Free education is available. We have the West Virginia adult education, they’ve got 10,000 in it right now, they can handle thousands more,” Roberts said. “We have Goodwill, they trained over 2,600 over last year alone, and they’re expanding, they can handle many more.”
Scott Centorino, deputy policy director at the right-leaning Florida-based think tank Foundation for Government Accountability, spoke in favor of the bill during Tuesday’s committee hearing.
“We all want this to be a temporary safety net that works at getting people up and on their feet,” Centorino said, calling the measure “the next obvious tool” for the state to try.
No one spoke against the bill, but advocates for hungry West Virginians previously told Mountain State Spotlight there was little evidence the measure would be effective at getting people out of poverty.
“There’s a lot of classist assumptions being made about people enrolled in SNAP, and I think this bill deeply reflects that,” Rhonda Rogombé, the health and safety net policy analyst at the West Virginia Center for Budget and Policy said in an interview last week. “I have seen so many studies, and even seen evidence in our own state, that forcing people to meet work requirements does not increase employment, but it does increase hunger.”
Lawmakers moved the bill out of committee; it will next go to Senate Finance.
