Art Hackett:
According to federal officials, Wisconsin is also among the worst 10 states in the nation when it comes to getting food stamps to people within required time limits. People with no income are supposed to be able to get expedited service and get food stamps within seven days. In Wisconsin, according to state figures since June, only 31 percent of applicants have gotten FoodShare benefits within seven days. Thirty-seven percent of applicants waited much longer. Thirty-two percent were waiting more than a month. The feds call this unacceptable and are considering federal sanctions against Wisconsin, saying their primary concern is feeding hungry people. Secretary of the State Department of Health Services Karen Timberlake is here to talk about this. Now, this is a program that was originally handled at the county level, correct, and then the state took it over? How did the state wind up with this task assigned to it?

Karen Timberlake:
I think it's important to clarify what we're talking about here. People apply for the FoodShare, or what used to be called the food stamp program, in all 72 counties of Wisconsin. There is, however, a new way that low-income adults without dependent children apply for FoodShare and that is through a state-run enrollment services center. The reason that's happening is because Wisconsin is actually expanding health insurance coverage to this population of people as part of the BadgerCare Plus initiative. As people are applying for health insurance, many of them are also eligible for FoodShare and so they applied jointly for those programs in many cases. So I think it's really important to point out that the challenges we're having in staying timely that you cited in your opening apply to the enrollment services center and to this group of people who are applying now in very great numbers, both for this new health insurance program as well as for FoodShare.

Art Hackett:
These were people who just weren't getting this benefit at all in the past.

Karen Timberlake:
Exactly. What we've seen is since June 15 when we opened the enrollment services center, we have received in just about a four-month period of time, 95,000 applications for a combination of BadgerCare Plus Core plan, the FoodShare program and in some cases also a family planning waiver. So that number of applications well exceeds what we get in total across all 72 counties in the state on a monthly basis, and it has unquestionably overwhelmed us, but overwhelmed us temporarily.

Art Hackett:
The problem has been most acute, I gather, in Milwaukee County, not surprisingly, the biggest county in the state, where the hunger task force says they're about 40 percent of the state's FoodShare recipients there. They said “the backlog has created a desperate situation in Milwaukee County. We call on the state to immediately provide the benefits to the backlog cases.” What's your response to that?

Karen Timberlake:
I think it's important to note that we have two very high-priority projects going on right now. One is the takeover of Milwaukee County income maintenance functions, which means the signing up of people for all Medicaid programs, all FoodShare, which for years was being done incredibly badly in Milwaukee County. The very good news is that that is a separate function, separate staff, separate processing. We are completely timely with priority FoodShare cases in the case of families and kids applying through that effort. For the statewide enrollment services center, which includes adults without dependent children, we are caught up with our priority FoodShare cases, so those cases that have to be done within seven days, we are timely. We are committed to staying timely. Our challenge now is to work our way as fast as we can though the backlog of tens of thousands of applications that have flooded in in a short period of time.

Art Hackett:
Is this a case of the state just not realizing that this crush was going to happen?

Karen Timberlake:
I think what happened was the crush was bigger than we ever expected that it would be and it has been sustained in a way that we never expected that it would be. So we literally have received, if you average it out over the entire time that we've been open, we've received an average of 700 applications a day every day seven days a week in the enrollment services center, which again is just a pace well above anything that we could have expected.

Art Hackett:
I understand the USDA gave Wisconsin a $1.5 million bonus to increase participation in FoodShare. What happened to that money?

Karen Timberlake:
We received that bonus because actually we have increased our participation in FoodShare. So we've gone up. We've added about 175,000 people to the FoodShare program from last September to this September. We are holding those funds and we are looking for ways to reinvest them in the program so that we can improve the efficiency and the overall quality of FoodShare processing in the entire state.

Art Hackett:
Did you give any thought to using some of that money to hire extra operators to process all these calls?

Karen Timberlake:
We have hired significant numbers of extra, both contract staff, we've redeployed state staff, we've reworked our work flow more times than I think our staff can probably count. We're making headway, we're making progress, but obviously we have to do more and we have to do it faster.

Art Hackett:
The federal government is on your case about this, to put it bluntly. What have you told them about what your timetable is for having this problem fixed?

Karen Timberlake:
We brought — it's the United States Department of Agriculture that supervises FoodShare. We brought the USDA in about two weeks ago to walk them through our plans, the way we do our work to make sure that they had a comfort level both with our commitment to clearing up the priority cases, which we have done, and our commitment to work through the rest of the backlog. And the information that we received back from the federal officials who made the visit was that they were supportive of the plans that we had in place and obviously if there needs to be more dialogue there will be.

Art Hackett:
Karen Timberlake, thank you very much.

Karen Timberlake:
Thank you.