Welfare Rolls See First Climb in Years

A few local judges have just begun working full time to reduce a backlog of 25,000 home-foreclosure cases. The News-Press, the Fort Myers newspaper, regularly reports the deaths of restaurants and stores.

The Monday after Thanksgiving, the Regional Service Center reopened to find 500 online applications sent over the holiday weekend for food stamps and Medicaid, as well as welfare. By 5 p.m., 250 more had arrived.

Welfare success stories, when they happen, come more slowly than before. When her cash assistance began in July, Marilyn Prather went to the Career and Service Centers of Southwest Florida for job training and help. She had been a waitress at Denny's but quit to work at Sisters Eatery, a North Fort Myers restaurant where she had worked part time. Before the new job even started, Sisters Eatery shut down.

It was five months before Prather, a 41-year-old mother of two, was hired in mid-November by the Florida Department of Veterans Affairs. For now, she works 40 hours a week preparing desserts and meal trays, but she has been warned that her hours will soon be cut in half.

Lori Lamson also went to the career center and, following Florida's rules, did an upfront blitz of 80 hours of job-hunting with other new welfare arrivals. "None of us found jobs," she said. "I have applied for, and I'm not kidding you, probably 150 jobs."

Lamson had been a medical technician for two decades, specializing in nerve and muscle tests, when she and her boyfriend moved to Cape Coral last year. She found a job with a sleep-study lab that paid $22 an hour, but, after 94 days, she was laid off. Eight days later, she went to an emergency room with piercing back pain. At 43, it turned out, she was pregnant for the first time.

She'd worked here too briefly to get unemployment benefits. Her boyfriend, 49, had been diagnosed with a heart condition and was fighting for disability benefits. "I'm someone who's owned two homes, had a perfect credit rating, had a Jet Ski, savings, Starbucks two or three times a week," Lamson said. "You sit and wonder how it all got lost."

A month before her daughter, Megan, was born, Lamson qualified for welfare. Unable to pay their $900 rent, she and her boyfriend moved in with his mother until he won disability payments; they have now found a $600-a-month place of their own. Still, she said, "it is tight, tight, tight. . . . Things like aluminum foil, laundry soap, trash bags, you take for granted. Shampoo, conditioner -- that's on the luxury side now." To keep her cash assistance -- $241 a month in Florida for a family of two -- she sorts clothing three days a week at a Goodwill outlet, "just kind of trying to keep busy."

Goodwill Industries of Southwest Florida has long helped find jobs for people on welfare. Now, "the door revolving in is much greater than the door revolving out," said Bob Haenggi, the vice president of career development. Last year, his staff placed 292 people. This year, it will be less than two-thirds that many.

Goodwill's half-dozen "employment consultants" have become so upset that they can't generate jobs for people, Haenggi is sponsoring a coping seminar for them.

Will McDaniel, a roofing company supervisor who had a $47,000 salary until his entire department was eliminated in June, keeps a legal pad listing all his job applications -- 73 so far. He has applied for food stamps and Medicaid, and he plans to apply for cash assistance, too, if no work comes through by the time his unemployment checks -- $550 every two weeks -- run out.

Yet he worries about a welfare system built around people getting jobs. That idea "has failed," he said. "You can't take the policy that was applied 12 years ago and use it in this day and time."