Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, May 11, 2010,
Item 21
21. Receive update from health and human services and veterans service on the impact of the economic downturn on emergency assistance programs.
>> yeah, sherry fleming with health and human services and staff came to you in november, i believe and gave you an update.
>> can i interrupt one -- mr. Clark, are you leaving?
>> no, sir.
>> because we will try to get to you if we can, all right.
>> thank you.
>> sorry to cut you off but i thought we were able to lose.
>> no problem at all. Staff came to you in november of last year and gave you an update on the economy of our emergency assistance program specifically and so we, at that time shared with the court that we would come back to you in the next quarter to advise you on our continued progress in that area, but, also, to advise you on a -- the use of about $450,000 in funding that is in the health and human services budget but that you requested that you come back for authorization before we access, so we are here today to give you an update since november on emergencies is assistance programs specifically and to request the release funding that is currently in the health and human services budget and we will progress rather quickly through the presentation. It is in pretty much the same format that you saw back in november, so we will highlight those areas where we have seen significant change. And, please be reminded that the anticipated need that you will see demonstrated is based on a straight line projection that recalculates each week add actual expenditures are logged into that program. With that, i will pass you on to andrea.
>> good morning judge and commissioners. As far as the economic downturn indicators comed need, poverty, there is no new information on income status from last year but we want to remind the court on the proportion of travis county residents who live near or on the poverty level. This slide shows entire population of the county broken-down by their ratio to the poverty threshold. We commonly talk about people living at or below the poverty line, which is shown in the box on the left side of the slide. The most recent sense of the bureau data shows us in 2008 estimated 144,336 individuals in travis county, which is about 15% of the population live in households with incomes below that poverty threshold. Many people living within 200% of poverty threshold are also considered at risk of poverty. And that's nearly one-third of the residents in travis county, 32 percent or estimate 311,005 individuals live on poverty threshold of 11%. Here we have broken-down the categories that closely align the family service services eligible guidelines, household under 15% of the income threshold and income under 200% and for our income support services, county funded eligibility, it is 50% for a household that does not have an elderly or disabled person and 125 if they do have an elderly or disabled person living in the household. Another indicator of continued need is unemployment. And that is updated regularly. Following the normal seasonal spike in january, unemployment rates at the national state and local levels have dropped in the past few months, unemployment in travis county continues to fall well below state and national levels. However, it is important to note that while unemployment rate remains high the number of travis county residents working in 2010 exceeds 525,000, 3.6 more than in march 2009. Lastly, the indicator of -- as far as indicators of continued need, public benefits. Snap, which is the new name for food stamps, enrollment continues to rise and march 2010 received the greatest number of recipients in the most recent four-year period. Participation in the chip program also continues upward trend and total enrollment increased 54% since january of 2008. Local indicators. One of our partners, the capital area food bank has increased food distribution every quarter but one since beginning of 2008, over 8.2 million pounds of food were provided to travis county agencies in this 2009, which is 20% increase since 2007. Last december we reported on changes in community conditions from january 2008 through last fall. New data reveals none of the indicators have improve and most are actually at their highest levels, indicating residents are still in need of basic services. At all of our 7 family support services community centers, we are seeing unprecedented number of folks that present for assistance. I really would like to express my appreciation to all of our department employees for rising up and meeting this need. It is very challenging and they are serving as folks as possible but we have to turn away a lot of people away and i want to thank the court for the continued support and now jane is now going to discuss internal families of service trends.
>> good morning, i am jane and the case management coordinator for travis county family support services and i will talk a little bit about some internal data that we have that shows much of same trends that andrea discussed at state and local level. The first i want to talk to you about is the slide you saw late last year. We have updated it through january, and we are seeing the trends continue in terms of the individuals we are serving for county funded utility, county funded food and prescriptions and county fund and rent and mortgage assistance and are seeing ongoing increase in our other utility assistance and of note here, the red line on the bottom half of this is our other funded utilities. Most of that about 58% of our funding comes from comprehensive energy assistance program and you will see that this increasing trend is continued through fy '09 and into fy '10 for all of our assistance category. The second slide i want to point out shows this by the dollar amount. Again we see those same four categories in terms of expenditures, as you expect, these fall in the same patterns as the increase in number of persons we are serving. And so when we presented to you in november, we looked at fy fiscal year '08 and '09 and saw these increasing trends you see at the top of this slide, and across those three categories of county funded services. When we look at the first half of fiscal year '10, we see again an increase. We spending approximately 50-65% more on all three categories of county funded assistance. And so, again, this is the the -- for fy '10 we are looking midyear to midyear, so we are looking at this time last year, this time this year. And you will see this is where we get to where we are looking at what our expenditures, our projected budget and the increase over the past three fiscal years in both our adopted and our revised budgets. The revised budget expensed over 99% of our allocation in both '09 and '08 and our adopted budget for fiscal year '08 of 8,095 -- $895,671 to our projected budget of fiscal year '10 of $2,236,521 represents 150% increase in funding. And we also want to mention, again, as sherry said that our revised or our projected amount for our fiscal year '10 is current straight line projection based on actual invoices submitted from october 1st through april 12, 2010. Now i would like to turn it back over to sherry to talk to you a little bit about what to do about that and the option.
>> and of course as we identified in our presentation back in november, certainly the court has a variety of options. The first being funding the increased demand for services at the projected level of need. Certainly, another option would be to prioritize access in some way, which the reverse of that statement would be to limit access to your programs. Therefore, reducing the expenditures and then a program expenditure cap so not only prioritizing access but also setting a cap on the amount of assistance that persons could receive. The potential impact of those decisions or similar ones would be fewer clients being assisted. You would shift demand from your programs to other service providers within the community and certainly the safety net to residents would continue to shrink. So staff's recommendations today in order to meet the projected need for funding in this program is to release the current funds in the health and human services fy '10 budget of 450,000 and then the remainder be realized through transfer of $153,294 from the fy '09 credit balance in the public health interlocal line item which would at -- based on today's projections, meet the projected need of 603,294 in those line items so that would be our recommendation today.
>> that's projected through the end of the fiscal year?
>> yes, sir.
>> travis, when we put the 454,000 in the hhs budget it was to serve as a reserve for this purpose in case we needed it, right?
>> that's -- that's correct. It was my understanding that this was approved fy '09 was going to go to additional social service needs and i believe you asked hhs to come back with a plan on how that best would be spent. Last year you allocated ability 200,000, to 450,000 towards this this need which remainder goes to other social service contract, i think evaluation component, early on in the year, though, when we recognized -- we also added additional 320,000, one-time funding in this year's budget to cover this year but even with that increase, i think we kind of recognized that this could be some challenges and that's when sherry recommended -- -- or had internal discussions with us that we would bring this to the court that you recommended that that funding go toward this and we supported that.
>> so pp's position is just in support of the recommendation.
>> that's correct. We support it.
>> move approval.
>> second.
>> hopefully the level of need will start going down dramatically, but all we can do about that is keep our fingers crossed and hope the economy improves and that the employment picture improves, also. Discussion and motion? All those in favor? This passes by unanimous vote. We appreciate y'all's dedication, commitment, hard work, et cetera, keep on keeping on.
>> thank you.
>> thank you.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 12:35 PM
