BUDGET SEASON The needy get the first cut BY BRIAN C. JONES

In what could be the first shot in the annual debate about welfare, Governor Donald L. Carcieri has proposed eliminating a $50 monthly payment that mothers get when absent fathers pay child support. Carcieri included the cut in his "supplemental" budget, which tidies up the difference between the budget enacted last year by the General Assembly and the actual expenses that develop halfway through the fiscal year.

The proposed cut is nominally small: only $400,000 would be saved this year, and just $1.7 million on a yearly basis. About 3100 of the state’s 14,100 welfare families would be affected. Thus, the symbolism of the proposal is probably as important as the dollars themselves.

Carcieri and his aides say the state remains in tough economic times and that hard budget choices have to be made, especially in terms of the upcoming budget, with a projected deficit as high as $200 million. No program, Carcieri warned during a January 13 State House press conference, is "off the table." Advocates for the poor, including the One Rhode Island Coalition of human services groups, however, have vowed to pursue state spending changes that will "do no harm" to the state’s poorest residents, and they see the $50 payment as one of many possible cuts they’ll try to thwart.

Jane A. Hayward, director of the Department of Human Services, and interim director of the Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, says the $50 payment began in 1984 as an incentive to get welfare mothers to cooperate with state officials in having fathers pay child support. The support payments offsets some of the family’s welfare costs, but the first $50 collected goes not to the state, but to the mother and children. The federal government stopped paying its half of the incentive costs in 1996, when national welfare reform was enacted, because studies found the incentives didn’t work, Hayward says. Instead, mothers are now "mandated" to cooperate. But Rhode Island so far has continued the $50 bonus program with state-only funds.

Thought the amounts seem paltry, Linda Katz, policy director of the Poverty Institute of the Rhode Island College School of Social Work, says the impact is big for the families. It’s about 10 percent of the $554 a family of three receives in monthly welfare payments — an amount not hiked in 15 years. "It’s really shameful to take money from the poorest of the poor children in our state," says Katz. Such proposals are a sign of the continuing stigma associated with welfare, she says.

"I don’t disagree that when you deal with people with low incomes any reduction is very difficult," Hayward counters. But she says the "core" welfare plan continues, including allowing some working recipients to retain partial welfare benefits. Hayward says the $50 cut isn’t quite as high as it seems. The loss of $50 a month will increase the amount of federal Food Stamps many families receive by between $10 and $15 a month. Thus, the net loss to families could be $35 to $40 a month.

Katz says this is still a substantial cut for vulnerable families, and One Rhode Island already has started a lobbying campaign to protect the payment. She notes that Rhode Island has an effective welfare-to-work program that won the state a more than $3 million bonus from the federal government this year.

When it comes to the next budget, which outlines spending for the 12 months starting in July and probably will top $6 billion, one of the arguments will be about who should shoulder the projected deficit. Carcieri has vowed no increase in taxes.