With 3 Weeks to Go, States Face Big Choices in Meeting Welfare Laws

Three weeks before new federal welfare legislation goes into effect, top state officials from around the country say they have little idea how they will implement many of the law's key components.

The welfare bill, signed last month by President Clinton, largely leaves the states to decide how to implement the biggest change in social policy in the past half-century -- because each is free to design its own plan as long as it meets basic federal guidelines. Yet state lawmakers, gathered in Washington Sept. 9 for their first formal briefing on the bill, said they are only beginning to wade through the law's complexities, much less decide how they will meet the federal requirements for moving welfare recipients to work.

"We still have all the big decisions to make," said New York state Sen. Joseph R. Holland (R). "We have to decide what to do about immigrants, about the work participation rates, about our Constitution, about how to make sure that people who get off welfare don't just go on home relief."

The two-day session, sponsored by the National Governors' Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures and the American Public Welfare Association, was designed to help states face these issues. But it sent South Dakota Gov. William J. Janklow to his hotel room toting thick briefing books outlining the new legislation.

"I just read the part about how all this money has to be appropriated by the legislature," he said. "I sure hope that this can be a nonpartisan deal and that 100 percent of the other party doesn't decide to oppose me on this."

Janklow, a Republican, also has a Republican-controlled legislature, but even so, he expects the issues to be contentious.

As welfare reform moves into its next phase -- implementation at the state level -- local officials are raising a staggering array of concerns, ranging from the political difficulty of taking away hunting and fishing licenses from deadbeat parents to establishing work programs on Indian reservations where there is no cash economy.

"You want to see some political excitement?" said Wyoming state Sen. Charles K. Scott (R). "Start taking away the hunting licenses of the adult male population that has some arrearages in child support."

Scott's concern is a provision of the welfare law that requires states to remove the professional, drivers' and recreational licenses of parents who owe child support. And he figures that provision alone could prove highly disruptive in his state.

"You have hit a real sensitive pressure point," he said, "that is catching them where they feed."

Iowa, which only recently passed a law taking away drivers' and professional licenses, did not try to take away fishing and hunting permits.

"These things are sold at bait shops and little mom and pop stores, and compliance is going to be very difficult," said Douglas E. Howard, administrator of the Iowa Division of Economic Assistance.

In Alaska, administrators are asking how they can meet the tough new requirements that 25 percent of all their recipients be working in jobs at least 20 hours a week by next July.

Some of the state's 220 Native American villages have subsistence economies with virtually no wage-paying jobs, he said. "We are just going to have to count somebody going out and hunting and fishing and trying to feed their family as working."

Virtually all state officials said they saw the new law as an opportunity to make welfare work better, providing temporary help instead of allowing long-term dependency.

But the questions raised yesterday showed the myriad directions from which state officials come as they attempt to carry out the law's mandates. The legislation requires 50 percent of all recipients to be working by the year 2002, cuts off benefits after five years, ends many forms of assistance to legal immigrants who have not become citizens and reduces the amount of federal dollars that will go toward food stamp payments.

Since the law ends the federal guarantee of welfare payments and instead gives states a fixed amount of money in the form of block grants, many local officials are worried that, if a recession hits, they will be left to pick up the tab.

Oklahoma state Sen. Bernest H. Cain Jr. (D) says state officials are being told to plan for downturns in the economy, but that will not be easy.

"How do you save money if you're a poor state?" he asked.

Gordon Page, deputy director of the Department of Human Services in Arkansas, said he is "going into this thing optimistically" but is well aware of the special problems in some areas of Arkansas where unemployment is twice the rate of the rest of the state.

Page said he is concerned about what happens to people who come up to the five-year cutoff of benefits, having done everything the state asked while still failing to find a job.

"One of the things we are not going to do is break up families and put the children in foster care," he said.