As Florida enters its final week of a massive and sometimes troubled Hurricane Irma food relief program, the price tag has climbed to more than $1.3 billion — one of the largest food disaster programs in U.S. history.
In just four Central Florida counties — Orange, Seminole, Lake and Osceola — nearly 460,000 people have received disaster food stamps, known as D-SNAP, totaling nearly $153 million, paid for by federal taxpayers. That doesn’t include the 285,000 people who normally receive benefits under SNAP, the federal Supplemental Food Assistance Program, who got nearly $49 million in additional benefits to replace food that spoiled during prolonged power outages.
To some, the program has been an unparalleled success. To others, it is a mess that could put pressure on an already vulnerable food stamp budget.
“I have to say, after 24 years of doing this work, going through all kinds of disasters, I believe the state overall did one of the finest jobs that I’ve seen,” said Dave Krepcho, president and CEO of Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida. “We know there was incredible need after the disaster hit. When you see people standing in line for six, seven hours — that, to me, says they’re desperate.”
By Wednesday, more than 4.7 million Floridians had received benefits. Residents can still sign up through Wednesday in Pasco County and from Tuesday through Thursday in Broward and Miami-Dade County. All Central Florida sign-ups have closed.
Florida’s Department of Children and Families, the state agency that administers the program, has held five-day enrollment periods in 47 of the 48 eligible counties.
Although people were encouraged to pre-register online, the in-person application was required to prove residency and discourage fraud.
But that also led to the hourslong wait times, hot tempers, snarled traffic and confusion. At four South Florida sites, for instance, many of the tens of thousands of people who stood for hours in the heat were turned away empty-handed after officials shut down operations, citing health and safety concerns — namely, heat exhaustion and frayed nerves.
“DCF’s failure to properly staff application sites has led to exceptionally long lines that have made it impossible for hundreds of thousands of Florida families to get the benefits they need,” complained U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-FL, in a letter this week to the federal Department of Agriculture, seeking to extend the deadline for Floridians to apply for emergency food aid. “These families should not be punished for the state’s failure to properly administer this program.”
DCF defended its work, noting it deployed more than 6,000 workers for the D-SNAP sign-ups, including nearly 1,500 temporary workers, and it passed out bottled water, made special accommodations for people with disabilities, hired traffic control and extended hours. It also added extra days to the South Florida sites to make up for the abrupt closures earlier. Though a department spokeswoman said the state’s expenses haven’t been tallied yet, they’re expected to be considerable, and the federal government will only reimburse Florida for half.
“I’m proud of the effort our staff has made, with half of the agency contributing to this operation,” said DCF Secretary Mike Carroll, though late Friday he announced he was asking the federal government to allow elderly and disabled residents in all affected counties to sign up by phone — without the in-person interview.
“While the D-SNAP operation in Florida following Hurricane Irma is unprecedented in size and scope and accommodations have been made for those with special needs at each D-SNAP site, we recognize that there may be vulnerable Floridians still in need of assistance,” Carroll said.
One reason for the long lines, DCF said, was the mistaken notion that getting to the sites early increased the chance of qualifying for benefits.
In Orange County, for instance, on the first day of applications at Camping World Stadium, DCF closed the line at 9 a.m. — two hours after it opened — because it snaked around the facility twice and went down a side street.
“People starting lining up the night before, so by the time you get there at 5 a.m., you already have 10,000 people waiting for assistance. You can’t recover from that,” said David Ocasio, a spokesman for DCF’s Central region. “We did 15,500 [applications] that day, so if we hadn’t capped the line, we would have been there until the next day.”
At every site, Ocasio said, wait times dropped as the days went by, both because the initial rush had passed and because DCF adjusted traffic control and staffing to meet the expected need. By Monday afternoon, for instance, the wait at Camping World Stadium was a half-hour.
“We were in and out,” said Jahaira Marin, a single mom raising three kids of her own and two for a relative. “I lost my job because of the storm [when her employer’s business was damaged] and at home we lost power for five days. We are running out of money, but now at least we’ll have food.”
She and the children qualified for $913 in benefits — money that can only be spent on food in grocery stores and farmer’s markets.
The benefits equal two months of a standard food stamp allotment, even though power outages were far shorter for most. Applicants did face income limits — $1,664 for September for a single adult with no children — though, per federal guidelines, they didn’t have to document their income, as they normally do for food stamp programs. Still, DCF officials said they had state fraud investigators at each application site, and as of last week, they had stopped nearly $10 million in suspected fraud.
The $1.3 billion-and-counting tab for the program comes just as GOP lawmakers are expected to try to cut the food stamp budget to pay for their new tax plan. Many Democrats are worried the nation’s farm bill — more than 70 percent of which is for nutrition programs, including SNAP and food disaster aid — will become a target as negotiations begin for its renewal next year.
“Disasters have a way of underscoring the fragility of everyone in the community, especially those who are growing our food and those who need help to have enough to eat. There’s a ripple effect,” said Carrie Calvert, director of tax and commodity policy for the national nonprofit Feeding America.
ksantich@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5503. Follow @katesantich on Twitter.
