Santa Barbara County Sees Big Spike in Food Stamp Cases

Supervisors Vote to Hire 89 Workers to Process CalFresh Applications

STAMPING OUT HUNGER: Supervisor Laura Capps suggested the recent spike in food stamp cases can be attributed to county case workers doing a more thorough job qualifying people eligible for assistance. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

The ongoing fight against food insecurity throughout Santa Barbara County just got some much-needed bureaucratic reinforcements this week with the county supervisors voting unanimously to add 89 positions to the Department of Social Services to process food stamp applications.

Most of these positions — which pay between $25 and $31 an hour — will be paid for with federal and state dollars to the tune of $82 million. But the County of Santa Barbara will be on the hook for $1.2 million in matching funds to help cover these additional administrative costs.

Driving this surge in demand for application processors is a significant expansion in the county’s client caseload. Today, 38,065 households in the county receive food stamps, more precisely known as CalFresh. Last year, the number was 34,212. Seven years ago, it was 20,228.

As caseloads have increased by 69 percent in the last seven years, the workforce to process these applications — reportedly a cumbersome, complicated, time-consuming endeavor — went up by 28 percent. Making sense of these numbers — and what they portend — is a tricky business.

County Supervisor Laura Capps — a high-profile supporter of programs addressing childhood hunger before being elected to the board — suggested the recent spike in cases can be attributed to county case workers doing a more thorough job qualifying people eligible for assistance. Capps noted with some astonishment that the application questionnaire — designed to weed out people who don’t qualify — asked questions about whether applicants had purchased a grave site for loved ones.

Even with significant improvements, Capps noted, the county is only getting benefits to 71 percent of those who are legitimately eligible. While that’s dramatically better than the 40 percent it was 10 years ago, she said, it’s still a far cry from 100 percent. States such as Washington and Oregon have achieved the 100 percent saturation mark, she noted Tuesday, and strongly urged Social Service administrators to strive for that mark.

Translated into actual human beings — as opposed to percentages — that would require county application processors to help 23,000 households successfully navigate a discouragingly difficult application process.

Program director Maria Gardner was not overly enthusiastic. “The 100 percent goal is very lofty,” she stated. “We may not be able to reach that.”

Other supervisors, such as Bob Nelson and Steve Lavagnino, expressed concern that the county would be taking on so large a number of new workers at a time when the State of California is looking down the barrel of a $68 billion budget shortfall. The budget math presented in the staff was less than intuitively obvious, and they, along with Supervisor Joan Hartmann, struggled to reconcile contradictory statements as to whether some of the county’s contribution would be coming from the general fund or not. No, it turned out, there would be no new contributions from the general fund, but the $1.2 million would be coming from unspent portions of general fund contributions from prior years.

It took probing and patience by the supervisors to get this clarified. Why was this left-over money, they asked, not redeposited back into the general fund so the supervisors could spend it where they saw fit? They were informed most, if not all, of that money was restricted in what it could be spent on.

Supervisor Nelson raised perhaps the most intriguing if unanswerable question: At what point could artificial intelligence be deployed, he asked, to handle the arduous work of food stamp applications? And how hard would it be, he wondered, for the county to shed these additional workers, if and when AI became a cost-effective alternative?

Eliminating jobs, he was told by County Executive Mona Miyasato, is never easy. But the supervisors, she said, can vote to do so anytime.

Based on the most recent benefit formulas, food stamp beneficiaries are eligible to receive up to $226 a month; that’s down from $336 a month during the height of the COVID pandemic when special emergency supplements were provided. Those payments were stretched to the limit late last year when food inflation rates hit ten percent in December. The rate of increase has tapered off since then to four percent. Roughly 13 percent of the county population — about 60,000 people — receive food stamps right now.