Legislature United On State Welfare Reform Forty-Four Point Plan Includes Lifetime Limit, Work Requirements

Idaho’s welfare reform plan was introduced in the Legislature Tuesday to generally favorable reviews from both parties.

“This is very much a bipartisan issue,” said Sen. Mary Lou Reed, D-Coeur d’Alene, who was among the Senate Health and Welfare Committee members voting Tuesday to introduce the package. But, she said, “It’s going to be important that we ask all the right questions.”

Sen. Gordon Crow, R-Hayden, vice chairman of the committee, said, “I think it’ll fly through.”

Crow said he’s more concerned about what will come from Washington, D.C., on welfare reform. If Congress passes welfare reform and gives states more flexibility, Idaho’s reforms will fit right in.

If not, Idaho still can go forward with its plan, but it will have to seek waivers from a batch of federal rules, which can be a time-consuming and costly process.

The plan was proposed by an advisory council appointed by the governor, which held hearings across the state. Its 44 points include a 24-month lifetime limit on cash welfare benefits, making grandparents on both sides financially responsible for their minor children’s babies and requiring all welfare recipients, including new moms, to work or learn basic job skills.

Some of the reforms can be accomplished through state agency rule-making, others require legislation. The legislative package proposed Tuesday would:

Require grandparents to support their minor children’s babies. The major change there, said Judy Brooks, state welfare administrator, is including the teen father’s parents as well as the mother’s.

Suspend all licenses of a parent who refuses to comply with child support or visitation orders. That would include drivers, professional, hunting and fishing licenses and more. The suspensions would kick in when delinquent child support reaches $2,000, or three months. Similar laws in other states have proven “a very effective method of getting child support from delinquent parents.”

Make it a misdemeanor to aid and abet the nonpayment of child support on the first conviction, and a felony on subsequent offenses. Brooks said that would apply to an employer who purposely paid a delinquent parent under the table to help them evade child support, for example. Although rare, the advisory council felt such cases should be prosecuted.

Disqualify from public office any parent who is delinquent on child support.

Direct the state Department of Health & Welfare to adopt new rules for its welfare programs in line with the advisory council’s plan.

Allow unmarried parents to sign a legal form declaring paternity, and make that form final after a six-month waiting period. That process now requires going to court. “We are paying a great deal of money now to go in and establish paternity in cases where this is no dispute,” Brooks told the committee.

Direct the Health & Welfare Department to pay worker’s compensation benefits for welfare recipients who participate in unpaid work experience or training programs. Brooks said that removes one obstacle to moving welfare parents into on-the-job training.

Brooks described the package as “a huge cultural shift,” saying, “It changes every part of the way we do business.”

Under the plan, welfare is envisioned as a temporary program that helps recipients with child care and job training and readies them to support themselves and their families by the time their two years of benefits end.

Reed said she still has major concerns about the 24-month limit, and whether that’s long enough to turn people’s lives around. She also wants to make sure the job training programs don’t displace other workers or turn into cheap labor schemes. “We need to make sure this is not an exploitative practice.”

The welfare changes, if enacted, will be felt strongly in Shoshone County, where 8.1 percent of residents now receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children - four times the state average of 2.04 percent.

In North Idaho as a whole, 2.83 percent of residents are on the welfare program.

, DataTimes