I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
One in five New Mexicans, or about 20.7 of the state’s population, are on food stamps, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Gov. Susana Martinez announced Monday that she will call the Legislature back to work beginning on September 6, six days earlier than the Legislative Council wanted. Redistricting will be on the agenda.
Gov. Susana Martinez announced Wednesday that she will ask the state legislature to approve $450,000 in supplemental food stamp assistance for 4,000 elderly and low-income New Mexicans in the special session next month.
Gov. Susana Martinez announced Monday that she will extend a state program to supplement federal food stamp benefits for 4,000 low-income elderly and disabled New Mexicans, the AP reports. The program was set to expire on July 1, as the Legislature did not appropriate money for it.
New Mexico will end a food stamp supplement for elderly and disabled residents, according to the Associated Press. The cuts come just as Congress is considering cuts to the food stamp program even as a record-high amount of people are receiving the benefits.
Four thousand additional New Mexican families could qualify for federal food aid under new rules laying out who can and cannot qualify for the program.
On Thursday New Mexico expanded eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known…
About six million Americans are living on nothing but food stamps, according to an analysis by the New York Times. The paper profiles several recipients in Florida who are representative of the growing trend as the country’s economic travails continue.
Missouri officials acknowledged Monday that they reported inflated numbers of food stamp recipients to the federal government, calling into question millions of dollars of bonuses paid to the state for running one of the nation’s top-flight programs, according to the…
Photo by Mills Baker
Here’s another sign of how the poor economy is affecting New Mexico: state data show that 70,000 more New Mexicans are using food stamps than just a year ago.
According to data from the New Mexico Human Services Department, individual use of the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, rose by 28 percent in New Mexico from September 2008 to September 2009, when nearly 325,000 New Mexicans were collecting benefits that help them buy food.
Food stamps help individuals and families living around the poverty level — roughly $22,000 for a family of four. And the increase in food stamps usage in New Mexico has coincided with a similar rise in the state’s unemployment rate, which has risen dramatically over the past year. The rate reached 7.9 percent in October, up from 4.5 percent in October 2008, according to the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions.
As bad as the numbers are, they may not capture the full picture of how widespread hunger is in New Mexico, officials said Monday.
“Not are we only seeing low-income people who need food,” said Sonya Warwick of Albuquerque-based Road Runner Food Bank, which distributes foodstuffs to pantries and soup kitchens across the state, “[but] we’re seeing people whose hours are cut. They may make too much money to qualify for food stamps.”
But they are having trouble putting food on the table, she said.
In the past, the Road Runner Food Bank has estimated that 100,000 New Mexicans who are not on assistance go hungry at some time or another, Warwick said.
The rise in food stamp cases, which is almost entirely federally funded, offers a glimpse into how the recession is hitting New Mexicans. And the picture isn’t pretty.
Over the past year, nearly 40,000 adults joined the program’s rolls, compared to nearly 30,000 children, data show. Adults make up just over 50 percent of the food stamp recipients in New Mexico.
Food stamp usage rose nearly everywhere in New Mexico, in urban and rural areas.
Bernalillo County saw an increase of nearly 40 percent from September 2008 to September 2009 as the caseload grew by more than 12,000 cases, state data show.
Santa Fe County, meanwhile, recorded a 33 percent increase in food stamp cases while Dona Ana County, which includes Las Cruces, saw the caseload rise by 24 percent.
Rural areas were equally hard it, if not harder hit by the economic troubles.
Lea County, in southeastern New Mexico, saw food stamp cases rise by more than half, jumping to 3,459 this September, up from 2,263 cases a year before. Colfax County, up north, saw its caseload rise by nearly 40 percent, jumping from 533 cases last year to 745 cases this September.
The rise in New Mexico’s food stamp cases has led to increased costs, which jumped from $23 million in September 2008 to more than $41 million in September 2009, data show. The federal government foots the bill for the program.
Hunger of course is not confined to New Mexico. More and more Americans are going hungry, according to recent reports.
According to a research report issued earlier this month from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more and more Americans are struggling with where to find their next meal. The report, authored by Mark Nord, Margaret Andrews, and Steven Carlson, said that 17 million households across the nation at some time during the year had difficulty providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources.
The prevalence of food insecurity was up from 11.1 percent (13 million households) in 2007 and was the highest observed since nationally representative food security surveys were initiated in 1995.
Meanwhile, the New York Times published a story over the weekend detailing how the federal program, has increased dramatically during the recession.
An interactive map that ran with the Times story showed how many people in each county use the program.
Torrance County was the worst off county in New Mexico, according to the Times’ interactive map. According to the graphic, nearly 25 percent of all Torrance County’s 17,000 residents, and 50 percent of its children, were on food stamps in 2009, an 11 percent rise from 2007.
But Torrance County was nowhere near the top of the list of worst-off counties across the country as measured by the number of food stamp cases compared to population, the graphic showed.
According to the graphic, Wade Hampton County in Alaska earned that dubious honor. Nearly 50 percent of that county’s residents, and 62 percent of its children, were on food stamps.
The use of food stamps, the federal program, has increased dramatically during the recession, reports the New York Times. Food stamps pays benefits to individuals and families making around the poverty level — around $22,000 for a family of…
Here’s a summary of what I’m reading this morning. Every state is swimming under a tide of new applications for food stamps, the federal program that helps the low-income with food purchases. New Mexico isn’t an exception. But one state over, Texas is at risk of losing federal food stamp money due to a high error rate and failure to process applications in a timely manner and. A federal official has suggested the nation’s second most populous state should hire a food stamp czar to correct the significant problems, reports the Austin American-Statesman. More …
ALBUQUERQUE — Ask Carmen Martinez, and the Albuquerque senior will tell you how the federal government’s stimulus plan is helping.
A petite woman with a friendly face framed by curly black hair, Martinez was on hand Thursday to hear Gov. Bill Richardson and other officials announce that the federal government is purchasing $700,000 in extra food.
The chicken and pork products, along with canned fruit and produce, is being distributed over the next several months to low-income New Mexicans across the state who might otherwise go hungry.
Among those expected to benefit are senior citizens who rely on boxes of food supplied by Albuquerque’s Roadrunner Food Bank and children at 35 low-income schools. They receive backpacks during the school year packed with food for weekends and holidays.
“There are people out there living on $300 a month,” she said.
Martinez has a street-level perspective of hunger in New Mexico.
She coordinates deliveries of food to individuals and families living in Albuquerque’s Brentwood Gardens Apartments, where she is a resident. She volunteers at the food bank, but she also is a client, receiving a box of food each month meant to last her 30 or so days.
“I know how to budget,” Martinez says. “I learned from an early age. My mom always made us beans, tortillas with green chile. Others don’t know how to.”
Things have gotten worse in the last year, she said.
“People are hurting. If you are working and you’re hurting, you’re definitely hurting if you are on a fixed income,” Martinez said.
Melody Wattenbarger, executive director at the Roadrunner Food Bank, has noted the rise in hunger too. It’s hard to miss, she said.
A year ago the Roadrunner Food Bank was shipping 65,000 pounds of food a day to its partner food banks across the state. Today that amount is 90,000 pounds, Wattenbarger said.
The increase has to do with rising need, Wattenbarger acknowledged. But it also has to do with the additional food that is on hand thanks to the federal government’s cash infusion.
On Thursday, 552 whole chickens and 868 cases of applesauce were shipped out, headed to various parts of the state, thanks to the federal stimulus money.
But that’s only a small fraction of what the $700,000 pays for, state officials said.
“That’s nearly 600,000 pounds of food that will soon be on dinner tables around the state,” Richardson said of the federal infusion. “These are tough times. More and more New Mexicans are turning to some kind of assistance to help provide a decent meal for their families.”
The economic slump has led to a 28 percent increase in applicants for New Mexico’s food stamp program, said Pam Hyde, the New Mexico Human Services Department secretary.
“We are seeing a lot of people come in to our offices for the first time asking for help for food on the table,” Hyde added.
The money earmarked for New Mexico is part of a $100 million infusion of stimulus funds to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Emergency Assistance Food Program, Rosa Coronado, director of USDA’s Special Nutrition Program, said Thursday.
New Mexico, like other states, is receiving poultry, pork, canned fruits, peanut products and cheese.
The state also is receiving $173,000 to help agencies and organizations pay for the administrative costs required to handle the additional food, Coronado said.
As deep recession settles in on the American economy, more and more people are relying on the public benefits safety net to help them put food on their table or meet health care needs.
A record 31.8 million Americans received food stamps in one recent month, and Medicaid enrollment around the country is surging by record numbers in many states.
In New Mexico, our unemployment is rising — up to 5.1 percent in January from 3.7 percent a year earlier — and we are seeing some of the worst job growth statistics since 1982-83.
Indeed, 8,600 jobs were lost in New Mexico between January 2008 and January 2009. Low-income working families have been particularly hard hit, as job losses have been concentrated in blue collar industries — 5,500 jobs lost in the construction industry, 1,800 in manufacturing, 3,300 in retail trade, and 1,100 in leisure and hospitality.
Against this background of lost job opportunities, New Mexico retains the third highest rate of poverty in the nation and the second highest rate of food insecurity.
Yet, in the face of worsening economic conditions and precisely when safety net programs should be providing support to more low-income families, participation in some of these programs has begun to stagnate and even decline.
According to the most recent data from the New Mexico Human Services Department (HSD), there was a surprising drop at the beginning of this year of the number of New Mexicans receiving help from two of our state’s primary safety net programs — General Assistance and Medicaid.
Perhaps most shocking was the decline in enrollment in the General Assistance program (pdf). General Assistance provides small amounts of cash assistance to people who are seriously disabled and very poor. In some cases, it helps children in difficult circumstances. The number of New Mexicans receiving help from this program fell by 40 percent since November — the steepest decline in ten years — as new HSD procedures caused application approvals to decline precipitously.
Only 11 percent of the 1,042 New Mexicans seeking help in January and February were able to receive it — the highest denial rate in recent history. Furthermore, the department cut benefits to people already enrolled in the program.
Other key parts of our state’s safety net are also faltering.
Medicaid, the program that helps more low-income New Mexicans than any other by providing critical access to health care, fell by 4,448 people between September and November, according to the latest data. This is the first time since May 2007 that a significant decrease in Medicaid has occurred.
This decline in the number of New Mexicans served by the safety net programs of Medicaid and General Assistance during the worst economic downturn in at least 25 years is of grave concern.
The number of people helped by these programs should be growing right now, not decreasing.
One program that did see an increase was the food stamp program, which is funded entirely by the federal government and provides $1 per meal per day to help New Mexicans avoid hunger and the health consequences of poor nutrition. Nearly 7,000 more New Mexicans began receiving food stamps in February, underscoring the deep need that is evident in our state.
New Mexico is at a crossroads: We must make some critical choices about whether we will help the people most in need or let our public assistance programs founder.
Safety net programs not only provide relief to families facing serious hard times, they also provide some of the most effective economic stimulus measures to protect local economies.
Those on limited budgets are likely to spend every additional dollar of assistance on basic necessities, helping themselves and local businesses. For example, $5 of food stamp benefits, which are federally funded, generates $9 in local economic activity. Those dollars spent at the grocery store, in turn, help to pay the salaries of the grocery clerks, truckers who haul the food, and the farmer who grows the crops. A failure to maximize the use of these programs not only hurts families, it hurts our entire state economy.
Indeed, the federal government recently passed a “stimulus” bill to explicitly serve these dual purposes: to help states meet the needs of Americans falling into the safety net and to provide local economies with powerful economic stimulus.
More than $700 million federal dollars are now available in New Mexico through the public benefits programs. New Mexico has an enormous opportunity to draw federal dollars directly into our economy through Medicaid, the food stamp program and New Mexico Works, a program that provides small amounts of cash assistance to very poor New Mexicans for a limited amount of time.
These are unusually difficult times. Yet such moments often provide unusual opportunities to improve our lives.
New Mexicans are known for their fundamental resilience and optimism in the face of adversity. Think of how the New Deal programs of the Great Depression years provided New Mexicans with jobs, education, and the legacy of public buildings and art we cherish today.
A similar opportunity now confronts us. New Mexico should rise to the occasion by making full use of the federal stimulus bills and having our public safety net programs provide the jobs and assistance they were designed to provide.
What will it be, New Mexico?
Patricia Anders is a staff attorney with the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty.
