WIC ‘smart cards’ make debut in Las Vegas Valley

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Thursday, Jan. 20, 2005 | 10:54 a.m.

The Las Vegas Valley became the first metropolitan area with more than a million residents nationwide Wednesday to begin using a card with a computer chip for low-income mothers to use in buying food for their families.

The "smart card," part of the federally funded Women, Infants and Children program, is a technology that will save taxpayers' money while making more money available for poor families to shop whenever they want, according to Louise Jones Ports, management analyst for the state Health Division.

The purpose of the WIC food program is to insure that mothers, infants and children up to 5 are well nourished.

The card was rolled out Wednesday at the program's clinic at 2041 N. Jones Blvd., one of 14 such clinics in the valley. The other clinics and surrounding grocery stores will take on the program in the coming months, with all of them on board by June, Jones Ports said.

The technology has been tested in smaller, mostly rural areas during the last four years nationwide, including Washoe County in Nevada, Jones Ports said.

During that time, switching from a paper-based system to the cards allowed the state to reduce administrative staff from 23 to 14 people, while increasing the number of people served by the program from 6,000 to 6,700, she said.

Additionally, the old system required low-income participants in the program to do all their monthly shopping at one time. With the new card, they can shop as many times at they like and the computer chip records how much is left in each person's monthly benefits.

The program has a budget of about $38 million statewide, about $8 million of which currently goes to administrative costs. About three-quarters of the budget is in Southern Nevada, where 39,000 people are enrolled in the program.

The North Jones clinic, like six others, is run by the Economic Opportunity Board, a nonprofit organization. The other clinics are run by Sunrise Hospital or Clark County, Jones Ports said.

Jones Ports said Nevada was one of only 12 states using the new technology, which not only required state offices to train their employees and acquire technology, but also required the same of grocery stores statewide.

"It takes a great leap of faith when you decide to do something like this," she said.