Budget committee hears personal testimony at welfare hearing

Saturday, Feb. 8, 1997 | 4:37 a.m.

Welfare Division chief Myla Florence presented Gov. Bob Miller's welfare budget for the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF, program to the Assembly Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees.

As Florence spoke Friday, welfare recipient Beth Ingram's three-year-old son played with a toy truck on the hearing room floor - evidence of the trouble Ingram has had finding child care for her three children while she works and attends school.

Ingram, 45 and a single mother, went on welfare three years ago when a complicated pregnancy forced her to stay at her Reno home. As part of her re-entry into the job market, welfare workers encouraged her to attend school.

But at a recent orientation at Truckee Meadows Community College, Ingram discovered the TANF program won't pay for school for people older than 21.

Ingram took job-training classes anyway and now works 20 hours a week at a child-care center.

"I was doing job applications during my finals, 10 applications per week minimum," Ingram said. "I wasn't qualified for many jobs, so I gradually became less discriminating, even desperate."

Ingram said she's angry that it's so hard to find affordable child care. Once, she said, a welfare case worker told her to leave her sick 9-year-old son at home alone while she worked.

"I could go on for hours about all that has happened to me in this system," Ingram said.

Nevada Empowered Women's Project director Lisa Appelrouth, who accompanied Ingram to the hearings, said her group is concerned that reformers who emphasize job placement don't adequately consider child care needs.

"We need to provide these women with accessible, affordable and quality child care," Appelrouth said. "How productive can any employee be if they are preoccupied with the health of their child?"

Appelrouth also said that imposing a two-year lifetime limit on welfare could have a devastating on families. Although the federal lifetime limit is five years, Gov. Miller supports a two-year limit.

"Terminating assistance based on a calendar date instead of a person's stability would have drastic consequences for the entire family," Appelrouth said.

Also testifying before the committees was Arlan Melendez, head of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. He said welfare reform presents particular challenges to Indian communities, which have a 42 percent unemployment rate in Nevada.

"Laws that seem realistic and doable in some communities will not work in Indian country," Melendez said. "The plan is ill-conceived and destructive to the families and children we are trying to preserve."

Melendez said tribes governments wanted to have more control over reform, but federal rules mandate that states take control.

"Our communities are remote, with a lack of education, lack of businesses and other problems that make reform much more challenging," Melendez said. "We can not start the 24- or 60-month clock until these problems are figured out."