La.'s food stamp program threatened with shutdown

In St. Mary
According to the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services:
— In May, 5,592 St. Mary households received SNAP benefits.
— 12,605 of St. Mary's 51,000 people lived in those SNAP households.
— Benefits totaled about $1.7 million per month.

BATON ROUGE (AP) — Louisiana will end the food stamp program that provides aid to nearly one in five state residents by January, unless lawmakers add more money to next year’s budget for the social services agency.
The Department of Children and Family Services is slated to take a cut of around $34 million in the budget passed by lawmakers in the final minutes of the just-ended special session. The agency says that will force it to shutter the food stamp program in 2019 because it won’t be able to pay for administration of the federally funded benefits.
Nineteen percent of Louisiana residents receive assistance from the food stamp program — known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. The Department of Children and Family Services said about half of those recipients are children.
“It’s a gut-wrenching decision to make,” said Children and Family Services Secretary Marketa Garner Walters. “I hope and pray that none of this is going to be necessary.”
Elimination of SNAP isn’t yet certain. But Walters said conversations already have started with the USDA, which oversees the federal aid program, about the possibility.
Gov. John Bel Edwards is calling lawmakers into a 10-day special session starting June 18 to try to fill the gaps in next year’s budget. He’s asking lawmakers to pass some expiring temporary taxes that are causing the state to take in $648 million less in general tax dollars.
Without additional funding, the family services department will officially notify the USDA in September that it intends to shut down Louisiana’s SNAP program. In January, 1,000 staff would be laid off, eight offices closed and aid from the program ended.
“Our whole culture is wrapped around sharing food, and yet we’re talking about not feeding 860,000 people. It’s just so illogical,” Walters said. “The repercussions of this are ugly.”
Louisiana doles out $1.4 billion in federal food stamp aid annually to low-income households, with benefits depending on the number of people in the family and the level of income. For example, a family of four can receive a maximum up to $640 per month.
No other state has ever shuttered a SNAP program, but Walters said her department has few options after years of cuts that slashed its budget from more than $1.2 billion to around $770 million this year.
The reduction included in next year’s budget would strip 24 percent of the unrestricted, discretionary state general fund money the agency receives.
Walters said she’s protected emergency preparedness work, and she described child welfare services as off-limits because “to take a cut there means literally children die.”
If she hits the child support enforcement program, Walters said the state could lose $150 million in federal grants that spread across multiple agencies to pay for a pre-K program for at-risk children, substance abuse treatment, drug courts and other services.
“It really was a process of elimination. SNAP was the only program left,” she said.
If Louisiana doesn’t have a food stamp program, that also means the state can’t administer disaster food stamp aid after a hurricane, flood or other calamity.