Same song, yet another verse: The food stamp situation in Texas is truly terrible.
As Texas begins hiring hundreds of food stamp workers to help erase an application backlog that has left families waiting months for aid, no one expects the problems to disappear any time soon.
The new state workers are entering a system in crisis. They’ll have far fewer experienced colleagues than they would have five years ago. Training is shorter. Mentoring has mostly fallen by the wayside. And employees are working an average of 13 hours of overtime per week which, in some cases, is mandatory.
“We’re just overrun,” said Sheila Badzioch, a caseworker in Houston, one of the state’s slowest processing areas. “The attitude of the higher-ups is, ‘You can do more.’ Well, you can’t. There are only so many hours in a day.”
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The Legislative Budget Board earlier this month OK’d the hiring of 250 more workers and directed the agency to fill 400 vacant jobs.
“We’ve moved in the right direction,” Gov. Rick Perry told reporters last week. “Help is on the way.”
But it could take months for the employees to be hired and trained. State Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, one of two senators recently tapped by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to monitor food stamps, said that adding employees might be a good long-term solution but isn’t an immediate fix.
“I’m not sure that getting 250 or 500 people in there who don’t know what they’re doing is really going to solve this problem,” Williams said. “The only way out is to have a task force of people we know can do the job, and efficiently, and ask them to help us get out of this hole we’re in.”
The good news, I suppose, is that in another six months or so those 250 to 500 people will have a much better idea of what they’re doing, and that will be a big help. It’s of no comfort to those who are suffering now from the long wait times, of course. About the only thing we could do is build a time machine and undo all of the bad decisions that have led us to this crisis. As that is unlikely to happen, the next best thing we can do is take steps to make sure those bad decisions never get made again. Keep that in mind when we start talking about next year’s elections, because that will be our chance to make that happen.