Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Subcommittee No. 3 on Health and Human Services

The Senate Budget Subcommitee Number Three on Health and Human Services will come to an order. Good morning, everyone. The Senate continues to welcome people in person and over our teleconference for those who wish to provide comment through that avenue. Today's number is going to be 1877-226-8163 with an access code of 736-2834. As always, we are meeting in room 1200 of the 1021 O Street building. I ask that the remaining community members please join us. Well, we have quorum.

We will be beginning to hear our budget proposals or end our budget proposal hearing from the Department of Social Services. Before that, Consultant, can you please. Oh, never mind. So close. So we'll hold until the Senator returns. With that in mind, I'd like to bring up the first issue on the agenda and welcome our Director. I'm really bad with names, but Director, I've memorized your name. You've been here often. So the first issue on the agenda is going to be the Calfresh and nutrition programs overview.

We'll be welcoming the Director to start by answering the questions in the agenda with this overview, and then I'd like to also welcome up LAO and Department of Finance to join us in the well.

Good morning. Thank you, Madam Chair and Members. Kim Johnson, California Department of Social Services. Thank you for the attention on the Calfresh nutrition work that is happening across California. As your agenda references, Calfresh is California's version of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, an entitlement program that provides eligible households with federally funded monthly benefits to purchase food. The program is expected to serve over 2.7 million households this year, representing 4.8 million Californians.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, in the fall of 2021, about 3.9 million more Californians, or 10.3%, would have been in poverty without safety net programs. Calfresh kept 1 million Californians out of poverty, or 2.6%, up from 500,000 in 2019. Due to both the temporary and ongoing changes, for your questions related to caseload and the budget, we continue to see Calfresh caseload increases. In fiscal year 2021-22, approximately 2.6 million households were served by Calfresh per month.

For the 23-24 Governor's Budget, the Department projects the average monthly caseload will increase by 6.4%, serving again over 2.8 million average households per month from the previous fiscal year, and the average monthly caseload for fiscal year 23-24 will increase by 0.2%. The federal Calfresh benefits budget is approximately 19.1 billion in 22-23 and 8.9 billion in budget year. This includes a 12.5% COLA increase for the maximum allotments beginning October 1 of 2022. The estimated impact of the COLA is 713.9 million in current year and 973.7 million in budget year.

The year over year decrease in estimated benefits reflects the end of emergency allotments. Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer, also known as PEBT, and Calfresh temporary student eligibility expansion. The budget proposal of January also includes the Calfresh military housing allowance disregard includes 500,000 total funds, 250,000 General Fund and automation costs associated with the implementation of SB 950, which seeks a federal waiver to exclude the basic allowance for housing provided to specified uniform service members from countable income in the determination of eligibility.

We estimate this will allow 13,000 military families to be newly eligible for Calfresh benefits. As it relates to our CFAP caseload, similar to Calfresh, we continue to see this caseload increase in 21-22. Approximately 15,300 households were served by CFAP per month. In the 23 Governor's Budget, CDSS projects the caseload for current year to increase by 9.2% and in budget year increasing by 4.2% or 17,400 households served.

CFAP benefits, which include the 12.5% COLA that I referenced, are expected to be approximately 100.4 million General Fund in current year and 75.8 million in budget year. Also, as it relates to the Child and adult care food program, the Governor's Budget includes 692 million total funds, 18 million General Fund in current year and 693.5 million total funds, 19.5 million General Fund in budget year for this program based on expected claims and COLA increases, which represents a $150.4 million total fund change from the Budget Act of 2022.

Food banks- the Governor's Budget includes 86.7 million in current year and 34.7 million in budget year for the federal food bank programs and 148.9 million in current year and 65.8 million in budget year for the State Food Bank Programs. The decrease is due to the reduction in the CalFood augmentation. It also reflects the one time nature of the Federal Emergency Food Assistance Program, also known as TEFAP. The federal TEFAP program and Resiliency grant is also reflected in that reduction.

The Committee asked about goals towards our Calfresh administration methodology. I will say the budget includes for current year, including PEBT, reflects $2.1 billion in total funds, 760.3 million in General Fund, which represents an increase of 201.4 million total funds from the Budget Act of 2022. In budget year, Calfresh administration includes 2 billion total funds, 734.7 million of which are General Fund, which represents a projected decrease of 130.2 million total funds from the revised current year.

The decrease reflects the ramp down in funding for the CalFood augmentation, the end of PEBT, funding for special food programs, the sunsetting of the Calfresh temporary student eligibility expansion, and the completion of initial cross training for Calfresh simplifications. Also, it's the methodology: beginning in budget year AB 207 requires the Department, in partnership with representatives of county human service agencies and the County Welfare Directors Association, to update the budgeting methodology used to determine the annual funding for county administration for Calfresh program every three years.

This administrative funding is largely dependent on changes to the caseload. As your agenda points out, the base was established in fiscal year 2001-2002 and has been adjusted each year for caseload increase or decrease. Adjustments are made to this base funding for staff development costs, contracts, legacy systems, and other non caseload driven items. This methodology, again, is we're revisiting the rebase. We have been conducting surveys, we've been engaging with stakeholders, also held a listening session.

But again, all of this information is informing what we will bring to you in the May revision for further discussion on the rebase for Calfresh admin. And with that, I'll be happy to answer any questions.

No, thank you so much, Director. That was actually one of my questions and you answered it right there. So I'd like to turn it over to LAO to answer the question. Oh, so sorry. Before can we establish a quorum?

[Roll call] We have a quorum.

Good morning. Ryan Anderson, Legislative Analyst Office. Just a comment about Calfresh caseload, which has been behaving rather unusually the last few years. So, our office, which is charged with projecting costs associated with this program, has a model which projects Calfresh caseload largely as a product of the labor market. In recent years, we've had to disregard the results of that model because they've been so out of line with the actual data.

They suggest, based on the relative strength of the labor market, that caseload should be decreasing, whereas in fact it's been increasing month over month. In searching for an answer as to why this disconnect from historic trends, one answer which seems plausible, which has come up, is the impact of emergency allotments, which you'll hear about in the next panel. There are many. We'll hear about the average benefit of emergency allotments is, I believe, around $90 per family. But that distribution is very unequal.

Families who are employed, who are making outside money, they may be receiving hundreds of dollars extra in benefits every month. And when it comes time to fill out your redetermination paperwork, that hundreds of dollars of benefit might make a big difference.

Whereas if you're only getting, say, $23 a month, you might decide this program is no longer worth the trouble. With the expiration of those emergency allotments this spring, it's possible that we will see Calfresh caseload realign with historic trends, which means that we may start to see a decrease in that caseload. This is something to be mindful of. It's too early as of yet. We don't have the data to suggest whether that is actually happening. But it is a possible dynamic that we just want to alert you to.

Thank you so much. And just to confirm, the possibility of the decrease in caseload is because the EAs are no longer going to be supplementing and people don't see this as a program that's really going to help them out?

That would be our presupposition. Of course, that would be assuming that the disconnect we are seeing between the historic relationship between the labor market and Calfresh caseload trends, which would suggest that caseload should be much lower in this program, that that disconnect is because of emergency allotments. It's possible it's due to other factors.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Director, can you briefly just talk a little bit about the summer EBT program? What resources are being implemented to stand that up to be ready to go?

Sure. And I know we have another.

Maybe we can wait. Actually, yeah. Because I know we're going to talk later about that. Committee Members, any comments on the overview? Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. We'll dive into our panel here on this hunger cliff and what LAO just mentioned, the end of the federal emergency allotments here in California. Welcoming back the Director Johnson. And I'd like to welcome Becky Silva, Government Relations Director of California Association of Food Banks. Andrew Cheyne, the Managing Director of Public Policy at Grace and Child Poverty California, and Eli Zigas from SPUR.

A part of this panel is community members. We're going to be hearing some stakeholder proposals. Usually we hear them at the end of the hearing. It just seemed appropriate to embed them into this panel as it relates to it.

So we'll start with the Director.

Okay. Thank you so much, Madam Chair and Members again, Kim Johnson, California Department of Social Services. I just want to again start with tremendous appreciation for the partners across the state and all that's been done in response to the pandemic and getting additional support out into community. This section of your agenda and the resources that we receive from the federal government are absolutely significant. Specifically, the committee asked about those resources. I'll start with the Calfresh emergency allotments.

These were temporary increases to regular Calfresh benefits amounts bringing households to the maximum Calfresh benefit allotment, regardless of size or income. They were authorized from March of 2020 to February of this year. Preliminary total of issued benefits are $14.1 billion, with an average allotment of $232 per month per household. Emergency allotments on a monthly basis averaged $543 million across California. So the Consolidated Appropriations Act ended emergency allotments effective February of this year.

The final issuances of that last February month were received by participants in Calfresh in March of this year. These were obviously integral in helping lifting families making little to no earnings out of poverty. For example, a Calworks assistance unit with one adult and two young children. The emergency allotments alone pulled families making little to no earnings under $600 per month out of poverty using the supplemental poverty measure, so they again were significant increases. Pandemic electronic benefits transfer, P-EBT, was also a tremendous resource.

This provided food benefits to families whose school age children and young children under age six lost access to free and reduced price meals due to the pandemic related to school and childcare facility closures. The Consolidated Appropriations act sunsets the P-EBT program at the end of the 22-23 school year. A total of over $10 billion in benefits will be issued through the course of this program.

I'll also just note that there was a 10 cent reimbursement per meal increase served for those in the child and adult care food program that's also set to expire in June of 2023. The committee asked about the impact of these losses and who it impacts most based on how the emergency allotments in particular were driven.

We do anticipate older adults in working families living in poverty are likely to be the most impacted by the loss of the federal benefits. These households receive income levels counted in the Calfresh budget that are more likely going to decrease benefits to the minimum allotment levels. The minimum allotment level is currently set at $23 per month. Based on the federal rules, all active Calfresh households will see a minimum of a $95 reduction in their monthly Calfresh benefits.

We do anticipate that there will be additional reliance and need on local food banks and other programs. And I also would just note that we are happy, as we continue working with some research organizations to bring back that we've been working with, to look at the true impact of this loss over time to bring back those findings to the committee. In terms of, again, mitigation efforts.

I want to again applaud the work of the Legislature and the Governor to have the availability of meals in schools now for all children across our state. That's certainly going to help a large number of children going forward. Part of our efforts are ensuring that we're doing outreach to all of our Calfresh recipients, both on really understanding the change to their benefits over time. Right?

We anticipate additional calls and inquiries related to the end of the emergency allotments, but also to make sure their information is updated so they are in fact receiving the appropriate amount of support based on all of their family circumstances. We also continue, obviously, outreach more broadly with our outreach partners in Calfresh for any newly eligible families. We are also glad to have invested with the Legislature and governor $5 million in nutrition assistance programs for tribes, that's scheduled to begin this summer.

We also are in the process of doing outreach with great partners on the California and vegetable EBT pilot, fruit and vegetable EBT pilot and market match, where again a Calfresh recipient can further leverage and maximize their food resources at many retailers and other food banks across the state. Of course, we're looking forward to implementing the expansion of the California Food Assistance program as well. And of course, we also have invested over time a lot in food bank infrastructure that will be supportive.

I will say in totality these are both new investments, and we're grateful and glad to make sure that these are all getting to the individuals and families who need them, but certainly aren't equivalent to what you just heard me speak to in the federal resources that we received to date.

I also just want to note that on that note and the federal changes, we are obviously bringing our voice to things like farm bill reauthorization at the federal level, where we're specifically calling out the need for many different improvements, including SNAP benefit adequacy through addressing inflation by conducting a regular review of the thrifty food program, increasing equitable SNAP program access by eliminating simplifying exclusionary policies for specific populations like those with able-bodied adults without dependents, also referenced as ABAWDs.

Repealing the five-year bar prohibiting SNAP to immigrants, reducing program access barriers for college students expanding the restaurant meals program, expanding the support for the Emergency Food Assistance program. Again, we continue to have different disasters throughout the state where that support is needed.

Enhancing the Commodity Supplemental Food Program by allowing more product flexibility within the food box to accommodate any shortages, expanding program access for communities in high-cost-of-living regions also establishing a demonstration project for individuals determined chronically homeless, similar to the elderly simplified application project and more. So, just again, lending our voice to the improvements that we believe need to be made to SNAP at the federal level.

And then finally the committees asked that Congress did when they ended pandemic EBT created a summer EBT program to add a supplement to families Calfresh benefits and the Committee is asking if we're looking at this. Yes, the answer is yes we are. We continue to work with the USDA FNS to understand the parameters of this program. Obviously, this will be a continued partnership with the Department of Education as well.

So we are looking to kind of get all of our work plans outlined, our data components, and looking for potentially launching the program in the summer. Any information related to the costs associated with implementation will be brought to the Legislature as part of the May revision.

Before we turn over to the stakeholders, I'll start with some questions for the director. One of the biggest things that stood out, I've been very focused on this hunger cliff and I just wanted to make sure I read this out loud. Calfresh kept 1 million Californians out of poverty in 2021. This is so crucial. And you mentioned, I appreciate the efforts and all the programs that we've implemented, the pilot of the fruit and vegetables, but still a pilot and not everyone is eligible across Californians.

This is a dire situation that we're seeing, and my first question to you is, LAO mentioned the potential decrease in Calfresh participation. Would you agree with that analysis?

Again, we're currently projecting a 0.2% increase into budget year. That's our current projection. And I think, I certainly appreciate the LAO's comments related to what the program offers is changing significantly from what it's looked like over the last few years, but again we have a strong desire to continue to reach families and individuals who aren't currently, who are not currently enrolled and are eligible.

So we want to continue our outreach efforts and again learn from things like the SSI/SSP expansion, which was successful in doing a number of different modalities and reaching populations who hadn't historically been eligible for the program. So again, we are at this point projecting a 0.2% increase into the budget year.

And you mentioned you touched on the summer EBT program and you said hopefully in a launch in the summer. Was that summer 2024?

Correct.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Colleagues, senators? Okay, we'll jump into stakeholder proposals now. And turning it over to Becky.

Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to speak to you today. Again, my name is Becky Silva. I'm the Director of government affairs for the California Association of Food Banks. Our organization represents 41 member food banks with the mission to end hunger in California. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you about the state of hunger in California, the challenges that we face this year, and opportunities for mitigating harm through critically needed budget investments.

Simply put, California is facing a catastrophic hunger crisis this year. With the signing of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 and ending of the federal public health emergency, as we've talked about already, two critical programs that help to mitigate hunger over the last three years come to an end, Calfresh emergency allotments and pandemic EBT. We are very grateful that the Administration has fully maximized Calfresh emergency allotments and pandemic EBT for as long as they were federally allowable.

And we're also equally grateful for the robust farm bill recommendations that you just heard about published last month, including improving SNAP benefit adequacy and permanently ending harmful and racist rules like the ABAWD time limit and college student rules federally. While we will continue to advocate for these federal policy fixes, California must continue to lead with budget investments and policy solutions to address record levels of hunger here in California. Calfresh emergency allotments, which were boosting Calfresh benefits up to the maximum level, ended on March 26.

And starting this month, 5 million Californians, Calfresh recipients who currently rely on these food benefits, are facing a dramatic drop in their benefits of an average of $82 per person per month. This represents a loss, as we heard, of about $500 million per month statewide. Many households have seen their benefits drop down to just $23 per month, barely enough to cover a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, and a gallon of milk.

And pandemic EBT, which is also a hugely successful program supporting low income children with food benefits on an EBT card, ends after the summer of the current school year, which we know is often the hungriest time of the year for children when school is out. At its height, P-EBT provided about $6 billion in benefits just in 2021 to over 4 million children.

And just to put these two programs into perspective, in 2021 alone, Calfresh emergency allotments and P-EBT accounted for one-third of the food safety net, or about 3 billion meals. That is the scale of the gap we're facing in 2023. We know that SNAP recipients in states that have already ended emergency allotments many months ago reported visiting food banks more, eating less food at meal times and skipping more meals. We expect the same in California.

We also know that California can't fill the entirety of the gap that the end of emergency allotments in P-EBT will create. But, there are several concrete solutions that can help to mitigate harm and that should be part of the long term solution to end hunger here in California.

In addition to investments in critical programs like Calfresh and ensuring that the newly federally authorized summer EBT program can be maximized, as you'll hear for in a minute, we ask you to protect and bolster funding for food banks, as they will not be able to mitigate the hunger crisis alone. Cal Food is a highly effective program that provides state funding to food banks to purchase California-grown and produced foods to distribute in their communities.

We are extremely grateful for the $112 million onetime amount provided in the 22-23 budget, and we must ensure that $60 million is allocated in the 23-24 budget as planned and is set as the new annual baseline. Moving forward, we estimate that $1 enables food banks to provide five meals. Cal Food is efficient, it supports food banks, distributing culturally appropriate foods, and it supports California's food economy. In addition, we ask you to invest $180,000,00 million one time in food bank's climate and capacity resilience funding. And lastly.

We can dive into number two after I was just saying on number one.

Okay, thank you for the opportunity to share about that and look forward to any questions that you might have.

Okay, so colleagues, in front of us is the stakeholder proposal, number one, the Cal food expansion. And I actually have a question for the Department of Finance, if they can come up. Thank you. Grateful? Yes. Like Becky mentioned in the current proposed budget, there is an allocation of $60 million for this. And it seems like for the past two years there's been an increase in this budget line. Is there anything you can share regarding making this a permanent baseline for this entity?

Jenean Docter, Department of Finance. At this time, finance supports the proposals included in the Governor's Budget, but we can certainly take all of the information here back for consideration.

Justin Freitas, Department of Finance. I can give some insight into those investments. So those investments were one-time investments, including the 21 Budget Act and 22 Budget Act. So they had carried over. Again, there's not additional investments proposed by the governor beyond those.

So it was just carried over.

Yeah. So those were one time, or was to maintain that for that point in time. But I'm happy to answer any additional questions, if you have any, on that.

Right. It just seems, we're looking at everything. Everything has a new baseline. The numbers that we were dealing with for years now, everything's different. Eggs are no longer $2 a carton, and we have to reevaluate everything now. So I'm interested in seeing how we can move forward so we're not coming back every single year. Like, this is what I need each year. This is what I need here, and just do a baseline. So definitely interested in seeing what that could look like moving forward.

But for now, I'm appreciative that at least we have it for this budget year and seeing what we could do moving forward. Thank you so much for that insight, colleagues. Any question on. Okay, Becky, stakeholder proposal number two. Is there anything else you want to add on number two? On the capacity resiliency funding?

Could I just add one more thing?

Go ahead.

Yeah. So the $180 million request for one-time funding and climate and capacity resiliency would enable those food banks to undertake really well overdue and necessary food bank improvements, such as expanding warehouse space, purchasing new refrigeration units. Food doesn't move itself. So things like trucks, equipment that warehouses need to move the food.

And so that budget investment would really help to support food banks not only to receive more food, but also then to have the resources to adequately distribute that food and make sure that they have warehouse space. So thank you for your consideration of that budget request.

Thank you so much. On that question, I see in the 2021 budget included the capacity grants for that. Talk to me about what that looked like. Was that just meeting half of the capacity need?

Yeah, no, thank you for that question. So when we did a survey of food banks a few years ago, the response we got from food banks was that there is a totality of over $700 million in needs across the food bank network. And those are for things that I mentioned a moment ago. It's for infrastructure, trucks, transportation, things like solar power at food banks, backup generators, especially for those that often respond to disasters.

And so the totality of the need is much higher than what we are requesting. And this year's request for $180 million would enable many more food banks to expand their capacity even further. So the $182 million a couple of years ago has allowed food banks to start many projects, but doesn't represent the totality of need.

Thanks for that clarification. And Department of Finance, do we know if all that money went out the door? Or maybe you know.

Yeah, thank you for asking that. So my understanding is that all of the funding from that $182 million has been applied for and approved, and that. I'm sorry that this is not the most current information, but about a month ago, when I inquired, I think it was about $40 or $50 million that had already gone out the door. So those projects are in process. Many food banks are getting them started, but all of it has been accounted for, if that makes sense.

Got it. But only $40 million has gone out. Approximately $40 million has gone out the door. I don't know if that's a question in the Department of Finance.

We're glad to get back to the Committee with the specifics of how much has actually been allocated. And I think to the point we have an awards out, but what's been allocated and improved projects.

Perfect. Thank you.

Senator Grove?

Something just caught my attention when you said that. What kind of kilowatt-size generators are you looking for for emergency response?

That is a great question that I don't know the answer to. Off the top of my head, I think it would depend. Food bank by food bank. But I know, for example, that's something that, for example, food for people up in Humboldt County has been looking at, given that they have responded to numerous fires and sort of flooding and disaster situations over the last few years. So I'm sorry that I can't answer in terms of the specifics, but it's okay.

I'm just thinking about things about keeping the food cool, making sure it doesn't spoil, doesn't rot. You know those are gas generators, right? There's no electric ones available in thes dtate of California with technology.

That is something that came up a couple of years ago during the fires when food banks had a lot of food in their warehouses. But of course, when power goes out, or even if it's not actually a fire, but a power shut off for safety, then it can have a huge impact on spoilage of the food that they were planning to distribute.

Oh, I totally agree. It was just interesting and caught my eye that this body is eliminating all gas generators, and you are in need of gas generators to keep your food from spoiling. So it just caught my attention. Thank you.

Great. We're going to hold those two items open. Thank you so much for the presentation on those two and move on to the third stakeholder proposal. Andrew talking about Calfresh $50 minimum.

Thank you, Chair and Members. Andrew Cheyne, managing director of public policy for GRACE and End Child Poverty, California. I don't think I can put it better than Dr. Johnson and Becky already did on the magnitude of the hunger cliff. I just want to thank you, Chair. I feel like we don't go a week without you talking about it.

Including your powerful remarks today, I think just look no further than the agenda to see that the scale of the impact in terms of raw numbers, the department's budget for Calfresh is being cut in half, but we know that ultimately families are going to be hurt the worst. And we know from the prior hunger cliff, after the end of the OURA boost after 2010, that there was actually a decade of elevated hunger and hardship.

And so California has to act, and we couldn't be more appreciative that the Senate budget plan yesterday would do just that and would invest in the minimum Calfresh benefit so that it would not be $23, but we'd have a minimum of $50, especially with the loss of the emergency allotments. It was spoken to that the disproportionate impact will be on people with disabilities and older adults, those who are most likely to be in a household of one or two.

And I know that you heard from Trinidad recently who gave powerful testimony about what it's like to be someone who's living with a disability, and the transportation costs, I mean, let alone the food costs that have gone up. But really what it means to be able to utilize that EBT benefit even once you access the program. And just broadly, the impact that this will make, the approximate $95 million investment, that reverberates across our food system.

Every dollar in Calfresh generates as much as $1.80, especially in places like California in tough economic times, because we are the places where farm workers are picking the food, where it's being grown, where it's being trucked, and then obviously across the retail system. And I just want to address the point made by the LAO, in terms of the caseload. I think that the EAS definitely should be put on the table in how we look at this, but it's also the cost of living.

When families have high costs, like dependent care, like shelter costs, those are taken into the Calfresh equation. And so you can have families who are earning wages but still are eligible for Calfresh. And so I think we need to really understand why there could be other contextual factors for caseload when there is low unemployment, and that makes this investment even more important. But I thank the comments by Director Johnson on the department's commitment to continue to reach out and enroll more eligible folks.

We're still at 71% or so overall in terms of participation, even less for older adults when we're talking about this issue. Finally, I just wanted to quickly speak to summer EBT because I so appreciate you bringing that up, and I couldn't be happier to hear that the administration is planning for summer 2024. We will have the final summer of pandemic EBT this summer, but the benefit will be far less, unfortunately, due to the decision by Congress.

The same decision by Congress to prematurely end the eas and hasten the hunger cliff also means that there's going to be a much smaller pandemic EBT benefit. That will pay for the permanent summer EBT program. But it's only going to be at $40 a month instead of $60, which is what the USDA evaluated. And just that evaluation showed it's the rare intervention where it is. Okay. A little bit left.

But I think it's a really important point that it reduced very low food insecurity, the worst form of hunger by a third, and relatively less normal food insecurity by a fifth. So we talk a lot about reversing inequities. This is a program that's demonstrated to actually reach those that we're trying to target the most. And some back-of-the-napkin math. We'll see what the department comes forward with.

It should be around $10 million or so, we think, based on what California spent on admin for P-EBT, and we're talking about 3.4 million kids should be eligible, minimum, and about $413 million in 100% federally funded benefits. Again, you apply that multiplier. Really, this is a fantastic opportunity.

Thank you so much. Andrew. You took one of my talking points. I was going to say it's true. For every dollar we put, we get 1.8 back in GDP. And you mentioned something regarding the correlation between people working and still being eligible. That's my mom. My mom works, she cleans houses, and she's still eligible for Calfresh because even that, it's not enough, right? So I've talked throughout these hearings like things that are personal to me.

A lot of these things are personal to me because I reflect or I represent districts that are going through this. These are real stories. And I think often we have to have that reminder of these are people's lives behind all these stories, right.

So just want to bring that up. Thank you so much, Andrew. I don't have any question for you. Obviously, this is important for me. Senator Roth, if you have anything. Perfect. Thank you for that proposal. We're going to hold the item open and move on to our fourth and final stakeholder proposal as it relates to the hunger cliff. Eli?

Thank you, Chair Menjivar and the Committee. My name is Eli Zigas. I'm the food and agriculture policy director at SPUR. And I want to thank everyone who came before me on the panel for outlining the scope of the hunger cliff. It is bad, and just as you said, Chairman Menjivar, it is affecting people's lives directly and painfully. What I think we're all talking about today is on this panel, proposals that are tools, tools to address that Cliff, how can we fill some of that gap?

I don't think any of us think the state has enough money to fully fill the gap left by the Feds, but we have some tools at our disposal to both raise the floor and raise the ceiling. And I'm going to be talking about today Calfresh fruit and vegetable supplemental benefits. You may have heard about programs like this called healthy food incentives, double up, foodbucks, Más Fresco, Market Match, and others that have been piloted in a number of forms that have not been integrated into Calfresh.

But what I'm talking about today is a program that the state, due to the hard work of CDSS and OSI, has stood up. You heard about it briefly in the remarks. That is a supplemental benefit program where the way it works is a customer goes to a retailer, a grocery store, a farmers market. They buy fruits and vegetables. They pay with their EBT account, and the money is matched.

What they're paying for those fruits and vegetables, penny for penny, dollar for dollar, rebated back to their card. That is a program that is happening right now at seven farmers markets and two grocery stores by the end of the summer, should be at 95 retail locations across the state. This is California pioneering. We're following the footsteps of Massachusetts. They were the first to do this 10 years ago. We're now doing it. And other states are following our footsteps.

What we know from earlier research is that this program achieves three goals, reduces hunger when people have more money in their pockets. It improves health because people are buying fruits and vegetables and eating them. And it supports, to your point, Chair Menjivar, the agricultural economy and the California economy at large. And I'd say the multiplier of this is even higher than just base level SNAP benefits because agricultural products circulate more money, especially in California's economy.

Right now, in the pilot that was authorized in 2018, there's $5 million set aside for a 12-month period. What Senator Wiener and Assembly Member Arambula are putting forward in the proposal is $94 million to be spent over two years. Approximately, I think, $90 million of it going straight into people's pockets in the form of rebates. The current pilot at the 90-plus retailers is going to have good impact, is already, but is probably going to reach tens of thousands of households.

We could reach hundreds of thousands or millions, really. It's just a function of money that the state can put towards it. So the infrastructure is there to expand and bring on more retailers. We think this is complementary to the minimum benefit proposal we just heard about and that sets the floor. No one gets less than $50. This would allow people to get $60 more no matter what their base-level benefit is.

So, raising the ceiling. Also important to note in this tight budget environment, it's not only effective, but super efficient. 96% of the money that has been proposed would end up in people's pockets. The EBT system is incredibly efficient at delivering benefits directly to people, and we think that's important when we have limited resources. So there are many people who support this. Retailers are eager to offer it. The state has set up the technology to scale it, and Calfresh participants need it.

If there was ever a time to scale a proven program, it's now, even during a difficult budget year. And there are a few programs that I can think of that would be as effective and efficient at addressing the hunger cliff. And we hope the committee and Legislature will support this program to make healthy food more affordable for low-income Californians. Thank you.

Thank you so much for that presentation. Just clarification questions. This is to expand it for two more years?

Yes. The ask in the budget proposal is a one time ask to be spent over two years. I'd say there's a long term vision to desire to see it permanent, but this is a stepping stone towards that.

Okay. And I see that right now the pilot stands. It's in only certain counties. Is it to expand it just staying within those counties or statewide?

I would say the vision is for it to expand as broadly as it can. That will be dependent on the funding that's available, as well as the retailers who sort of raise their hand as saying, I want to do this, and they have to meet some technical specifications. So nothing has been designed to limit it to counties.

It's really been who are the retailers who came forward and were willing to be the guinea pigs in the pilot, and who are the retailers who will in the next round raise their hand? But so far as I know, there's no hard and fast rule of like only these counties and not those other ones.

Perfect. And I am no stranger to the benefits that this brings. And I see written in the description some of those benefits. Could you speak a little bit more specific to the pilot so far? I know it's fairly new. Is there anything that we have on how the pilot is going so far? People's awareness of this?

Sure. I think as a co-sponsor of the legislation in 2018 that authorized it, the biggest question in my mind, and I think that we were trying to prove with the pilot, was can California set up the technology so that this can be rebated to people's accounts? And I am very pleased to say that when this launched in February, and up until now, no retailer or customer that I know of has said, I have an issue with this.

So we've created a system that works. In terms of, we have not done the analysis ourselves yet to know number of households served. It is, I believe we're in the range of tens of thousands of dollars a month going out the door. I think by the end of the summer we're going to see that grow a lot because one of the retailers has 85 locations in Southern California. So that's Mother's Nutritional Center. It's not online yet. Should be. They're aiming by August.

We haven't had enough time since February to know how many households are reaching the $60 a month cap or what the average amount is. We'll have good data soon. Unfortunately, not in time to inform this budget. But we know people are using it, they like it and we have not heard complaints about the system.

Great. Yeah, of course, that makes sense. Just final question for my knowledge, does this rollover if all the funds aren't utilized by the end of the pilot?

It's a great question. So the legal authorization for the program from the 2018 legislation ends basically at the end of this calendar year. So unless action is taken to remove that sunset or extend that sunset, I believe the Department would no longer be able to run the program. So that's one thing that would bring it to a screeching halt. The other is if money runs out.

I think at this point, given the timing, there's about $5 million for supplemental benefits itself, unlikely to run out by the end of this year. Unclear whether it will. I'm hopeful I think we all are, that it will extend us through at least next budget cycle. But how much runway? We'll have to monitor the burn rate. So, there is a hard stop unless we get rid of that sunset or extend it.

And, yeah, we'll say that that is part of the conversation with this proposal, for sure.

Senator Roth, any questions? Director, I don't know if there's anything you wanted to address on the four proposals that you heard.

I'll just generally say some of the initiatives and efforts, again, you've heard, in partnership with the Department, we are grateful always for the engagement of community and stakeholders in helping be thought partners in our work together, and we'll plan to continue to do so.

Thank you so much. LAO, Department of Finance? Any comments on any of these? I know perhaps these are new proposals.

Jeanean Docter, Department of Finance. No further comment, but I concur with all the comments made by the director of the department.

Perfect.

Good morning. Jen Troya with the Department of Social Services also just wanted to provide the information that the director mentioned we'd get back to you on. We were able to obtain it with respect to the food bank capacity grant funding. All $182 million is already encumbered and $77 million is already out the door.

Oh, thank you so much for that quick turnaround. I appreciate it. It's a good team. We're going to hold all four stakeholder proposals open and now move on to the next section. Thank you so much for coming up for the presentation. Moving on to issue number three, a mini panel regarding the EBT security.

I'd like to welcome Ryan Gillette. Nope.

Yeah.

Yes. Rick Wanne joining us on Zoom and then Lena Silver from the Neighborhood Legal Services of LA.

Go ahead, Ryan.

Thank you. My name is Ryan Gillette. I'm the chief data officer and Deputy Director with the Department of Social Services. CDSS is requesting 76.5 million over the next two fiscal years to support card security enhancements for the electronic benefits or EBT card. As a reminder, EBT the EBT system is the mechanism for delivery of public assistance benefits, including Calfresh, CalWORKS, Cache aid, as well as pandemic EBT programs. Cards can be used at ATMs and point of sale devices throughout the nation.

These funds will be used to implement chip tap technology to better protect cardholders and reduce theft. Over the past year, the state has witnessed a rise in EBT benefits. In February of 2023, the most recent month for which we have full data available, the state replaced approximately 6.4 million in CalWorks benefits and 3.2 million in Calfresh benefits due to theft. There are two types of theft that are currently occurring. The first is called skimming.

So this is when a malicious actor installs a device on a point of sale terminal or at an ATM machine that reads the information off of the card, which they can then use to create a clone card, and scamming, in which someone uses phishing or social engineering to trick someone into disclosing their card information. In California, we face both types of challenges, but skimming represents the bulk of the theft. The best way to combat skimming is through increased card security by implementing chip tap technology.

Chip tap encrypts card information, making it much more difficult for a malicious actor to steal this information and make a clone card. Over the coming months, CDSS will be moving aggressively to deploy chip tap technology. This is a major initiative, and California is on track to be the first state in the nation to use chip tap technology on its EBT cards. Deploying chip tap technology will involve a significant overhaul of the existing system. Some of the key development activities include card replacement.

We estimate that we would need to replace approximately 5 million cards that are currently out there. County equipment replacement all county administrative equipment must be replaced with devices that can produce chip EMV tap cards. This includes about 500 each of card printers, pin devices and balance inquiry devices. EBT system enhancement, and FIS resources. In order to implement chip tap, the EBT system will have changes required led by a dedicated team of EBT vendor resources.

This includes updates to the firmware within point of sale devices and a number of other enhancements to the existing system and then point of sale devices. EBT only retailers, in particular at farmers markets, have a specialty device that they use to process those transactions. There's about 950 of those devices that we would need to replace. And then finally funding for county and client and county communications to make sure everyone is aware of these changes and knows to actually use the new card once they have it.

There's a question that you raised about prioritization. Once development is complete, cards will be mailed out on a rolling basis over about six months. As we think about how to deploy cards once they become available, we think it's important to prioritize families who are most likely to be affected by electronic benefit theft due to their county residents.

There are certain hotspots where we're seeing more of this occurring than in other places, so that's definitely one of the lenses that we want to look at, but we're more than happy to seek input from stakeholders and of course this panel for other considerations as we figure out how to deploy those cards. Moving on to the second question, how is EBT theft impacting different participants in safety net programs? Households that are victims of theft are typically already in a financial situation faced with instability.

Many households receiving CalWORKS, Calfresh and other safety net programs rely on the benefits delivered through their EBT cards to pay rent, buy groceries, and meet their basic needs. While the state does replace stolen benefits. And I would note this is not a practice that all other states necessarily do. Even a short disruption can have a severe consequence on these households. We do not at the time have granular level on the number of households impacted.

Due to the nature of how this data is collected, we're working to streamline and resolve that collection issue. But for now, we can only estimate based on the number of replacement benefits that have replacement issuances that have been made using this approach between the period of January 2023 and March 2023. So the first quarter of the year or so, we estimate that approximately 43,000 households utilizing EBT cards to receive their benefits experienced some level of theft. I do think it's important to put this in context.

With over 3 million households participating in one or more of the Calfresh, CalWORKS and cappy programs, this means that a little over 1% of households have been impacted by theft. I do think this context is important as it speaks to why we need to be a little bit careful and cautious as we think about how we overhaul the system given the scope of the changes involved.

What we want to avoid is creating a situation where in the process of trying to upgrade the security of this, we move too fast and create some sort of a bigger challenge that could have an impact on the other 99% of households that have and cause them to have their benefits interrupted. Obviously, no amount of theft is an acceptable amount of theft, but we just need to take all these factors into consideration in terms of what we're doing in the interim.

While we are moving fast on chip tap technology, we have a few activities that we've implemented and some other things on the horizon. So earlier this year we deployed card verification value, or, sorry, last year we deployed card verification value to combat the scamming portion of this. So this is the sort of three numbers that you see on the back of maybe a personal credit or debit card. That same sort of technology.

It works a little bit different in this context, but it really should reduce incidences of scamming. And since we implemented that, we actually saw reports of scamming go down by an estimated 95%. So that technology has been very effective at reducing scamming. We also block out of state ATM transactions for the cash side, we block transactions at out of state FNS retailers if we've seen patterns of Calfresh or SNAP trafficking and fraud at those retailers.

We've been using data analytics to identify likely locations where skimming devices may have been installed and then partner with our local county investigators to have them removed. We limit withdrawal windows during benefit load days to make it a little bit easier for the legitimate cardholders to get their benefits. We've been raising awareness through enhanced client communication and efforts just to make people aware of what's going on, convince or encourage them to change their PIN and take actions to protect their cards.

We've streamlined procedural requirements for clients to file theft claims so once they do have their benefits stolen, making sure that we can get their benefits replaced as quickly as possible. And then we've been coordinating with local and federal law enforcement agencies, including the US Secret Service and the FBI, to investigate theft claims and conduct operations. So far, this has resulted in over 75 arrests across multiple counties, and we continue to pursue additional law enforcement activities.

Finally, California is participating in a coalition of other states that are working to identify additional strategies on these issues and have had the opportunity for us to share our best practices with them as well. On the more immediate horizon, we do plan to deploy a new mobile app, EBT Edge, which will provide cardholders with some self service functionality to freeze their card, change their pin a little bit more easily. That hopefully will help cut down on theft.

On your final question regarding the federal changes for replacing stolen SNAP benefits, California submitted its state plan for federal food theft reimbursement in February of 2023 and is anticipating FNS approval is imminent. Once approved, California will begin receiving federal reimbursement for food theft claims, reducing financial impact to the state General Fund, which is now the sole source of funding for food theft reimbursement claims. These federal changes do not impact the timeline or development of the EBT card security efforts put forth in this budget proposal.

This proposal strictly seeks to modernize EBT cards and does not include funding for client reimbursements due to the EBT theft. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Ryan. Want to move over to Zoom and welcome Rick Wanne, County of San Diego and then Lena Silver from Neighborhood Legal Services. We'll start with Rick.

Good morning. I just want to do a sound check that you can hear me, okay?

Yes.

All right. Very good. Good morning, Madam Chair and Members of the Committee, Rick Wanne, Director for Self Sufficiency Services with the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency, and thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony this morning. Regarding the questions put forward, the first one being, describing how the rapidly increasing levels of EBT theft have affected clients we serve.

How does this affect participants in the Cal Works, Cal Fresh and cappy programs, and what is the magnitude of this theft and who is most affected? So from a local perspective, counties are very concerned about the ongoing significant increase in EBT skimming and scamming and the impact that this has on our vulnerable customers. We do not want to see our customers face evictions or increased hunger because the benefits have been stolen.

To share some perspective from San Diego and the scale of this issue, since September 1 of 2022, we have replaced nearly $5.4 million in stolen cash benefits and nearly 4.5 million in stolen food assistance benefits, representing over 15,000 unique claims. And since January of 2022, we've received more than 29,000 requests to replace stolen benefits.

Some of the customers that have their benefits stolen, this occurs multiple times, which can place them at further risk of eviction when they are unable to pay their rent timely and for several months in a row, especially as the ending. The growing theft of food benefits, combined with the ending of the pandemic, emergency allotments and the ongoing increase in food costs placed families at even greater risk of food insecurity and homelessness. Regarding the second question, what problems have arisen with the benefits replacement process?

How have recent changes from the state CDSS impacted the benefit replacement process for clients and what more could CDSS and counties be doing to further streamline the benefit replacement? We greatly appreciate the state's efforts and CDSS's efforts in the changes to simplify the reimbursement process and timelines. Even with those changes, the volume is so great that this is creating noticeable operational impact and significant impact to our local workload. Each month, we receive thousands of phone calls and in person requests regarding benefits that have been stolen.

On the first working day of April of this year, we received more than 200 referrals for benefit replacement just in our call center, and this does not include the requests that are made in person at our offices. We recognize the need to get the stolen funds reimbursed quickly and strive to meet the process that we can do this as quickly as possible.

We have had to assemble special teams here in our county, both in our call center and at our offices, as well as additional staff in our fiscal Department to increase the capacity to address the volume of benefits replacement coming in. This has become a very tricky challenge and a balancing act as we are also working to process the restarting of the Medi Cal renewals as part of the continuous coverage unwinding, we continue to have additional ongoing casework for other programs.

We've had many, many inquiries and questions regarding the end of the Calfresh emergency allotments and we are doing this all while experiencing the highest Calfresh caseload in our entire history. And the final question please share feedback regarding recommendations on how the state should implement the EBT card security enhancements and any additional measures that the state and county should take in the meantime to address the EBT theft issue.

So counties have been urging and working with the state to increase card security, and we're very glad to see the CDSS proposal to replace the current EBT cards with the more secure chip technology, which will lower the risk of the benefits being skimmed. From an equity perspective, though, we think this is critically important to our customers that they have the same protections and securities available that you and I do through our current banking system with ATM cards as well as credit cards.

This is an urgent issue and we want to see the chip card technology implemented as soon as possible to minimize the risk that our customers will continue to face as their benefits are stolen.

Finally, as already referenced, we at the local level here in San Diego have been working with our law enforcement partners both at the District Attorney level, local law enforcement, FBI, as well as the state in efforts to apprehend these criminal predators as well as educating retailers to be vigilant in checking for and removing skimming devices. While these efforts should continue, they are insufficient to fully address the issue and the volume of the level of criminal activity going on.

So we urge you to deploy this technology as quickly as possible. And with that, I'll be happy to take any questions.

Thank you. We'll turn over to Lena first before questions.

Mic on. My name is Lena Silver, and I'm an Associate Director of Litigation and Policy Advocacy at Neighborhood Legal Services of LA County. Thank you so much for the invitation to address this Subcommittee. While skimming cases have trickled into our hotline over the last decade, we've seen a precipitous rise since the end of 2021 that has caused hunger, homelessness, and grief for thousands already living on the edge.

Consider Martha, who was checking out at Costco when she learned she had no CalFresh money on her EBT card. Imagine the embarrassment of returning her items. On top of that, the theft had occurred more than ten days before, so she received no reimbursement at all. Nikita, a single mom to four children and a CalWORKS student, has been robbed five times in the past five years, struggling to feed her children and pay rent each time.

The county denied reimbursement of the theft in January 2023, mistakenly finding that she had already had been reimbursed because what was robbed was the money that was reimbursed that was stolen the prior month. We were able to overcome that hurdle, but because she'd been a victim of crime three times in the past 12 months, they put her money on a 25-day hold to investigate her for fraud. We thank CDSS for simplifying the reimbursement process in January 2023.

It has made a true difference, but the state can do more to reduce the harm in the meantime. First, the state should align cash aid and CalFresh rules by reimbursing all stolen CalFresh benefits. Juan lost CalFresh in November 2022 when his recertification was unlawfully not processed. In February 2023, we helped him get 7,000 dollars in back pay for his household of eight. Before he even knew the money was on his card, it was stolen in a single day in Florida. He only received one month of reimbursement.

Under the pending federal changes, he would receive two, but there's no timeline for that presently, and he has to keep track, know when the change happens, and within 90 days of the change happening, go back to DPSS and ask for his second reimbursement. It is not fair that someone like Juan cannot be made whole simply because the EBT system does not provide basic consumer protections. Second, CDSS must immediately revise regulations to require reimbursement within three days in all situations.

Currently, the timeframe is ten business days or 25 calendar days if there is an automatic fraud referral for anyone robbed more than three times in 12 months or over 1,000 dollars or more than their monthly allotment. The WIC requires, quote, 'prompt replacement of benefits in order to minimize the harm to recipients.' Three days is the timeframe for curing a notice to pay rent or quit and the max that people must wait to receive emergency CalFresh. It should be no different here.

Further, the state must end mandatory SIU referrals, which are out of step with the rampant nature of skimming and revictimizes the victims. Third: CDSS should eliminate mandatory supervisory review of every single 2259 Form, which you heard in San Diego is thousands of forms a month and is many forms a month in LA County, which is one-third of all beneficiaries in the state.

Supervisor review slows the process, causes backlogs, and prevents same-day issuance of benefits for counties like LA with telephonic signature where a person could make a single call, describe the theft, have their electronic signature, and their money could be reimbursed to them right away without any delay. CWDs can adopt a targeted approach to reviewing these forms afterward.

Moreover, the Legislature should require CalSAWS to expedite both the automation of the replacement of skim benefits and also programming the EBT 2259 Form, which is the reimbursement form, into BenefitsCal immediately. Most importantly, the only way to end this madness is to expedite the timeframe for converting to chip technology. The state has known for many years that skimmers can easily clone EBT cards without chip.

Yet, as the thefts rose in spring of 2022, the state spent millions updating the CVV technology, which, yes, has reduced scamming, but the main bulk of the harm occurs through skimming. The launch timeframe, for which I'm aware leaves our clients vulnerable and wastes state dollars, I strongly encourage the state to scrutinize the timeframe for any months that can be cut. In rolling out cards, people receiving cash aids should be prioritized as well as heavily targeted regions.

The state must also ensure mom-and-pop vendors are not left behind. Often these are the only markets in low-income communities and they will need the most help navigating the new system. While it's incumbent on the state to shorten the timeframe, in the meantime, the state and law enforcement should continue to engage with banks and EBT vendors to prevent tampering on point of sale devices and ATMs. Our clients live in food and bank deserts.

They have no choice but to return to the same ATM, which is why repeated skimming and theft occurs and the onus continues to be on county welfare departments and law enforcement to look at the data and identify tampered devices.

Finally, outreach materials must be produced in all threshold languages to educate our EBT holders about how to protect themselves from skimming, change their PIN number, which is quite a burden and difficult for our elderly clients specifically and anyone who is not familiar with technology, and to get reimbursements. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Before we turn over to questions on our end, Department of Finance, LAO, any comment? No?

Jenean Docter, Department of Finance. No additional comments to add.

Great. Thank you so much. We'll start with the Department, and it's kind of a good tie into what Ms. Silver's mentioned over here. I appreciate the answer you gave, given how we're going to prioritize the rollout, and you mentioned on a regional basis, where there's hotspots. Is there room to also include the benefits of cash aid to CalWORKS recipients, which I see make up 80 percent of the theft?

Yes, absolutely. Well, let me clarify. Cash makes up the bulk of the theft dollars. It doesn't necessarily make up the bulk of the theft cases, and this is where we don't quite have the granularity of data that we want yet, but once we fix this 2259 Form process, we will have a lot better data on it. We've been hearing anecdotally that there's actually increasing rates of CalFresh beneficiary, like the individuals having their benefits stolen.

It's just a smaller dollar amount because of just the nature of how those benefits work. So that's something we're looking at and it's something we want to keep an eye on, but absolutely open to considering focusing on CalWORKS.

Absolutely. Yeah. It just makes sense. These are individuals. That's all they have. That's literally all they have, and I don't think we need to hear more stories of articles have mentioned so many stories that will last us the whole hearing on what's happening to these people. Great. Thank you. And my next question is, we've heard some of the notices people are getting. Is that the state or county sending those notices that they're being investigated? Does anyone know?

So I think one of the things that changed that was very welcome is a person no longer has to report the theft first to the EBT hotline and get dispute claim numbers, and that would produce a notice that said basically your claim was denied, which people would then appeal, but it wasn't a true denial. It was a denial on a different level, and that thwarted a lot of people from making reports.

Then I talked to you about automatic fraud referrals that are being made, and I think that's probably what the notices refer to. I personally haven't seen one, but yes, in the article I heard that, and we receive report backs from the county when we advocate for people to have their EBT form reimbursed, that it's on a hold because of fraud investigation, so that probably is the form that they're getting. These automatic fraud referrals are not required by state law. They're implemented through ACLs that, to the best of my knowledge, came out in 2013 when cash aid reimbursement started.

The WIC requires that there be protocols for system integrity, and this is a system that was created over ten years ago and like I said, is very out of step, in my opinion, with how rampant fraud is, how continuously targeted people are, and also how benefits have risen, thankfully, due to the good work of the Legislature. 1,000 dollars is--a family of four gets more than that. That's one month of benefits.

So these protocols should change immediately, and no one's cash aid, even if there's a determination they should be investigated for some reason, which again, I would think is an extremely rare occasion--I can't quite think of one--people should get their money in three days because like you said, all they have, and it's usually drained on the very first of the month even before they wake up in the morning. Yeah.

Thank you for that insight, but I guess I still don't know if that notice is coming from the state or the county.

It would be the county, probably.

County. Okay. Thank you. I'm going to direct my next round of questions to Rick over here and apologize that no one else can see him. Rick, first question--I'll shoot them at you twice, at the same time--is why are the clients receiving these notices stating that they're being investigated already, traumatized or being retraumatized? And the second, for CalWORKS recipients who get all their benefits stolen, are they offered the array of benefits that come from CalWORKS, for example, the CalWORKS Housing Support Program in helping perhaps alleviate the potential homelessness that could come out of this?

I know there were examples in the articles about moms with babies finding needing money to go to a shelter for that day because they didn't have money, so can you talk to me about what support services are being offered to these individuals and families?

Sure. Thank you for those questions. So, to address the first question on the notices, as mentioned, it is in state direction to make referrals to our special investigation unit, which does come with a series of notices from the local county. Recently, there are so many referrals, it is literally impossible to just auto-refer as we once did prior to this issue occurring. There's just no way to process them at our special investigations unit.

So we've instituted--each county is different--but here in San Diego Institute, a little bit of a different process where we are screening the request for benefit replacement in order to determine if there's any reason to even refer it to special investigations at all. It is very easy to see on most of the cases that the benefits have been stolen out of state, taken out of an ATM far away from where the customer is.

And once we can document or address that, verify that, then we don't make a referral if it's not warranted, so we try to minimize the number of referrals over to special investigation as well as the notices going out. And then we are working very hard to replace benefits within a very short timeframe. We are averaging here in San Diego, 75 percent of our replacement benefit requests are being replaced within three working days. We're working hard to try to get that to one working day.

In terms of the array of services for CalWORKS, the answer to that question is yes. Any benefits, ancillary benefits that our CalWORKS families are in need of, which could be triggered by a benefit, skimming or scamming, we immediately engage with our employment services case managers and work with the family to access the array of ancillary services, housing support, family stabilization and so forth, to make sure that we try to either intervene or stop a crisis for the family, particularly when it comes to eviction or becoming homeless or addressing immediate food needs.

And you spoke on the second thing I was going to bring up is the timeframe. We have a request of bringing it down to three days. You're saying 75 percent are within the three days. Some of the articles we read, people are waiting a month and a half, and it was LA Times. I'm assuming they were talking about LA County, month and a half?

So I'm wondering what is needed to help assist or what resources counties need to bring this down, even just to the ten days, right? I don't know if there's data on what that's looking across our 58 counties in California and how--has it gotten better? Are we seeing this trend of it getting better? Because if we can't even meet the ten-day threshold, it's going to be very difficult to even go to a three-day threshold, which is--I mean, three days is a lot. Even that is a lot. Do you know how the trends are moving? How is LA County looking like?

I can't speak to LA County, but I can only--

Oh, so sorry, Rick. I was looking at, you know, over here.

Thank you.

Okay, so I don't--I mean, I don't have updated data. I can tell you anecdotally, I tried to look at the cases that have been coming into our hotline. We aren't seeing the 30 plus day delays that we saw before. I think part of what was happening before was the confusion on meeting all the different, very complex steps of reimbursement, which have been simplified.

But in looking at the cases that have come in through the last few weeks, LA is certainly taking every day of the ten days and often into two weeks, three weeks. That's what we're seeing. So, again, we know in Los Angeles and other contexts that supervisor review with the huge caseloads is an extreme burden, and we've seen in other contexts that when supervisor review that's not required is removed, that timeframes for turning around business processes are much improved.

So that's why I really do think removing supervisor review--which, again, is not in state law--removing that and having a targeted approach would make a big difference, but, I mean, it just needs to be a requirement. I will say that people who get HA sometimes get lump sums, and we've had clients whose HA is robbed immediately. It's just a very tragic situation.

HA?

Homeless assistance, like the money that's put in people's cards, and then their landlord's waiting for it and it's been stolen, and then they have to wait another ten days to get it reimbursed. So it is really important to shorten this timeframe so that greatest harm of eviction is not on the table with people who are robbed.

Ryan, can you speak on that, it's not a state requirement on the supervisory review?

Yeah. So I just want to start by saying we actually already have plans in place to work with counties to try to better understand what their timeframe is. We don't have data on that yet, but that's something we've been thinking about as well.

We definitely would want to hear more about supervisory review, and if that's something that's sort of why that's in place, and if there's anything that we can do to make it easier to streamline that or other parts of the process, we're definitely open to hearing that.

Kevin, do you have that implemented in San Diego? Rick. There's no Kevin here. Wow.

So I'm sorry, can you repeat the question?

Yeah. Speaking about the supervisory review and that not all counties have that, do you have that in San Diego County?

We had to temporarily suspend that because of the volume is just too great, and we were not able to achieve even the ten days during that process. So we have a supervisor escalation at this point if there is a suspicion that the benefits replacement claim is not valid, but in most of the cases, it is valid, and it has allowed us, with our additional resources that we've put on it with staff, which has stretched us tremendously in terms of our operational performance, we are doing everything we can to replace benefits as quickly as possible.

Seeing that it's working and it's a temporary halt, do you anticipate perhaps making that a permanent process?

We would support working with the state and CDSS to make that a permanent process.

Perfect. Thank you. Senator Roth.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just to make--just a comment, I guess this touches all of us. You know, my wife's sister is, I guess, permanently disabled. Very, very modest means. I don't remember which of the benefit programs--may not be one of these--but she's obviously eligible for many of them, but took a while to finally get eligibility determined and get the benefit established and have the money sent to something, whether it was an EBT card or an account.

The money lands, she goes to access it, the money's gone. She reports the problem, has to go through quite a number of hoops to establish that it was not her problem, but somebody else's, finally gets that fixed, more money is on the way, it's sent to either the same card or the same account, it's swept again. Start the process all over again. I think she got it on the third try, but it may have been one more sweep before it got pinned down.

So I'm just saying that to thank you for working this problem because you're talking about people who live in, I will say, incredible circumstances--and that's not a positive--who have no money, who, when somebody takes it, it's the money they use to buy their groceries or put a gallon of gas in the car, and they don't have anywhere to turn. And sometimes they have family members that can help. Sometimes they don't. So you're doing the Lord's work by trying to fix this thing because we need to fix it. So thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you so much. I think sometimes perhaps the public forgets, you know, it doesn't happen to the legislators, but it touches our lives and our personal families as well. No one can escape some of these horrific events that are happening regarding this.

My last question--and I appreciate this dialogue here looking at some potential next steps--but my last question for you, Ryan, is on the--it sounds what I heard, that the state requires a notice to be sent out to individuals, letting them know that they're being investigated. Can you talk about that and the necessity behind that and how we can--maybe you don't have an answer right now and how we can address just some of those concerns, but just anything else you can provide in terms of insight?

Yeah, absolutely. I don't have a great answer right now, so we'll need to check back with my team just to understand exactly where those requirements are, what of them are actual requirements, or to Ms. Silver's point, how much of that is an ACL that we can change. Again, we want to make sure that people are getting their benefits. Well, hopefully we want to make sure they're not getting their benefits stolen in the first place.

But absent that, we want to make sure that we are replacing them as effectively and efficiently as possible, and to your point, not retraumatizing them by suggesting that maybe this was something that they did. So we'll get back to you with a little more information on what that process looks like and definitely open to exploring how to fix it.

Perfect. Just because I love recaps, just to make sure some of the next steps I see is like, if we can look into prioritizing some CalWORKS--not clients--families, to be prioritized in the rollout of the chipped EBT cards, I think that's really important.

I hear that you're going to be working with counties to learn more about this secondary review, seeing how we can provide resources down at the counties to remove this if it seems appropriate, perhaps learning from counties like San Diego and how they've temporarily halted that and how we can move forward with that. My biggest takeaway here is ten days is a lot. We're seeing that three days is already for--you said for Cal--

Emergency CalFresh for people with no food. Get CalFresh in three days. It should be no different here, and again, a landlord can send you a three-day notice to pay rent or quit, and if you don't get your money in three days, then they have every right to evict you. There's no protections there.

That makes sense to just have a uniform number to be responding to other things that could--or emergencies like that, evictions, looking--so having conversations around that, and then how we can support our counties to go down to those three days. And then, Ryan, the outreach materials in all base languages that seems like very baseline to me, as a minimum ensuring that individuals have notices in their language. I'd like to learn more about that, but those are the biggest takeaways for me.

Senator Roth, was there any---great. Perfect. Thank you so much for this conversation. Rick, thank you so much. Not Kevin. Thank you, Rick, for joining us on Zoom. We're going to hold that item open and move on to Issue Number Four. Welcome back, Director Johnson.

Thank you, Madam Chair and Members. Kim Johnson, California Department of Social Services, and I will come back to our conversation around the California Food Assistance Program, and just, again, given the earlier panels and conversation, obviously want to impress upon the Committee our continued commitment to what we agreed upon together, which is to provide food benefits to all Californians who are income-eligible and aged 55 years and older, regardless of their immigration status.

The Department proposed a budget change proposal requesting 18 permanent positions to support the CFAP expansion, and the proposal makes significant changes, obviously to the state's eligibility, fiscal, and reporting systems, and staffing at the state and local levels. The requested resources will lead the development of the expansion policies, procedures, regulations, guidance to the county welfare departments and all county letters related to the expansion of the program. Staff will support local implementation, launch an outreach campaign, provide policy instruction and technical assistance to counties, and monitor program performance.

The policies must seamlessly interact with existing complex CalFresh eligibility policy and benefit determination structure. The requested research positions will engage the counties and the statewide automated welfare system, or SAWS, and stakeholders in automation design and implementation. More specifically, the SAWS will need to create a new program within the state eligibility system to better capture the CFAP participants. In addition, these resources will determine data collection and reporting requirements, analyze and validate data, and again, provide technical assistance to counties.

Also, the resources requested for the Family Engagement and Development Division will design and implement the outreach campaign, which will launch ahead of initial implementation of expansion and will focus on getting the word out to the hardest to reach populations. The outreach campaign will be developed in partnership with immigrant-serving community-based organizations statewide and will involve significant stakeholder engagement through development and rollout.

Also, in addition, the Marketing and Media Contractor will conduct targeted outreach and collaborate with trusted partners within the targeted communities to connect the new eligible population to CFAP. Again, those specific positions are outlined in page 15 of the agenda, and that's kind of the key support and work that they'll be doing. The Committee asked, 'are the 18 positions included in the proposal here to help shorten the timeline?' They are not.

They are to actually accomplish the original timeline that we've put forth going forward. In terms of the Governor's budget and the proposal for the two-year delay of January 1st, 2027, again, the Governor's budget reflects that a longer timeline for expansion of the initiative benefits would start no later than January 1st of 2027, as opposed to the original date of January 1st of 2025.

The proposed adjusted in the timeline will allow for any additional considerations related to implementation, operations and policy development, such as new forms, aid benefit codes, and required reports. While again, there's not a delay in the overall CalSAW system migration project, the following considerations in totality have a bearing on planning when the programming can begin and the overall timeline for expansion and benefit issuance. Providing additional nutrition through CalFresh CFAP expansion to all low-income older adults, again, regardless of status, remains our priority going forward.

We are committed to working together with CWDA counties, CalSAWS, the Legislature, and additional stakeholders to help inform any potential updates to this timeline in the May Revision.

In the final question, the Department's plan to implement expansion, we continue to work through the milestones and action items, which include amending the State Plan and submitting to the Food and Nutrition Services, or FNS, at the federal level, updating again relevant sections of regulations, developing new and revised current forms and notices, establishing the new aid codes, the new EBT benefit types, and revising relevant fiscal and statistical reports, and so forth. So again, committed to continue working on implementation, a priority of all of ours, and glad to answer any questions.

Thank you so much. We'll turn over to LAO or DOF for any comment on that.

Good morning. Ryan Anderson with the Legislative Analyst Office. I think some general comments, which is, we understand--because we've been in conversation with a lot of stakeholders here--that there's a lot of frustration with the change in the timeline, and there's also a lot of confusion about the rationale. To be candid, it's been hard to track the rationale. I think there's been some different messaging from the Administration at different times about why exactly that timeline has changed.

Our best understanding of trying to cut through the various messages is that this has always been a very heavy lift on the automation side. We've been working on this issue for several years and our initial impression was that the necessary decoupling of the current reimbursement process for CFAP, which is authorized by federal law, and this new procedure, which is not authorized by federal law and will have to be more directly funded through the state, it's always been a heavy lift, and perhaps the Administration's proposal in last budget year was erroneously ambitious, right?

Like the initial timeline was just more accelerated than what was possible. That's our best attempt to understand what is going on. I think we're all in a position of being outside of this process of the contracting and procurement, the whole long process of actually making these automation changes.

We're all very reliant on the Administration for insight into that and our best understanding, cutting through all of what we know is it's always been a heavy lift, and perhaps we were just a little overambitious last year.

Thank you. Department of Finance.

Hi. Jenean Docter, Department of Finance. Finance concurs with the comments made by the Department. Obviously, this is a very important proposal, and the Administration has used its best information to take all of these considerations into account.

Thank you so much. Before we go to questions just like the first issue, we've embedded a proposal, stakeholder proposal here. I would like to welcome Benyamin Chao with the Health and Public Benefits Manager from California Immigrant Policy Center to present the stakeholder proposal. Go ahead.

Hi. Hello, Chair Menjivar and Members of the Committee. Again, my name is Benyamin Chao. I am with the California Immigrant Policy Center, and along with Nourish California, we co-chair the Food4All Coalition, which is comprised of over 110 organizations across the state, from San Diego all the way to Humboldt County, anti-hunger partners, immigrant rights partners, food banks that are committed to ending inequities in our food system.

Thank you for providing the opportunity today to speak on the Food4All proposal, which would increase access to the California Food Assistance Program by removing the exclusion of all income-eligible Californians due to their immigration status or age. As an immigrant myself who has been excluded from CalFresh and CFAP growing up, I understand that it's really important to make sure that everyone who's struggling to afford food can get the assistance they need, when they need it.

Currently, Californians who are undocumented, TPS holders, or DACA recipients are unjustly excluded from CalFresh and CFAP, and the LAO has estimated recently that there are between 650,000 to 750,000 Californians who would be eligible for CalFresh, but not for their immigration status. Furthermore, I want to emphasize that undocumented people in our communities pay taxes and contribute to our economy, but they are ineligible for the public benefits that they pay into.

And the fact of the matter is that undocumented immigrants living in California pay millions of dollars in local taxes each year to the counties they live, and that adds up to an estimated three billion dollars combined in both state and local taxes. So I will add that expanding CFAP to undocumented immigrants will not only help this population, but it will also benefit our state's economy and our society as a whole.

These exclusions continue to contribute to painfully high rates of hunger, which have serious consequences for health, financial security, and children's long-term success. Nearly half of undocumented Californians are affected by food insecurity, according to the most recent data from UCLA, and for children, this rate is nearly 64 percent. So that means that two in three undocumented children are going hungry. In conclusion, we strongly urge the Legislature to fund the complete expansion of CFAP and cover the remaining excluded population between the ages of zero to 54.

And this week we were pleased to see that Food4All was included in the Senate Budget priorities laid out by Leadership this week. This investment is even more urgent today due to inflation and decades of exclusion, and we right now have the ability to reverse these inequalities and build a California that is more healthy and resilient, and we can do that by investing in Food4All. We see this as a matter of basic human dignity, public health, and economic justice. No exceptions, no exclusions, no delays. Thank you.

Thank you so much. So I'll start off--Director, that was one of my questions: just the reasoning behind, just a little bit more, is there any more meat you can provide into the delay here?

Sure. Again, as was referenced, the processes that need to be taken, inclusive of automation as well as the policy guidance, these are all required to be done in sequence. So, for example, when the Department indicates that we have gone together with the Governor and Legislature to make a policy change, we work with the CalSAWS to determine when they need that policy guidance established to then identify when we can implement and go forward.

Again, as I referenced, this is not a delay in the overall CalSAWS migration system policy, but rather all of the steps that are outlined to take to actually implement the change. I think in all of these projects we are doing, to the LAO's point, our projections in terms of how we're looking at our work plans with the new policy of implementation, again, the Governor's budget proposal was an update to those proposals.

And again, we are working and have been quite clearly with stakeholders and others to make sure if we have any additional changes to this timeline and the steps that need to be taken or any ways we can expedite processes that, again, those would be offered in the May Revision.

And for my coming in, learning all these new programs, are we moving the entire CFAP over to this new--that's a yes? Or okay. I just want to make sure it wasn't a whole new platform just for those who are documented. It's the whole program? Great. Thanks.

Third question is the intent was to ramp up through ages to get to the end goal of providing coverage or benefits for everyone undocumented, zero to 120. Given that the previous timeline was for 2025, and then perhaps we would look at 2027 to add another group of ages, but now that we're going to start at 2027, what are our thoughts in starting at 2027 with a broader age group?

Sure, Chair. We obviously don't have a proposal at this time within the Administration to go broader than what we've already agreed to, but glad to make those considerations should the Legislature want us to explore those components further. If we're doing it anyway, to your point, is there any additional time needed if we change essentially who we are adding to the program?

Yeah, that's my question. Would the platform come in 2027 be ready to include other ages?

Glad to confirm that with you. If we can go back to the t. Glad to confirm you.

Senator, I don't know if you--I didn't have any additional questions to that. I think I'm on the same page in including that Food4All is food for all. When we talk about the hunger cliff, it's not people who are citizens, it's everybody that is struggling with the hunger cliff, and whatever we can do to ensure that we get to the intent in covering Food4All.

And if we have to push back this platform, that the software is that we can include all those ages, and I look forward to having some follow up to that answer. I didn't have any other questions for either one of you. Department of Finance, LAO, anything else? I know, LAO, you added something, but on the stakeholder proposal?

Just on the stakeholder proposal, it looks like it was the same proposal that was included in the Senate's Budget Plan that came out last night. I just wanted to note briefly that the 715 million dollar ongoing figure to expand CFAP to all Californians regardless of immigration status, the estimate there may be a little bit low based on the conversations that we had within the Administration when we were working on the CFAP expansion back in the 2021 Budget Act.

Thank you so much.

Yeah. I'm not sure what the methodology was, but I just wanted to add a note. Thank you.

Perfect. Just scanning all my notes; that's all I had. We're going to hold both items open, the stakeholder proposal and the expansion proposal open and move on to Issue Number Five.

Is it Jen? Jean? Jen.

Chair Menjivar, Senator Eggman, Jen Troia with the Department of Social Services here to answer your questions on Issue Five. This is a proposal for one limited term AGPA to meet requirements related to student participation in Calfresh. By way of background, federal SNAP rules prevent students from receiving Calfresh unless they meet one of a list of exemptions that make a student eligible if they otherwise qualify.

We refer to this often as the student eligibility rule during the public health emergency associated with Covid-19 the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 also authorized temporary changes to this federal student eligibility rule and included additional students in the pool of those who are eligible. In recent years, there have been several collaborative efforts by the Legislature, the Administration, and our partners and stakeholders to better address food insecurity among college students and to increase uptake of Calfresh by eligible students. SB 641 is an example of these efforts.

It was legislation that required CDSS to convene a stakeholder workgroup. We submitted a report to the Legislature earlier this month with the outcomes of that workgroup, which I'll address in your next question.

This position would allow us to continue to engage with higher ed stakeholders to further develop the data landscape with respect to identifying eligible students to facilitate enhanced and ongoing collaboration between the colleges and the counties, including training to continue to regularly update and post on our website a list of the state or locally funded programs that provide those exemptions I referenced earlier, and to provide technical assistance to the counties regarding the state's guidance on maximizing Calfresh eligibility.

Your second question was with respect to the report that we submitted earlier this month related to SB 641 and the views of the stakeholder workgroup that we gathered. There were eight recommendations listed in that report. The first was that we conduct a landscape analysis to identify county best practices for handling influxes of student applications. The second was to create a student eligibility decision tree. The third was for our Department to develop and deliver statewide training on student eligibility.

The fourth was to establish a partnership between college institutions and counties. The fifth was to increase Calfresh Administration funding. The 6th was to change student eligibility at the federal level. The 7th was to make the current temporary Calfresh student eligibility rules under the pandemic permanent, and the final recommendation from the workgroup was to improve the CALSA's functionality with respect to student applications.

In terms of your final question related to ongoing work by the Department to address food insecurity among students, CDSS will continue to engage with stakeholders. We have a quarterly student workgroup that continues to identify recommendations to be prioritized based on available resources and as described above, the requested resources in this proposal will allow us to continue engaging with the higher education stakeholders, working on the data landscape, posting relevant information on our website, and providing technical assistance to the counties.

In addition, I'd offer one final note that was in your agenda, which is that the 2022 Budget Act also included resources for counties to designate points of contact for the higher education segments to connect students to human services programs.

Anyone any comment? Department of Finance, any?

No additional comments, but happy to answer any questions.

Perfect. No questions for me. Perfect. We're going to hold the item open. We'll move on to issue number six.

Jen Troia again with the Department of Social Services. In this item, we are requesting permanent resources also for Calfresh in our Calfresh and nutrition branch, the employment and training section. Specifically, the resources include two staff service manager ones, five AGPA's, and one research data analyst. The need for these positions, which are fully federally funded, is to support our Calfresh employment and training program. The Calfresh ENT program, as we refer to it, is mandated by federal law for the purpose of increasing employment and earnings of Calfresh recipients.

It is provided in California at county option and in partnership with over 80 community service providers. With anticipated expansion in federal fiscal year 2023. The program provides case management services and access to education, work experience and job search assistance. In 2018, the federal Farm Bill codified some new regulations that directly impacted Calfresh ENT and these positions are to help us comply with those new requirements from the Federal Government.

Increasing the resources will also sustain our oversight of the Calfresh ENT program and expand program access and compliance with federal law.

Perfect. Thank you. We have a stakeholder as it relates to this BCP. Welcome back Becky, presenting the Calfresh ABAWD care benefits.

Thank you very much, Chair. The impact of ABAWD time limit rules on low-income Californians deepens already existing inequities because it impacts certain populations more than others, including people of color who currently face the greatest discrimination and barriers to employment, former foster youth, people with undiagnosed disabilities, family caregivers, noncustodial parents, parents with children in juvenile hall or in child protective services. In addition, research shows that there is a 53% overall reduction in program participation when people are subject to work requirements.

People with ABAWD status who are cut off from benefits have more serious physical and mental health conditions, and their incidence of experiencing physically unhealthy days increases by 14% while causing no significant change in employment status. Ensuring those with the greatest barriers to full time employment do not face hunger will support them to eat and not face the toxic stress of hunger as they try to find work.

Hunger never makes any person better able to prepare for work, secure a job, or succeed at their place of employment. Thankfully, California has a statewide ABAWD waiver in place, but this waiver is set to expire on October 31 of 2024, which would lead to many people losing eligibility for these critical Calfresh benefits. CARE or the California Antihunger response benefits would support people at risk of losing eligibility of Calfresh and help ensure that they are supported during hard times.

Our budget request this year is merely to invest in the automation and technology changes that are necessary in order to provide benefits in a future year. If we do not start this process this year, it may be too late to stand up the program in the future if and when we lose the ABAWD waiver. Federally, the new leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives is doubling down on restricting access to SNAP by expanding the reach of the program's time limit.

Just yesterday, the House narrowly passed a debt ceiling Bill that would dramatically worsen these already punitive ABAWD time limit rules. But that shouldn't stop California from doing what's right and becoming the first state in the country to protect its communities from this failed federal policy. We can do this by creating care benefits in the 2023-2024 budget with just a minimal investment of $3 million. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Jen, could you share with me how that waiver is going to anticipate it ever being not accessible for us to apply for.

The current waiver that we have runs through October 31 of 2024. Waivers from that point forward would be dependent upon the unemployment rate in the state or in portions of the state, and so it's a little difficult at this point to predict what our eligibility would be. We have clearly advocated it with the Federal Government before for greater flexibility with respect to that policy.

One of the positions that is here in our request is actually related to the ABAWD policy unit and the help for us to prepare for any impacts should they occur in the future in parts or all of the state. And we do work closely with counties to make sure that we are prepared and we can minimize any harm if the waiver is to expire.

And Becky, the request is for the $3 million to put aside in case so it would roll over each fiscal year if not utilized?

Thank you for the question. So the $3 million is just for the automation and technology changes that are necessary in the CALSA's and benefits Cal systems in order to be able to provide benefits in a future year. So it's just to create the sort of program and technology infrastructure so that if and when down the line we want to turn on the program, we would have a mechanism to do that.

Thank you so much, Senator Roth, any? Thank you. We're going to hold both items open. Appreciate it. Move on to issue number seven.

This is our final Calfresh item here before you this afternoon related to federally mandated workload. In recent years, as we've talked about in earlier agenda items, the number of individuals enrolled in Calfresh has more than doubled, and the program has grown quite significantly as a result of this rapid growth, which was not matched by commensurate increases in the resources for state operations we have sometimes struggled to perform at the level needed or to remain in compliance with all applicable requirements.

To address these concerns, we're requesting permanent resources for our Calfresh and nutrition branch in the form of two staff services managers, two AGPAs and one more AGPA in different policy bureaus. The costs of this proposal are 266,000 General Fund in 23-24 and 259,000 General Fund in 24-25 and ongoing. These positions are intended to provide the counties with necessary quality control, training, technical assistance, and to facilitate information flowing between the state and the counties in our oversight role.

They will also support the implementation of those complex time limit policies related to the ABAWD policies that we were just discussing, develop guidance for and perform statewide coordination of SNAP Ed annual work plans, and engage in tribal consultation related to SNAP regulations. These increased resources would enable us to adhere to the federal mandates, to adequately train staff to perform reviews, to mitigate risks, and prioritize payment accuracy rates. With these resources, we believe we'll be better able to comply with federal requirements.

Thank you. LAO. Any comment? Department of Finance. Any comment?

Janine Doctor, Department of Finance no comments to add, but happy to answer any questions.

Great. I don't have any question. No question. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jen, and we're going to hold that item open, close out that section, move on to the CalWORKS section, issue number eight. Welcome back, Director Johnson, who will provide us a CalWORKS overview.

Thank you, Madam Chair, Committee Members. Kim Johnson, California Department of Social Services I want to start by thanking the Legislature and the continued partnership we've made together with the Administration on making some very significant policy changes to this program, supporting hundreds of thousands of families across California and ensuring that they have what they need to disrupt poverty and have economic mobility opportunities. The Committee asked for an overview of what's included in the Governor's Budget.

The budget provides again funding for cash assistance, eligibility Administration and services to support families. The current year revised budget includes 6.4 billion total funds for CalWORKS programs. This represents a net decrease of $24.7 million from the previous estimates in the Budget Act of 2022. The current year decrease is primarily due to a slower growth of overall projected CalWORKS Caseload, which is offset by a higher CalWORKS employment services caseload projection.

Funding for budget year includes 6.7 billion total funds for CalWORKS as the CalWORKS Employment services caseload is projected to continue increasing as well as an increase of employment services case management for intensive cases, resulting in a net increase of $260.3 million from the Budget Act of 2022. Though increasing, the CalWORKS caseload is expected to be a 6.1% lower than previously projected for current year and 2.7% lower for budget year compared to again to the 2022 Budget Act.

The Governor's Budget maintains the transfer of temporary assistance for needy families, or TANF funding to the California Student Aid Commission at $400 million and continues to utilize 18.4 million in TANF at California Community colleges and California Department of Education for educational and work activities for CalWORKS families. Your agenda also points out the grant level increases for the program and again, grant levels are established in state statute and vary based on family size, income level and region.

The maximum grant is referred to as a maximum aid payment or map level. Under state law, local revenue growth in the Child poverty and Family supplemental support realignment sub account automatically triggers grant increases in current year. The budget included around $300 million for an ongoing map increase of 11% effective October of 2022 associated with local revenue growth. Current year also included $816,000,000 of General Fund for an additional temporary 10% map increase effective of October 2022 through September of 2024.

An additional map increase of 2.9% is projected for October of this year. This increase will bring the nonexempt map level from $1,130 to $1,163 per month for an assistance unit of three residing in a high cost county, which is a $33 increase from the current level and equates to 61% of the 2022 federal poverty level as it relates to CalWORKS's caseload. During the pandemic, the caseload decreased. However, we have been seeing increases in the caseload over the last year.

In fiscal year 21-22 CalWORKS served an average of 302,000 families and 614,600 children. The projected average monthly CalWORKS caseload is 347,900 families in current year and 360,300 families in budget year. Though increasing the CalWORKS caseload is expected to be 6.1%, again lower than previously projected, and 2.7% lower than budget year in terms of demographics.

Also, of the caseload, just under half of all cases have a child under the age of 6. 59.9% of cases support families identifying as Hispanic or Latino, 15.2% identified as black or African American, 69.4% speak English as their primary language, and 27.2% speak Spanish as their primary language. Of our CalWORKS welfare to work participant head of households, 56.4% have completed a high school diploma or equivalent 41.8% of the caseload are child-only cases.

Cases not safety net or timed out. 8.1% are in the welfare to work sanction status, 16.8% are in the exempt status, and the remaining 33.3% are welfare to work participants. Would also just note that your agenda asks for some changes we are proposing to the CalWORKS single allocation. As a reminder, the single allocation refers to funding provided by the state to the counties to support the Administration of the Program. It reflects the cost to provide eligibility Administration, employment services and Cal Learn intensive case management.

These costs are budgeted individually for each component, but counties may use the funds interchangeably within a single allocation. In 2018--19 we began to use a new funding formula developed in partnership between the state and counties. This new formula increases or decreases administrative funding in increments based on caseload changes, and this formula recognizes that counties cannot rapidly change their staffing levels in response to changing caseload. During the pandemic caseload decrease, which normally would trigger funding decreases.

However, these decreases were suspended the last three years, and the state provided both ongoing and temporary augmentation to administrative funding. The Governor's Budget proposes to reduce county Administration funding by one increment or $28 million to align funding with recent caseload declines. The budget also recognizes a shift in administrative funding related to the cost sharing agreements with other county administered programs. The current year total single allocation funding includes 1.9 billion total funds.

Existing law requires the Department, in consultation with the Association and counties, to reassess the funding methodology for the CalWORKS eligibility Administration component of the single allocation during the 24-25 Governor's Budget or 2025 May revision and every third year thereafter. We anticipate that those reassessment conversations will begin this summer and look forward to having additional conversation with the Legislature. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I'd like to turn over to the LAO for their answer to the question.

Yes. Ryan Anderson, Legislative Analyst Office no big comments here. I will say if you've been following along the last several years with budgeting for this program. We've had an ongoing back and forth with the Administration about how to forecast caseload in these very unusual times since the pandemic. That started out with our projections being very distant, billions of dollars of difference between us. But we have since come into alignment.

So essentially our forecasts for both the caseload and for the projected grant increase are more or less identical to what the Administration has right now. Forecasts always uncertain, which is another way of saying we always end up being wrong, but in this case, we will be wrong together. So that's all to say right now.

Department of Finance, any comment?

Jenean Docter, Department of Finance, nothing more to add, but happy to answer any questions. Thanks.

Thank you. Director, regarding the administrative funding, by one increment, is that due to the under projection of caseload that we had the Department anticipated?

Again, we are following the methodology we all agreed to with this Governor's Budget proposal. It's that we had suspended it again, given the rapidly changing conditions all of us have been experiencing over the last few years. So it is following the funding formula based on what our caseload is projecting. We've had some conversations with counties in the Association on this front.

Hence our agreement to revisit the funding methodology going forward, and every so often going forward, just so that we can revisit what changing circumstances that we might be looking at going forward. So that's the conversation we look forward to having in 24-25 subsequent to that, and, of course, any adjustments to caseload will be updated in the May revision.

Thank you. Senator. Well, thank you so much for that overview. We're going to hold the item open. We're going to now turn into our next panel here on reimagining CalWORKS. This is a panel discussion on the CalWORKS take up efforts to refocus the CalWORKS program on the needs of families living in deep poverty and to include a stakeholder proposal. We might not have enough chairs.

Yes, Kathy, if you. Kathy, I think there's one over here. There's a chair. There's another chair over here. Yeah.

Including this panel is going to be LAO. Ryan, welcome back. We have Sara Kimberlin from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, Rachel Church from Parent Voices. Hi again, Kathy McDonald, the ED of the County and Welfare Directors Association, and then we'll end with the stakeholder proposal presented by Yesenia Jimenez from the Grace and End Child Poverty. So I'd like to start off with LAO.

Hello again. Ryan Anderson, Legislative Analyst Office. We've been asked to discuss some of our findings on our ongoing CalWORKS takeup rate project. So a few years ago, we developed a methodology for identifying likely CalWORKS eligible families within the Census Bureau's American Community Survey data. The big takeaway of that was we found takeup rate overall in the program was somewhere around 60%, and that represented a decrease from around 70% over the past 10 years.

Now, once we developed that methodology, we realized we had access to a wealth of information about these eligible families because the American Community Survey is a very rich data source. So recently we published a follow up documentation looking at what are the characteristics of CalWORKS eligible families and which of these characteristics are associated with particularly high or particularly low takeup rates.

Generally, we found a pattern under which groups which have historically or on average, more tenuous connections to the labor market or higher poverty rates, higher unemployment rates. These groups tend to both be more likely to be eligible for CalWORKS and, once eligible for CalWORKS, more likely to enroll.

So examples here would include that eligibility and take up rates are especially high for those with no college education, for those who are unemployed, of course, for different ethnicity groups, primarily following the pattern of what are average poverty and unemployment rates for the ethnicity groups. We did, however, find two significant exceptions to this trend. They were both racial or ethnicity groups.

Specifically, Hispanic Latino families are less likely to enroll in the program than you would expect, given their poverty and unemployment rates on average, and white families are more likely to enroll. We go into some general hypotheses as to what might drive differences in takeup rates in our paper. It's difficult to explain for any one group what is going on, but we do know one thing which is a very common behavior among CalWORKS eligible families is reliance on their social safety net to get by.

And in particular, we see a lot of cohabitation between CalWORKS eligible families and relatively more affluent friends and family. One example of that are multigenerational households where adults who have children may live with their grandparents, the child's grandparents who are helping those parents get by. We find those multigeneration arrangements are most common when you look, by racial ethnicity groups among Californians who are Hispanic Latino, they are least common among Californians who are white.

This might provide some of the explanation for why those two groups are abnormal. The other big takeaway, then, of course, is that our lowest takeup rates are actually among those groups who are relatively privileged, right. Groups that have more education, that have two parents in the home who are routinely employed. Even when they are eligible for this program, they are not taking up the program. This has consequences, the two in particular, of interest to the Legislature, we believe.

First, even though these groups may be relatively privileged to be eligible for CalWORKS, you still have to be in pretty desperate straits. Just the income eligibility limits for this program, around 80% of federal poverty, which itself is a very low threshold. So these are still needy families.

Second, and I think we're going to get into this conversation in this panel, is the work participation rate. A cloud that is hanging over this program perpetually is that the Federal Government is very concerned about the rate at which families who are receiving cash assistance include a working parent. Well, one way we can solve that is by helping families who do not have a close connection with the labor market become employed.

But another way that we can improve our work participation rate is by engaging families who are already employed or who are routinely employed and getting them to enroll in a program that they're already eligible for. So we think, thinking through, how could we make this program more attractive for them? Either by increasing benefits, by decreasing requirements, the paperwork associated with enrolling, or re -enrolling. These are, we think, issues of great interest for the Legislature. That's all for right now. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Ryan. I'd like to turn over to Sarah.

Thank you, Chair Menjivar, Members of the Committee. My name is Sara Kimberlin, now with the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. But until recently, I was a senior policy fellow with the California Budget and Policy Center, and today I'm presenting information from work there, specifically from two budget center reports published this year on CalWORKS. Today I was asked to focus on three issues. First, the significant barriers that CalWORKS participants face. Second, the county work participation rate penalty. And third, CalWORKS participant sanctions.

So the first point I'll highlight is that CalWORKS participants face multiple challenges to establishing economic security. CalWORKS parents face a labor market in which gender and race based discrimination are ongoing, as well as workplaces that make it difficult for parents to balance work with caregiving. And CalWORKS parents are particularly exposed to these inequitable conditions because they are overwhelmingly women, people of color, and parents of young children. CalWORKS parents also face an economy where higher education is increasingly required for all but the lowest paying jobs.

Yet nearly half of CalWORKS household heads do not have a high school degree or equivalent. This situation reflects structural barriers to education that many have encountered. A significant share of CalWORKS parents also experience health challenges, such as mental health and substance abuse challenges, and many are survivors of domestic abuse. Despite these obstacles, each of these parents has demonstrated the determination and resilience to successfully navigate to and connect with the CalWORKS program to access support for their children and families.

And that resilience really points to how much California has to gain from supporting and investing in these families, which leads to the second issue. I will discuss the county work participation penalty. So, starting with some important background that CalWORKS is funded through the federal TANF program and also with state and county funds.

So there are federal guidelines, but also some significant state discretion in how to design the program. And recognizing the importance of supporting the parents and children in CalWORKS, state policymakers have made several changes to the program in recent years that focus on respectfully addressing the challenges the parents face so that their families can secure long term stability.

These reforms include establishing state specific standards for the activities that CalWORKS parents participate in that are distinct from the federal standards and that do not include rigid time limits for advancing education or addressing other barriers. However, these recent constructive reforms are hindered from full implementation because state policy continues to threaten counties with financial penalties that are linked to the federal standards for parents activities.

So the federal government formally evaluates state programs only based on specific targets for the federal work participation rate, or WPR, which is measured by the percentage of parents that are engaged in a narrowly defined set of activities that are focused on requiring parents to obtain paid employment as quickly as possible.

These types of harsh work requirements have racist and sexist roots, and on top of that, something I really want to emphasize is that research demonstrates that these kinds of rigid work requirements do not lead to long term improvements in employment and income. At the same time, they are linked to increases in deep poverty.

So current state policy reinforces this ineffective federal approach to work requirements because counties would be charged a financial penalty if they missed the federal WPR targets when the state received a federal penalty for not meeting targets.

So this policy incentivizes counties and caseworkers to direct CalWORKS participants only into the narrow list of activities that count toward meeting the federal WPR and away from state supported, state approved activities that don't fully count for the WPR, like addressing barriers even if addressing barriers would be the best investments for participants' long-term stability and employment prospects.

So, for example, nearly one in two CalWORKS head of household lack a high school degree, yet adult basic education or high school or GED prep do not fully account for the federal WPR. Similarly, more than one in four CalWORKS parents were recommended for mental health services, about one in 20 recommended for substance abuse services, and more than one in six were recommended for domestic abuse services. Yet services to address any of these barriers do not fully count for the federal WPR.

So this financial penalty policy therefore works at cross purposes with extensive recent CalWORKS reform efforts. And repealing this policy could better align state policy with other recent reforms to focus on supporting families. And then the final issue I will briefly mention is CalWORKS sanctions. So if a CalWORKS parent does not document participation in required activities for the required number of hours, they can be sanctioned, which means that funds will be taken away from the monthly grant that their family receives to pay for basic needs.

This is another policy that reinforces the counterproductive federal focus on rigid and punitive work requirements. Research shows that sanctioned parents are often those who face the most barriers to employment and do not fully understand the sanctions process. Sanctions can significantly reduce the income that families have to meet their basic needs, and children make up the majority of the people affected.

CalWORKS sanctions push about 60,000 children each month into deeper poverty, and these children are directly affected when their families lose the income needed to pay for basic necessities like rent, electricity, food, or diapers. And state policymakers have the authority to reduce the amount and length of CalWORKS sanctions which would reduce this harm to children and families.

And I will conclude by just reinforcing the point that policymakers have several options to continue to better align state policy and to build on recent CalWORKS reforms to further bolster support for the families in the program. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Sara. Turning it over now to Rachel from Parent Voices.

Hello. My name is Rachel Church, and this is my daughter, Alessandra Garcez Church. We represent a community in San Francisco's mission district that we come from homelessness, poverty, and hunger. So I am currently working as a customer service representative. I want to thank Chair Menjivar and the rest of the Senate Budget Subcommitee Three Members, for providing me with this opportunity to share my experience with the CalWORKS program.

Although my experience was not perfect, I appreciate the commitment of all of you to partner with parents like me to transform this system to better support the parents and kids who rely on CalWORKS. From 2018 to 2021, I was receiving CalWORKS. Although receiving cache was helpful to me, I also had many negative experiences with the program.

I was made to feel lazy because I'm a mother of a child of color and I felt like I was looked down upon like a bad parent, like I was cheating the system. I was asked to turn in my husband's death certificate three separate times. During my CalWORKS intake process, I was wearing a pair of rosary earrings that I bought from Texas Hoyaria on 24th street.

My worker made it a point to ask me about them and I told him that they were to keep me safe and they cost me $125. He had told me that that could impact my case, even though, based on my income, I qualified for the program. He never made a note of this, so I'm not even sure why he asked. All it accomplished was making me feel bad.

There were also numerous times when I mailed in paperwork and it was either never received or it was received only for them to later on ask me for the same paperwork again. And gathering documents is a challenge. One example of this was for the death certificate of my husband, who passed away on 16th in Folsom from a heart attack.

And that just brought back terrible memories and I had to go through that over and over again, turning in this document and the only reason they had wanted it so many times was because they just wanted to make sure there was no other parent involved. My benefits were cut off in 2021, even though, based on my income and what other people were telling me, I still qualified. To this day, I've never received any kind of denial notice or anything written, no letter of discontinuance or anything.

I feel like my worker had an issue with me because I was persistent and he was trying to put me in my place. I was never made to feel comfortable or supported. I was always treated less than, like I was lazy, and I always felt pressured to make sure I presented myself as professionally as possible to make them feel like I was like a deserving recipient of CalWORKS.

It's unfortunate that parents like me who are in need of support and who qualify for these programs are met with hostility and suspicion by the workers who are there to help us. I know that this isn't the case for all parents and all workers, but it was my experience. It's through our experiences that we can help to reimagine the program. Please support the Reimagine CalWORKS Coalition Budget.

Thank you so much, Rachel. Turning it over to Kathy Senderling-McDonald from CWDA.

Thank you, Senator and Members of the Committee. I was asked to talk about the CalWORKS 2.0 effort and the related Cal-OR project, as well as the WPR, as Ms. Kimberlin also addressed. So, as you know, it's been 25 years now since CalWORKS was initially created after the welfare reform law at the federal level was passed.

And several years ago, we were realizing not just counties, but advocates and legislators as well, that we weren't really where we wanted to be with the program, especially when it came to engaging with our clients and moving forward with their welfare to work efforts. We'd learned a lot, I think, since the mid 1990s, about poverty, inequality, and family dynamics, and none of that had been really incorporated into the program. So CWDA launched an effort called CalWORKS 2.0 with the help of Mathematica, a national organization.

And it ultimately resulted in the development of new tools and new approaches to engaging parents, not just in developing a welfare to work plan, but trying to set goals that they can measure, retool over time, and recognizing that not everyone is going to meet those strict work requirements right away, that there are times when there might be an issue with the children at school, there might be behavioral health, domestic abuse issues that need to be addressed, and that that's all right, that it is okay to have that be the plan.

And so just a really different way of working with our families. Nearly every county has engaged in this process at some point. And even during the pandemic, we continued to offer workshops and opportunities to work with the Mathematica team remotely to implement the processes. At the same time, we were also thinking about how do we create more accountability in a public way for our system so we can measure what's going on.

A lot of the issues were around a lack of data or a lack of understanding about what was really going on with the program, and that WPR as really the only measure, which we don't think is the right thing.

And so the idea of Cal-OR is built after AB 636, the child welfare outcomes and accountability system that involves broad self assessments, including input from workers, from recipients, from advocates in the community, and other partners, development of a self improvement plan, regular check ins, and a regular public reporting of key data measures that aren't just about the WPR, but are about other things as well.

And so it was really slowed down by the pandemic, but we're finally underway with the first round of county self assessments and system improvement plans. As you heard, the WPR penalty really makes it, I think, impossible for some counties to go all in on these things. If you think about 2.0, saying it's okay not to meet that WPR right away. There are some people who need to do education, who need to get those other services.

And so we're going to say, let's work with you to get those. But the only thing that a penalty is related to is the WPR. So what gets measured gets done, but what gets penalized gets prioritized. If the County Board of Supervisors or CAO knows we might someday get a penalty, well, why aren't you focusing on the WPR? And so some counties can kind of step away from that.

But locally, it can be difficult to really go all in and be able to really put those 2.0 principles into play. And so removing it, which is part of the proposal, will give counties the ability to really focus on those other measures in addition to the WPR. And really, I think, bring together the concepts of the different engagement of 2.0 and the development of goals, rather than sort of the punitive situation that we've got today.

I just want to say, I think in final, I think we're in a situation where, from a programmatic perspective, we're really moving toward a greater understanding of what works, how we can engage better with parents, and how we can really help families make really lasting changes. But there are various components, both at the federal and the state level, that still aren't really aligned with that. And so we would really encourage you, and we're all in on figuring out how to better align those things so we can really do that. Thank you.

Thank you so much. And we'll end the panel with a stakeholder proposal. Go ahead, Yesenia.

Good afternoon, Chair and Members of the Subcommitee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today on behalf of the Reimagined CalWORKS Coalition. As mentioned, my name is Yesenia Jimenez and I'm a senior policy associate at Grace and End Child Poverty in California, where we dare to imagine a liberated future free from systemic racism and poverty, in which all children and families experience abundance, dignity, love, and opportunities to thrive.

Alongside my current role, I'm also a graduate student at UCLA, pursuing my masters of public policy, and today I would like to thank you. Today I would like to share a little more about what brings me to this work and why it is important that we as a state reimagine the CalWORKS program. Growing up, my family of seven shared one bedroom and I shared a twin size mattress with my older sister until I was in the 8th grade.

I share this image because it is just one way that trauma and trauma of poverty manifests for families experiencing poverty. For a couple of years, CalWORKS was our family's sole source of income when my mother suffered through severe health complications as a result of domestic violence. I know today, had it not been for the income we gained from CalWORKS, along with other benefits in our safety net, that I would not be here today.

And so I'm appreciative of the public benefits programs that are available in our social safety net here in California. However, families experiencing poverty turn to CalWORKS because they want to meet their family's urgent needs. Today, CDSS reports as of November 2022, 20.9% of CalWORKS families earn an average monthly income of $1 to $200. That's $12 to $2,400 annually if a family doesn't see a change in their earnings.

And this was very much the picture for my family for a couple of years. And yet, our existing Cowworks program reinforces counterproductive requirements rooted in racist and sexist perceptions about people living in poverty. Conditioning public benefits to work is premised on racist and sexist assumptions that people living in poverty do not want to work, and it fails to recognize the incredible labor people of color do to keep this economy afloat. And it doesn't fully consider the barriers to work uniquely faced by those living in poverty.

As a consequence, these harsh requirements limit a family's access to this vital program. These policies include penalizing CalWORKS parents who are not meeting program requirements by imposing harsh sanctions that reduce their monthly grants. As mentioned by Sara, the families of 60,000 children are affected by sanctions each month. And again, if 20.9% of the families are currently earning a dollar to $12 a month, to $200 a month on average, that's a very harsh sanction that they have to endure.

But there is hope. We can indeed reimagine the CalWORKS program. A 2022 report developed by the National Association of State TANF Administrators and published by the American Public Human Services Association outlined six principles for modernizing the TANF program. The principles outlined in the report have been used by other states, including Vermont.

Given the considerable flexibility states have to implement these policies and structure their programs to be more family centered and trauma informed, our CalWORKS Coalition believes it is necessary we reimagine our CalWORKS program to be anti-racist and anti-sexist. We can reimagine the CalWORKS program by removing pejorative and racist language in existing code and replace it with family centered and empowering language.

Eliminate all non federally required sanctions including those related to truancy and satisfactory report card progress in the Cal-LEARN program specifically for teen parents. Empower parents to choose the work activities that best support their goals. Expand countable work activities and ensure that participation in any work activity that family find most conducive to their self-sufficiency also count. And lastly, as sort of discussed already, eliminate the county work penalty pass through.

A comprehensive family centered approach is necessary to move away from the rigid one size fits all work first TANF model based in racist and sexist assumptions about people living in poverty and ensure CalWORKS becomes the family centered program California deserves. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Senator Eggman, as a previous Chair, this is tough stuff. These are heavy stories. I'm going to need some tips on how to process a lot of this, but I really thank everyone for sharing insight and your own personal stories and your bravery behind that. Department of Finance, do you have any comments to add to this? You can just shake your head from there. Perfect. All right, so turning it over here for us for questions. As I gather my thoughts, does anyone want to start on any immediate?

Probably being the least informed here, I'll try to ask an intelligent question. I'm just curious, listening to this, I think maybe one of the tragic results of our credentials creep, educational credentials creep that we see in this state and really across the country is the impact on CalWORKS and the CalWORKS participants. You mentioned the GED at one point in your presentation. Can you repeat what that relates to? I think I missed the point. What the point I wrote down was GED doesn't qualify, but I may have missed that.

So the point I was making related to GED or general equivalency degree, which is a high school equivalent degree. So just to be clear is that first of all, that nearly half of CalWORKS heads of household do not have a high school degree or GED.

And then the second piece of that is that participation in GED preparation or attending high school, or the kinds of activities, educational activities, that work towards getting that kind of a high school or GED degree do not fully count towards the meeting the federal work participation penalty or, sorry, federal work participation rate. So there are limitations on the amount of time that parents can spend doing that.

And so if they spend more time than is allowed on that activity, then it no longer counts as them meeting the participation requirements for the federal WPR rule, whereas that's according to the federal guidelines around activities. At the state level in terms of the state specific standards that California has put into place.

There are no rigid time limits on participation in those kinds of educational activities out of recognition that different people will need different amounts of time and that if this is the activity that a parent needs to focus on intensively in order to gain that credential to improve their long term employment prospects, that that may be the best activity for them to be participating in in terms of furthering their long term employment and self sufficiency.

But since it's a federal rule, I assume we can't do anything about that at this level.

On the contrary, actually, the state has our own state specific participation standards. So a participant will meet state standards by participating in a GED prep program, for example. But that person may not be able to be counted towards meeting the federal WPR requirement.

And the consequences of that are a penalty.

The consequences could be a penalty, although in fact the state has never actually had to pay a penalty. But that is the metric that's used at the federal level for calculating a penalty.

Well, that's good, because it would be truly unfortunate if we allow credentials creep to continue, yet we restrict individuals opportunities to attain the credentials necessary to secure employment.

If I might, sir. Kathy Senderling, CWDA, on the high school diploma or equivalency, I actually worked on that legislation. We sponsored it at CWDA to remove those more rigid requirements, and I think it's a good example of how we've chipped away at it over time in the legislation. I think what the coalition is seeking to do is be more wholesale about it in the changes. So we've gotten some of the things kind of out of our own way at the state level. But you're right, at the federal level, we do still have to meet that one measure is the only thing that they look at. So that is frustrating.

And then just one final question, which again will illustrate how uninformed I am on the subject. I'm just curious. We have issues with childcare throughout the state and funding for childcare. How do those issues impact this particular subject, if at all?

Well, others can certainly jump in, but again, Kathy Senderling, CWDA, the childcare is part of the CalWORKS program, and there have been some recent changes in state law to make it more automatic that someone is able to qualify for childcare. We have three different stages of childcare. I won't get into the details, but stages 1 and 2 are entitlements related to the program, and then you sort of move through the program and ultimately get to stage three of the program as you're moving through the stages.

But we have thought of that, and I think we've improved over the time, though I know finding childcare providers can always be difficult. And what are the rates? And those are certainly conversations for other parts of the budget, but has been an ongoing thing. We've tried to make it easier to access.

Right. I guess that's my question. If you can't find a provider, it probably affects the work participation rate, I assume.

Yeah. And some of that has been like how the state rules would reimburse people and the providers to kind of make the point. People can have really odd hours to work at a lot of these jobs. You know, people have service jobs and things, and you don't know what hours you're going to work always until maybe the week prior. And so you have to say to the childcare provider, I need Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, next week, and then the next week.

I need Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday. And so that has been frustrating, I think, for the providers and for our recipients at times as well. I believe some of the changes put into place thought to address that as well. I couldn't say that it's perfect or fully addressed.

And, of course, that's our job to try to, and the administration's job, obviously, to try to coordinate pieces of the budget so the systems that we have in place sort of work together. Right. Thank you, Madam Chair.

No, thank you, Senator.

And I think to your comments of like, this is a very complex, complicated situation. We're trying to create changes but are limited by the federal rules that we have to abide by. And I do want to note that in the 2022 Budget Act, CDSS was required to put together a work group, a stakeholder work group, and we'll be seeing some of those recommendations to come out in the May revision. I don't know if you want to share any little thing related to some of those recommendations.

Yes.

Kim Johnson, California Department of Social Services. Thank you for the opportunity. I will and glad to share kind of what we heard through a very robust engagement on this conversation of work participation rate. The high level recommendations from stakeholders include the desire from the work group for a full repeal of the federal work participation rate or WPR penalty pass on. Greater accountability in the form of calor performance measures or other metrics to be further explored and established.

Adopting reforms to increase supports for families, such as reforms to reduce the overall number of sanctions and reducing the financial impact and duration of the sanctions for the families. So we are absolutely looking forward to sharing our recommendations based on the consultations that we've had going forward. Thank you.

Perfect. Yeah. Thank you so much on that and I appreciate it Director. Kathy, my question for you is we talked about 2.0 and if we do repeal, remove this just education around county workers and fully understanding. Because I can imagine for years I wouldn't say you're fearful, but for years you have this looming over you. How do you do that? Switch to say, oh, now I can go into the other services and not be penalized. What does that education look like? It will look like.

Yeah, I think that's a great question. A couple of things to say. One is, I think we have a good base from the fact that nearly every county has participated in the 2.0 effort up to this point, and so they at least have some familiarity with those approaches.

There are some tools that were developed and things like that to do that goal setting, and so being able to add in with those, some additional training and education around specifically that point that it's okay if that doesn't get you necessarily to that number of hours or that specific work participation rate, I think we still will probably need to think about it because we need to track what is done because of that federal WPR.

I don't think you can just throw it all out the window, most likely, but at least there's a base to start from. The other thing I'll mention that I don't recall if it came up in the overview panel just prior, is we are engaging with the state on an effort to develop a diversity, equity and inclusion training for all of our CalWorks staff and all of our CalFresh staff. And I do think that that will help as well, form a base.

We hate to think about the fact that our systems are traumatizing to people, but just the fact that we know putting yourself out there to ask for the help can be traumatizing. And then to provide something three times retraumatizes you and to feel like you're not made to feel like a good person is traumatizing. None of my members want to hear that. I mean, they're going to watch this and go because they don't want that to happen.

And we want to take at absolute face value, though, that that does happen. And so we're hopeful that in working through these issues with a more diverse and equitable focus, as well as hopefully a more diverse and educated in this manner workforce, through this training, we could also set a good grounding for being open to those engagement conversations that you're at the same level, you're working together. It's not an imposition of a plan. It's rather a creation of a plan together.

And so I'm hopeful that those things will kind of ground us and help us get to that next step.

Thank you so much for that. In Ryan's presentation, he spoke about we're having trouble, not trouble, but he suggested getting at people who are already working to apply and who are eligible you know he talked about some of the racial percentages of who's eligible versus who's actually applying for it. I can imagine. On the Latino side, I remember when public charge was the really big thing. It took me a while to understand which one fell under public charge, which one didn't.

And depending on the Federal Administration that is serving at that time, that will adds an additional barrier for people to apply for public benefits and so forth, and that's going to loom forever. I don't think we're ever going to really get at the root of some of the concerns of our marginalized communities and immigrant communities. But I want to hear a little bit more about that suggestion. I'm always interested in being proactive.

I will always repeat this, just because you build something, people won't come to you. What's the work around how we're marketing, if you will, this program? When I see these numbers of about 370,000 in our 40 million individuals in Californians, I can imagine that's nowhere near the amount of people who are eligible and could really be impacted positively from this program. So what are we looking at to get at these individuals who are eligible and struggling every single day?

And I'm not sure that might be a county question or a Department question, and I don't know if there's anything that you can share, Kathy, or Director, on that.

I'll start and see if Director Johnson wants to add as well. It is incredibly refreshing and unusual to be in a discussion of how do we get more people to sign up for CalWorks. I just want to say because for 20 years of my, you know, that's how long I've been around, it was at least unwritten, maybe unsaid. But at this point, we fully spend our federal block grant. And so every additional dollar that's spent in CalWorks is a state dollar.

It's a state General Fund cost. And there was just this sense that we don't want people come because that's really costly. And so I think early days of the program, you saw a lot of requirements that have since been dropped. And this Administration, the prior Administration, we started to whittle away at those. A lot of them were, in fact, very racist, sexist, classist and things like the maximum family grant rule.

And I think you do probably also have some residual feelings about those from people who may think of the program as being really not for me or not aimed at me or not there to support me. So I don't have a great answer as far as how to best go about getting more people to sign up, especially those who are eligible and working sort of, to Ryan's point.

But I would be very happy to explore that with folks because I think, you know, the program's there and, you know, it can provide really important services for people. Childcare is really expensive. I just went through that. I mean, my kids, nine now, but, jeez, it's expensive. And so if we can help people with that while they're working, why would they not? And so it's the question of why would they not? What is the barrier to entry and how do people feel about the program?

It's a very fair question and one that I'm excited that we're actually exploring because it hasn't really happened to this degree in the.

Thank you I would just add, I'd add in the excitement, a couple of things I'll say as it relates to reaching families who are eligible, but we're not serving. We have been working closely with the LAO on their methodology in identifying how they're establishing the takeup rate and also doing our kind of parallel track on methodology of what we're looking at there. And not unlike what we do in CalFresh, that helps then dictate where we need to target our outreach and how we need to do so.

So whether we're looking at language access, and I want to appreciate on earlier panels the conversations we've had in food for all around how critical, and we've learned that certainly through the pandemic that language access is to reaching populations. But again, want to note that the work we're doing to get clearer on that who we are not reaching will certainly dictate our targeted outreach campaigns.

We have a stakeholder engagement Committee on this front and obviously want to leverage what we're already doing on outreach so that, again, we're not just connecting to one program, but the whole array that we built together. I'll also just say to your point, chair, I appreciate your point on especially reaching immigrant communities, we've made some very intentional choices in our program over time in recognition of that. So we know we have a lot of mixed status households in our program.

And so, for example, our strength based voluntary home visiting program, we have a very specific immigrant immigration component so that if we come across a family who may be eligible for a remedy, immigration remedy, that we are connecting to our immigrant legal service providers as part of what we've also built in California to support getting that immigration remedy supported.

So again, I do think that when we're intentional and thinking about our families in California and how we are, again, connecting to the array, these are some of the strategies that we're undertaking together.

Madam Chair, may I ask a follow up in one of my other budget assignments, we struggled with the yearned income tax credit and how to get the word out to individuals who didn't owe any taxes, but just to file a return so they could get some money. And we funded outreach. And I'm certain that we probably Fund outreach and somewhere in the budget for this effort.

But I think what we also found, I could stand to be corrected, is that we needed to involve nonprofits and the NGOs to help us get the word out. And I'm not sure if you're working in that area here, in that space here, but I think we had some success with the EITC. I think there's more work to be done there. And thank you for working on this. But just a thought.

Absolutely, Senator. It's a great thought. And just, again, in terms of our holistic approach here, Earned Income Tax Credit is a huge benefit. That makes a big difference. So we actually have employed a number of strategies that I'm happy to actually share with you.

I'll try to grab the numbers as I'm heading up for another panel where we actually did some campaigning around connecting to EITC and some new strategies with texting and other components and have seen a great return on the amount of dollars that's then going into the pockets of families experiencing poverty across our state. So want to lift that up and completely appreciate that. And to your point about community based organizations as partners, absolutely.

And again, especially as it relates to communities who have been more greatly impacted by former federal proposals like public charge, we have that trusted messenger and community. And again, in a pandemic, certainly part of our, we asked a lot of them and continue to just in terms of how we are connecting people from the community with others to connect to our program Director, would you say that's.

Related to just some of the recent funding on the campaign to go towards campaign on marketing from the 2021 budget? I know we haven't started fully implementing that, but some of the things you mentioned, are they tied into?

Absolutely. So our engagement Committee is called CalSore because we need another acronym in our lives, statewide outreach advisory work group and Committee is that effort. And so we're right in the midst of actually outlining all of those strategies. And again, as I mentioned, we want to make sure it's informed by the data of where we need to go and who we need to reach, but certainly a big focus of ours.

So we will be giving you our plan of overall strategies on outreach for CalWorks, promotional materials, media, using ethnic media, all kinds of things happening on that front. I'll also note that recently with our partners at GovOps, we've looked at, we want to recognize the technology that exists so we know that when we're maybe anyone doing online shopping, somehow you looked for that blazer, but now it's asking you, do you want shoes to go with that blazer?

Well, we're using kind of adopting that strategy to say if someone's looking for food assistance, are we connecting them to cash assistance or housing assistance so that where people are finding doorways and pathways, how are we making sure, again, that they're connected to the whole. So we have piloted and tested some of those technology components.

Again, we've worked with the associations and counties on that because again, we want to ensure we are working to recognize the outreach is going to potentially bring new families to apply and to their door intentionally and want to make sure the resources are there to compensate that effort as well. So absolutely, kind of using all strategies on all fronts to find families where they are and connect them to what we've built.

Thank you, Director, for your willingness to be part of this panel. Well, not being part of this panel, this one stumped to me because I felt we're looking at preventative DV services, GED, mental health. These are barriers. If you don't address them, you're not going to be able to work, but we're stuck in this federal antiquated requirement. So this is why I was sent. I was like, I can't force for that to be counted because it should be counted.

These are the first steps in getting a job when you're dealing with generational trauma and so forth. So that's when the beginning, I was a little stumped. I'm thrilled to hear some of the preliminary recommendations from this work group. And I know CDSs is going to take those back and we'll see some of their recommendations and then Ray, revision. Senator Eggman, any thoughts? Comments?

Yeah, thank you. And I think first want to say, Sarah, thank you for your words and your testament. You did a fantastic job. And thank you for showing up today to tell us your story means a lot. It helps. Yeah. I'm the 6th panelist. Yeah. And he said, thanks for sharing your story, too. All right.

Because it just underlines how important education is and how transformative it is that you go from living in one bedroom with a whole family and to now here you are testifying here before the Senate, getting your master's degree. Well, come on now.

Come on. But education is transformative. And to the Director and to Ms. Sunderling, I just state this Senate certainly is moving in a direction that we don't have to live in a world of scarcity. And I think that's what CalWorks was kind of designed around, is this scarcity will help you if you really need it. And we understand now that people can't grow and change in that.

And just like we found through the pandemic when we pumped a lot of money in, because we had the resources that we could really imagine what public service and public assistance could look like. And thank you to the Director for really taking a lot of this on where there should be no wrong doors, where if you apply for one program, you should be eligible for all of those, just to make it easier.

And understanding how traumatizing poverty can be and how living in a world of scarcity really narrows the windows that you see open to you. So I'm just really glad we're having this conversation. I look forward to the report coming out and us being able to move on it to once and for all change some of these things.

When these conversations were happening, I was in an MSW program or my doctoral program perhaps by then, but these are the kinds of things that got me inspired to run for office, like how are we inventing these systems and passing these laws that keep people that the main goal is to keep people feeling not good about themselves and not being able to grow to their full potential.

So thank you all for the work that you do and for sharing your stories about how the work impacts you personally.

That would have been a beautiful close, but I have too many questions. One last one.

That was really good. That was really good. Giselle, just a quick thought that came here. We talk about reimagining. You shared your story, like, some thoughts you have on how we can reframe perhaps the marketing so that families, just like your mom, feel comfortable in applying for these kind of programs.

Yeah, I think in many ways, like, folks were alluding to, right, the stigma behind even accessing the program. I know we had conversations as a family where we were shamed for even accessing the program. We were the one out of, like, my mother has a bunch of other siblings that came with her to this country, and we were the only family that accessed benefits. And it's this whole dynamic of pull yourself by the bootstraps. Right.

It's rhetoric we hear today at the federal level, especially right now. And so we're sort of in this situation where we hear words like, you are, sorry, I'm sort of losing my words right now.

Would you say it's, I mean, a familial societal, is there something on the state level that we can do, implement versus talking as Members, ensuring that we are selective on our words? And I heard that's one of the part. But is there something else that you think.

Yeah, and even thinking about, I know that coinciding to this budget proposal, we do have a policy proposal, AB 310, with Dr. Arambula, but I won't necessarily talk about a policy bill in a Budget Committee, but even thinking about the name of the program. Right. Like, how can we ensure that we're centering families?

And so that's something that we're currently talking through about how can we even potentially change the program name to a way that really engages families in a way that they want to apply for this program, they don't feel ashamed for applying for this program. And so looking through the ways that statute, in some ways also, again, perpetuates these ideas of who people in poverty are and taking each of those words and changing those words.

And so if you take a look at AB 310, those are some of the things that we currently are pursuing and ensuring that our WIC code section doesn't continue to perpetuate those types of language uses as it relates to the CalWorks program.

Thank you so much. Appreciate everyone. Again, as always, very appreciative of you all making the trip, whether it was 2 miles or 200. We're going to hold the stake proposal item open and move on to issue 10, bringing back the Director. Thank you, Rachel.

You're welcome, sweetie. Thank you. Oh, you mean following up about the.

Thank you, Madam Chair, Committee Members Kim Johnson, Department of Social Services. If I may, I do have the data on the Earned Income Tax Credit from the prior conversation. Very quickly, tax year 2020. This is a 2021 outreach campaign, yielded $13 million to CalWorks and CalFresh recipients who did not have a past tax filing practice. The return on investment for each email and message you sent was $10,737. So want to share that great news and hopefully more to come on that.

Director, you've been on point today with these numbers.

Glad to be so. And I just really want to appreciate that last conversation and panel very much to the point of us moving together on a much more holistic set of outcomes outside of in addition to work. Work is part of our array and our engagement, but that we are a program that's supporting families out of poverty by providing strength based service burial removal services that we have the outcomes to demonstrate that going forward.

So again, as it relates to domestic violence survivors in this proposal, the Administration for children and Families at the federal level released guidance in April of last year to states on how new state TANF certification requirements enacted in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022. The new guidance requires that states adopt programmatic requirements related to victims of sexual harassment or survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking.

It includes requirements for states to establish and enforce standards and procedures to ensure applicants and potential applicants are notified of assistance for survivors provide training for case workers and other agency personnel provide information about available options and resources via state standards and procedures and to update our state plan. Our TANF state plan for regulations, policies, training, and resource materials in consultation with individuals with lived experience and other stakeholders.

The budget change proposal requests resources to support the CalWorks program to address the workload associated with implementing these new federal rules. The Committee also asked about common barriers that survivors of domestic violence face in accessing CalWorks assistance and how the resources requested in the proposal increase access. And so common barriers include concerns for safety, obviously from abusers, lack of documentation to verify assets and income, and lack of awareness of what CalWORKS exemption supports and services may be available.

The proposal will lead to an increased access of services and more competency. The actual skill base and training of staff to be able to provide services is critical.

I want to note that the federal change is a newer requirement, but we again with the Legislature and Governor, have been making changes in several programs, including CalWorks on how we change, ability to expedite processes, and access to CalWorks that the burden of proof to show that I'm fleeing and the assets associated with the other individual don't count against me in accessing the safety net services. So want to recognize that that work continues.

And I also want to note that we are grateful to the Blue Shield Foundation, who has recently funded us, to be in partnership with a number of organizations where we're doing focus groups to really identify holistically what as an organization we need to be doing more in terms of integrating our policy for domestic violence survivors, but doing that through a number of focus groups with both survivors, other program participants, our counties, et cetera. So we will identify stakeholder recommendations on how to better serve survivors.

It'll include recommendations for access to and availability of services, ability to navigate available services, enrollment and if any enrollment changes need to happen, cultural sensitivity and language access, trauma informed services and gaps in policies and practice. So this is just another way through that public and private partnership. We're focused on this population and ensuring their needs are met. Thank you.

Thank you. LAO, any comment? Department of Finance, any comments? Great Committee members seeing none. We're going to hold the item open and move on to issue number 11. Thank you, Director.

Thank you.

Good afternoon again. Jen Troia on behalf of the Department. For issue 11 this is related to unrelated adults and the disclosure requirements in the CalWORKS program. Existing law in the state requires specific assumptions about presumed financial support from unrelated adult males, specifically who reside with CalWORKS applicants or recipients. This statute was implemented in 1969 under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which is the predecessor to TANF.

The proposed Trailer Bill Language would update the statute to apply gender neutrality to this household composition and family reporting requirement, and we think it's important to note that some county welfare departments have already applied that gender neutrality in practice. So, for example, Los Angeles County and Tulare County already operate their programs in a way that is the same as what would be reflected in the updated Trailer Bill.

At the same time, existing CalWORKS regulations already require applicants and recipients to report all sources of income that are expected to be ongoing, their application, semiannual reporting and redetermination, including contributions from any unrelated adults, whether they're living in the household or not. Once the county welfare departments are informed of those contributions, they must determine whether that income is reasonably expected to continue and if so, to count it in eligibility and grant calculations.

You also asked for us to respond to a question about whether there would be any impacts resulting from eliminating this program requirement, rather than making the language gender neutral, as some stakeholders have suggested. If the requirement were stricken, we would issue guidance instructing counties not to take into consideration the income of unrelated adults who are not part of the family and are not contributing to the family.

If the unrelated adult was already contributing financially to the family, the existing rules that I mentioned earlier would apply and that income would be counted anyway. We don't see from a policy perspective that there would be a significant programmatic impact to eliminating this language rather than making it gender neutral. However, it's important to note that the fiscal impact of doing so is unknown right now.

We have a data request into the CalSAAS system and need that information to come back before we could provide you with a fiscal estimate.

LAO, any comment?

Ryan Anderson, Legislative Analyst Office. We just want to note, as I discussed on a previous panel, we've been engaged in this ongoing CalWORKS take up rate process for several years now. A big part of that process was figuring out exactly what the eligibility rules are in this program so that we could simulate them with the census data that we're working with.

So we talk to experts at the state level, at county levels, people who implement these programs, people who help people navigate these programs, about all the tiny rules that might disqualify someone from the program. This rule never came up, so we appreciate, interested in the data request that the department has about exactly what the impact is of this program on enrollment. But anecdotally, it would seem to us that this is not a commonly enforced rule.

It's likely not a common reason why people are disqualified from the program, so striking it may not have a large impact.

Thank you. Department of Finance.

Jenean Docter. Department of Finance. Nothing further to add.

Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I'd be interested if there is a fiscal impact. I see 33 other states do that already, and I'd be interested to see if we could just simply strike this out. From my research and consultation, it doesn't seem to have been, and you confirmed it would be an impact in the actual program.

We'll be happy to get back to you once we receive that data and let you know whether or not we do see a fiscal impact as a result.

Perfect. Thank you. Yeah. I would like to see if we could just. It doesn't seem like there's a need, but perhaps the fiscal report will say otherwise, and that's only because the benefits would increase.

It's possible that it could disqualify someone from the program if they already had high enough income, but it's also possible that it could impact the amount of their grant.

Got it.

But to Mr. Anderson's point, it's unclear whether or not there's a significant population that is already impacted in that way by this rule. If there is then making a change to it or eliminating it could cause that grant increase or even potentially disqualification. If there's not already a significant population impacted in that way, and the existing rules of the program regarding contributions that I referenced are covering it, then there may not be. But without that data, it's difficult for us to provide you that estimate.

Senator Eggman.

Is it- to the point of people not signing up for the program, and was this identified as a barrier at all, or you're saying this was not identified as a barrier?

In our discussions, frankly, we weren't even aware of this rule, despite our large investment in understanding the eligibility process. So this was never brought to our attention as the significant reason why people are disqualified from the program.

Okay. Because this is, anecdotally, this is something you hear forever. No men hiding in the closets when the welfare worker would come by. And I would just guess in this day and age, a lot of people, whether they're related or not, share living space because rents are so high. So do people have that situation where they have a shared roommate and then somehow that gets impacted by their income and they lose benefits.

Yes to the department's other comments, there are other rules which deal more generally with the situation where some financial benefit, either in terms of dollars or in terms of in kind assistance, like just offering a room free of rent. There are separate rules which cover that for purposes of both eligibility and grant determination. Given the function of those other rules, it's not immediately clear to us what independent role this rule plays.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you so much. We're going to hold the item open and move on to issue number 12.

Issue number 12 is also proposed Trailer Bill Language from the Administration this is related to reminder notices for CalWORKS redetermination. Current law requires counties to or this would amend current law to require counties to provide an additional reminder notice to a cowworks recipient to complete their annual redetermination certificate for CalWORKS eligibility. This reminder notice, this kind of reminder notice is provided to recipients already as part of the semi annual redetermination process, but the similar reminder is not currently included at the annual redetermination.

The goal of all of this is to increase the connections between the recipients and the County Welfare Department and to prevent unnecessary discontinuances or the associated loss of benefits. And then, as well, we often refer to program churn, which is folks who are still eligible who lose their benefits and then reapply and come back into the program very inconvenient for both the client and also additional unnecessary workload for the counties.

LAO, any comment?

Ryan Anderson with the Legislative Analyst Office. Just an observation from the data from CalWORKS enrollment. First, when you look at the data for who enters this program, who leaves this program and what are the reasons they leave? Most families leave the program when the redetermination paperwork is due. The most common reasons why they leave the program are either they did not fill out the redetermination paperwork or they filled it out incorrectly.

So this does seem to be aimed at a pretty significant issue in addressing the program churn that the Department mentioned.

Thank you so much. Department of Finance.

Jenean Doctor, Department of Finance. No additional comments to add, but happy to answer any questions at this time.

Thank you. I don't have any comments. Questions. Thank you so much. We're going to hold the item open and move on to issue number 13.

Issue number 13 is the final CalWORKS issue pending before you this afternoon related to the Home Visiting Program and pregnancy eligibility. In the 2021 budget, AB 135 expanded eligibility for CalWORKS aid for pregnant person only applicants. So someone who does not have another child but is pregnant and that's the basis for their eligibility.

Effective July 1 2022, it is already now the case that if you are a pregnant individual aged 19 or older with no other eligible children, you no longer have to wait until your second trimester to be eligible for CalWORKS, which was the prior policy before the change. This is simply cleanup Trailer Bill Language because there was a provision related to that waiting for the second trimester that was accidentally left on the books and needs to be stricken for compliance with that policy.

None. Department of Finance.

Jenean Doctor Department of Finance, nothing more to add. Thanks.

Great. Thank you so much. We're going to hold that item open, and that would do it for CalWORKS. Moving on to CalSAAS. The Subcommitee has requested the following individuals to come participate in a discussion related to the SAAS project. I'll just have all of you introduce yourself individually. I'm not going to read all the names. Thank you. But we'll start with. Do we have enough? Perfect. We'll start with Brandon.

All right. Good afternoon. Brandon Hansard, Deputy Director, Office of Systems Integration, California Health and Human Services Agency. You want introductions of the whole panel or just myself?

Just you. And then okay when it's your turn? Yes.

All right. Well, thank you, chair and committee members. I'm happy to provide a very brief overview of the CalSAWS project and answer your questions in the agenda. Five years ago, the state provided a plan to meet the federal mandate that California must implement a single statewide welfare eligibility system by the end of 2023 in order to continue receiving federal financial participation. At the time, there were three eligibility systems, LA's LRS system, the 39 county C-4 system, and the 18 county CalWIN system.

As part of the plan, the 58 counties and their leadership formed the Joint Powers Authority for the CalSAWS consortium, creating the one single legal entity managing the CalSAWS system and migration efforts. There have been many milestones leading up to today that I just want to quickly highlight.

The creation of the JPA allowed for the formation of the CalSAWS project, the procurement and the onboarding of the vendors, the establishment of the governance to manage this effort, the design development of one of the largest eligibility systems in the world. By September 2021, the project had already successfully migrated the 39 counties from the c four system into LRS, decommissioning the C-4 system and resulting in a 40 county system that we call today called CalSAWS.

The remaining 18 CalWIN counties migration to CalSAWS is organized into six waves in order to best manage the conversion effort and the change management of adopting this new system. This began October 2022 and is scheduled to complete by October 2023. To date, there have been eight counties migrated in three waves, including just this past weekend, Orange, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. Upon completion of the remaining 10 counties migration, the state will be in compliance with the federal mandate.

In addition to the core CalSAWS system and county migration, this project scope also includes the new centralized print mailing, new imaging solution, and the new public facing portal, BenefitsCal. BenefitsCal was portal developments completed vendor procurement August of 2020 and in 13 short months later was deployed on September 2021, coinciding with the 39 county C-4 migration. For each county migrating to CalSAWS, BenefitsCal becomes the public portal for that county, and by October 2023, California will have one SAWS system and one public facing portal. This will meet the federal mandate being on a single SAWS by the end of 2023. So that's pretty much question one. Question two, you had some questions about how OSI oversees the project. What is our role with stakeholders and what is our role in the CalSAWS governance?

So, OSI is responsible for overseeing the successful implementation ongoing operations of the project for the state. Some of our major activities include providing oversight of the effort associated work streams, including BenefitsCal, securing project approvals and funding according to state and federal guidelines. In our oversight capacity, we're monitoring consortium activities and service delivery. We are identifying issues, where appropriate, approving and tracking expenditures, acting as an intermediary between CalSAWS and state and federal partners.

We are also responsible for the management of the third party, IV&V, which is the independent verification and validation, and we work with our state partners, including the state sponsors, Department of Social Services and Department of Healthcare Services, to engage with stakeholders in the development of policy for the publicfacing components, BenefitsCal, ensuring participation in activities ranging from the beginning phases of prioritization and design, progressing to the end when the functionality is being tested and implemented.

Participation from stakeholders, including state partners, now is part of the BenefitsCal collaboration model that the project will be touching upon in the testimony here shortly. So, in terms of governance, the CalSAWS consortium conducts their business and operates through a joint powers authority, which is a legal entity and it's governed and administered by its 12 member board of directors and OSI, and our director is an ex officio, nonvoting member representing OSI social services and healthcare services, and we provide input and recommendations on behalf of the state. In addition, we do participate in other meetings and other governance meetings, such as the project steering committee.

For question three, you asked what are the key components of the budget and what are the historical spending has been to date and how do we oversee the budget? I want to thank your staff for providing budget numbers within the agenda. I can either verbally go over those items that are in the agenda, but also want to state that if there are specific budget questions, we can provide more detail.

But at the highest level, the CalSAWS project was initiated to meet the federal mandate of single eligibility so that we may continue to receive the federal financial participation, and as you can see from those budgetary numbers, that is the largest funding source of the project. So as the project has progressed and systems are retired, their associated ongoing maintenance and operations budget of that system goes away, ultimately resulting in one single CalSAWS budget. The CalSAWS budget is broken into two main components.

We call it DD&I, design development implementation, which are mainly one time costs of either system functionality or migration efforts, and then the ongoing maintenance and operation costs. And each of those have formulas to maximize federal financial participation. We continue to manage that to the highest percentage available. At OSI, we review the budgeted project costs, we secure project approvals and funding according to the state and federal guidelines, and we approve and track project expenditures. I do want to note these budgets are extremely complex.

They're always being updated with actual expenditures against project budget. And we true up with our federal partners at least annually. Since publication of this agenda, we've already been working with federal partners on updated project budgets and project approvals, and we do have updated numbers that can be provided but are still very close to what you saw in the agenda.

So to that point, I wanted to call out one item, the project budget in the agenda that states that it is the CalSAWS DD&I budget does include also the ongoing maintenance and operations of those counties that are already on the CalSAWS system. So it was a rolled up number that does have two major components in it. I will pause there before answering question four, just because budget can go down some rabbit hole.

Just to confirm, you're saying the DD and I joined those last two together, is that what you're saying with the MS?

What I saw in the agenda was the very last table on page 45, 2022-23 CalSAWS' DD&I budget. When I look at those numbers, that does include, when I look at that total, both the maintenance and operations, and the DD&I, that is projected for 2022-2023.

Thank you.

Okay, lastly, what is the state's interface with the CalSAWS system? So, CalSAWS is one component, albeit an extremely large component, of the technology systems that support delivery of health and human services for Californians. And so, as such, CalSAWS has interfaces with several state and county partners to exchange required data.

Some of these include the CalHEER system, the California Healthcare Eligibility, Enrollment and Retention system, the case management and information payroll system, CMIPS, the Electronic Benefit Transfer system, EBT, the Medi-Cal Eligibility Data system, Meds, the Welfare Data Tracking Implementation Project, WDTIP, the California Child Support Automation system, CCSAS, Child Health and Disability Prevention, CHDP, and several others. So when we talk about interfacing, it is many technological interfaces to maintain. In addition, state staff do have access, depending on their role and responsibility, to access the system themselves. Those are the questions that were posed to OSI.

I appreciate that, Deputy Director. We're going to move on to the next one. We're going to hold questions until the end. Welcome, John.

Yes, thanks, Chair Menjivar, members of the committee, thank you for inviting me today. Today, the questions that were posed to CalSAWS were also posed to CWDA. So myself and Executive Director Senderling-McDonald are going to be going back. Yeah, we'll popcorn a little bit back and forth, but I think thank you for this invitation today. So, just getting right into the questions that were posed in the agenda, the first one was describing the process for implementing policy changes, timeframes. How do you go about that?

And really, the length of time that it takes to implement a policy change in CalSAWS is dependent on several different factors. I think, first of all, it's the complexity of the change that's being considered. Then the clarity and completeness of the policy that gets provided by the administration, the amount of automation that's needed in order to effectuate the change, what's already automated, what is brand new automation.

The number of competing priorities, and presently there are about 20 major policy changes that are into queue, as well as numerous other policy changes from last budget session, and as we go through that. Now, our timeline really starts when the state gives us final policy. And for legislative proposals that require automation changes.

Our partners at CWDA, our CalSAWS team and the administration have been working in concert to establish clear expectations to the implementation dates and things that are being considered by the legislature for both CalSAWS and BenefitsCal. And when I talk about these things, sometimes I talk about generally CalSAWS, but there's the public facing portal, BenefitsCal, that's just brand new that we'll be speaking of. And then the back end that's used by the county workers known as the CalSAWS case management system.

Now, most legislative changes from the time that the policy is provided takes between nine to 12 months to be able to implement. And this time is needed in order to get user input on changes, to update and actually code the actual system and put in the technology changes to validate the changes, to ensure that it works according to policy and that there's no unintended consequences. These are tightly coupled systems and they have ripple effects.

And to be able to test that that doesn't make sure that they don't have unintended consequences. Now, we know that the committee today has been talking about the California Food Assistance program, CFAP, and some changes do take longer. And I know you guys talked about that expansion because it's so complex. There would have to be structural changes to CalSAWS to be able to implement that changes, including some protections for the population that it's being expanded to, to protect that population's data from like, federal reviewers.

As we're going through that so if we have final policy at CalSAWS by July of this year, the earliest that we can be ready to implement that is October of 2025. Now, some changes could be made much faster. For example, if the legislature were to include a Cal Works grant increase this year in the budget in July, and we got final policy from CDSS by mid August, we could have that ready to go by October of 2023 of this year and work through that.

Now, the federal mandate did not allow us to make changes to CalSAWS to implement policy changes faster. However, the project, the counties and administration have included a request in the CalSAWS procurement, where vendor bids are currently being evaluated to further streamline the design, the development and implementation processes needed to implement these important policy changes faster.

Thank you. Cathy Senderling CWDA, answering the same question and thinking about the policy changes and how we think about moving forward after the migration. First, I want to take us backwards just for a second. When I first started in California at the Senate Budget Committee, actually, we had four systems that we were working in, and the systems worked.

They were county led, and we really didn't think we'd ever get to a fewer number of systems because they were working and we were getting federal dollars for those. And then over time, both of necessity, as one system would age, they kind of migrated into another one. And then the Federal Government got sort of more and more annoyed, I guess I would say, about spending multiple dollars for multiple systems. They'd say, why don't you just have one system?

And so we were able to, over time, kind of explain why we felt it was important to have multiple systems and really be able to work with vendors. And we lost the discussion, we lost the argument. And ultimately, if the state had not agreed and the counties had not worked together to put CalSAWS into place, we would have lost hundreds of millions of federal dollars. It just wasn't sustainable.

And so now, I think, especially in light of everything we've collectively been through over the last three years, it's on time. 100,000 individual users are using BenefitsCal every single day. And the migration is on track. It's going smoothly.

And they've been able to generally keep up with policy changes even through the migration, as well as changes where they had to be very nimble during the pandemic to push out additional benefits, change the levels, do the CalFresh increases that you heard about earlier, they were able to work very quickly to do that. And I think what we've seen is in order to meet that federal mandate, relatively few changes could be made to the base system. They just had to do it.

But now with the process in place to be able to work together to figure out the changes, prioritize the changes, we can't do everything at once, and I know we'll get to that a little bit more in some of the other conversation.

But what we really appreciate is just how John's team and the vendors are really working very closely with counties and helping to make this migration successful so that we can get to that place where we're then able to implement the additional policy changes that are already lined up from legislative changes that have occurred and also knowing that we can continue to expand our self service options through BenefitsCal.

I want to note, you hear a lot from me in the public comment about, hey, just a note. Issue one or issue four has automation. We'll continue to do that just because we want to make sure folks are thinking about that. It's not something that we always think about, but knowing that we want things to be implemented as quickly as possible.

But if it has that automation component, and especially if it's both BenefitsCal and CalSAWS that need to work together, it's going to be a bit more complex and we need to have both ends of the system working. We want to just make sure that folks understand and that we can help with those decisions. So thanks, John.

All right, moving on to agenda.

Catherine, before we go back, could you tie in? This wasn't part of the questions, but just because I have in front of me CWDA's question regarding PRTFs and the automation. I don't know if you have anything.

Off the top of your head. Do you mean the PRTFs for children in foster care?

Yes.

Okay.

The rates and how that's tied into.

Yes. So the foster care rate, payments for group homes, STRTPs is part of CalSAWS as well as many other aspects that people don't realize are embedded in CalSAWS. Could you talk a little bit, John, if you have it at your fingertips or the top of your head about how we implement those rates? If not, we can get back to you with that information.

Yeah, I know that we have some rates and there's been some rate changes that we're vetting through to be able to do that, and that is something that we have to get on our roadmap. I think those are some of the things that are sort of post migration changes. I don't have the specifics, Cathy, but we could definitely come back through OSI and get that to the committee.

Yeah, happy to follow up. All right.

The next question was regarded to CalSAWS project decision making about the various changes that are needed, including legislation, county requests, stakeholder requests as we go forward. So our first priority in accomplishing the complex mission of balancing priorities and meeting the commitments that we've already made to the legislature, the administration, the counties and the public is just communication, letting people know how much we have on our plate.

The administration, CWDA and the project collaborate on trying to provide clear, when they go to CWDA and the project to say what are the clear timelines in light of everything that we have on our plate so that that does set expectations on when we can get this automation in.

And the project's been very consistent about meeting these timelines when clear policy was provided on time, which is imperative to a design because we have technicians designing these, not practitioners, and making sure that we have clear policy as we head into that development activity. Now, policy changes and responding to emergency situations and keeping up on the migration that Cathy spoke about are our top priorities. But the project must react to emergency situations that impact the public and get these changes into the system very quickly.

And we know that we've had a ton of emergency situations in California in the world over the last several years. So the first one, our implementation of the COVID provisions, what needed to be put in place quickly to issue California emergency allotments and as those expire to take those out of the system.

Supporting the continuous coverage for Medi-Cal during the pandemic and now supporting through the unwinding of the coverage and making sure that the public has the necessary information through enhanced notifications, text messages and changes to our BenefitsCal portal. Responding to natural disasters and emergency relief needs in short order like CalFresh mass replacements for earthquake and flooding related to power outages in December of 22 and January of this year and disaster CalFresh benefits for 10, I think it might be 11.

San Bernardino got approved, I think, in the last week for disaster CalFresh benefits so far in 2023 because of the severe weather that's been experienced and effectuating that in the system as the counties go in and get those critical benefits.

So the project is also meeting its commitment associated with federally mandated single system integration, which you've already heard. Despite the pandemic rising caseloads, which I think you've already talked about today, which from an automation standpoint has a big impact because we have to scale the system to be able to handle that data and still perform for the public and for our case workers as we go through that. And as Brandon mentioned, the migrations have gone pretty well so far.

We know that that was a stakeholder priority when we started this five years ago. Learn from your past migrations. Try to limit negative impacts on the consumer and the public as we go through this because these are complex changes. Do that, do that effectively. So far they've gone fairly well as we've gone through that pretty darn well and been successful. Hats off to our counties who during this very challenging time have been able to do that, train their staff and work through that.

So just this last week, Orange County, Santa Barbara County, Ventura County have gone live on the system and are no longer on CalWIN. Just four short weeks from now, San Diego, County, San Mateo County, Santa Cruz County and Solano County will be making that transition. Their staff are in training as we speak. So once all of those above commitments are met, remaining funds, system capacity, human capacity for change are used for enhancements and innovations to be able to bring in.

For BenefitsCal these priorities are set by a group known as the collaboration model. This group has been existed for only about a year and has made recent progress, much needed recent progress, to formalize and to begin to optimize the engagement process with representatives from customers. Actually end customers are part of this group. Actual CBOs, our advocate community is part of it. Labor SEIU is part of that.

Our counties, cdSs, DHCs, CWDA, that group now for calsaws, for the application case management system that's used by our 40,000 county workers, those priorities are informed by our county users and the need to enhance those things as they serve the public, to be able to take care of the rising caseloads and those types of things as they face those items are informed by the counties as we do that.

I'll just share that the description of the engagement is extensive and more than in prior models, both within SAWS and I think with other systems that we've worked with the state as the lead on, it's a pretty extensive process. The appetite for change in the system is always going to outpace how much capacity and funding we have to do it.

You can only put so many people on the keyboards at any given time and so figuring out how to work through those processes to get to reasonable priorities where a county, the union, the advocates, everybody can't get everything they want at the same moment because it just doesn't work.

And so I think the collaboration model, from what I've heard, is a good basis for figuring out those processes so we can work through the issues and the ideas that people have for how BenefitsCal can be enhanced at a reasonable pace, at the pace that we can, which is what can be supported by the funds that are available and the people who are available to do the work.

We also, as we noted, have to also make sure that the front end and the back end meet. And so that can also dictate when something gets slotted in versus something that might just be a change to BenefitsCal that could be done more quickly. And so a good example that I'm aware of is that we're working in the CalWorks area of BenefitsCal so that someone could request homeless assistance online. Today it's call your worker, go in person and ask for that.

But we know that there is a lot of demand for that. And so being able to set that up and request that online, well, that actually has a back end impact as well, because homeless assistance is heavily automated. There is a lot in CalSAWS related to homeless assistance. And so we'll need to make sure that both of those things can work together in order that the process is basically coherent between the customer request and then the back end worker.

I know also that the first sort of effort to do prioritization of the collaboration model ended up really focusing on what is a current need, which is dealing with all of the renewals and the restarting of the processing for Medi-Cal and all of the unwinding of the continuous coverage requirement.

And so that's an area where some changes were being contemplated and they've been kind of popped up to the top because there's so many people who are going to be coming, and we really want to direct people to self serve if we can. So that's just some thoughts on this one.

And the last item was really provide how CalSAWS engages with stakeholders and BenefitsCal. I'm going to go through a few items on here, but I'll admit right up front, we have to mature those processes. We have a lot of stakeholder engagement, and they can be optimized, and we have to work together to be able to do those things. And we are working together to do those things. And we have made some recent really good progress on that.

So there's numerous meetings for stakeholders to obtain information and provide input in CalSAWS. So the meetings include quarterly stakeholder and collaboration model meetings, monthly user centered design for BenefitsCal meetings, and, as needed, design sessions for BenefitsCal that have the stakeholder community involved. We have public meetings because it is a joint powers authority. The membership has two meetings per year where all 58 counties are representative. The board, the 12 member board that Brandon spoke of has monthly meetings that are public meetings.

There's a project steering committee that also meets monthly, that is public meetings. There's WCDS CalWIN Subcommitee that oversees that system that was meeting monthly. But as we progress in migration and that system is going to be retired, is now meeting as needed, and then we have multiple processes other than just meetings to be able to get input.

So along with the quarterly stakeholder meetings and the other user centered design meetings, CalSAWS has numerous opportunities for advocates and the public to submit input to the project, request information from the project, and ask questions. These include public comment at our public meetings, extensive information.

We've pushed more and more information out on our website, CalSAWS.org, and we have a feature called Ask CalSAWS, which is available from calsaws.org that allows people to submit information and questions to the project and they usually receive an immediate response saying that we've got that. We track that in the ticketing system and usually, depending on the complexity of the question, there's a response in about five days.

Now, again, we acknowledge that there is work to do to mature these processes, but there's been meaningful progress very recently in this area. The collaboration model in publishing a public input form so people can put that in and we can track that with data, a BenefitsCal functionality roadmap and publishing a near final collaboration model charter for final review and input. In addition to these, the project is having to work on and is working on standard operating procedures to formalize the process. The scope and the tracking items between the various stakeholder input forums and these processes, once drafted, will be shared with the stakeholders.

I'll just jump in to say we know that there were a lot of fears about the migration being really difficult even before the pandemic occurred and the great resignation emerged. We've been really happy to see that those fears haven't come to pass and the amount of stakeholder engagement, as you've heard, is really significant.

It's far beyond the original quarterly sessions that were envisioned, and it's been great to see BenefitsCal get developed and implemented with feedback and input from actual and potential customers and the CBOs who work with people on the ground.

We'll need to continue to refine the processes and making sure that enhancements are considered from all perspectives and that changes are made in a way that support counties in providing services and our individual customers and the CBOs who work with them in providing those services as well, I think it's a balancing act. So thanks for the time.

Thank you very much. Okay, let's move on now to Jennifer.

Thank you, Jennifer Tracy with the California Association of Food Banks and the co lead for the CalSAWS Advocates Group. And thank you to the chair, Menjivar and Senator Eggman and Senator Roth. We want to thank the CalSAWS project, CWDA, the state departments, and the counties for leading the CalSAWS migrations and launching BenefitsCal.

We're grateful to the legislature for establishing five years ago welfare institutions code 10823.123, that stakeholders must have a process to provide input into the public facing elements of the CalSAWS system and the opportunity these policies present for innovations in technology that reflect the needs of all users. And we acknowledge and appreciate all of the many, many forums that the CalSAWS project has provided for our engagement.

These spaces, definitely, we've had a lot of meetings and a lot of conversations in the five years. They have evolved over time, and they've created a structure for our engagement, and they hold a lot of promise for future collaboration.

Ask CalSAWS has been a great resource. And we're kind of in a both and situation of like, yes, we've had all of these meetings and we've had all of these conversations, and we've also been raising recommendations because these forums, our experience in these forums has been that our participation doesn't always translate into meaningful outcomes. We've been engaged for almost five years, and we're still maturing the process.

As a recent example, last fall, the project invited us to participate in the design process for CalWORKS support requests so things like transportation, childcare, domestic violence, support that helps people become self-sufficient. After we submitted our feedback, we discovered that fundamental choices about the design had already been made. It was too late in the process for our feedback to be considered and integrated. The result is that BenefitsCal now does offer support requests, which is great, but it requires people to type in information about their request.

And because the system only allows for English characters, people who do not write in English cannot complete the requests. Advocates conveyed concerns during the design review and the comment period, but unfortunately, by that time, those critical decisions had been made and we weren't able to have those in there. So our recommendations were moved to the backlog list to possibly be considered and paid for at a later time.

When we think about California's journey to a single statewide system, we want to acknowledge that moving to a single system was a federal requirement. And we want to acknowledge the absolutely incredible effort that the project, counties and all the other stakeholders have invested in successfully meeting these federal deadlines and requirements. The benefits of a single system include having a consistent client experience between counties and potentially having more nimble response to new policies.

These benefits can best be realized when stakeholders with shared goals to support customer access can be meaningfully included in decision making about how technology will result in improved outcomes for consumers and county staff. And here's why it matters the most as we look ahead. The result of inviting advocates and stakeholder feedback into the design process after critical decisions have already been made is that a lot of our feedback ends up going to the backlog list, which will result in future policies competing against those backlogged items.

So our request is twofold for stakeholders to be consistently invited to offer feedback in early design phases so that suggestions and issues identified can be incorporated. And number two, to reorganize the collaboration model around industry standards for product management and best practices for managing a backlog list with transparency. And we recognize that the legislature does a lot of work to pass policies and make budget investments towards improvements for public benefits.

And what we want to see is a stakeholder engagement that results in a nimble and responsive system. Otherwise, we risk having a continuation of policies that are subject to future automation timelines because the available resources are bogged down by backlogged items that could have been integrated earlier as part of initial designs. Again, we appreciate all of the work that's gone into this very complex migration, all of the effort that's gone into working to have us be available in these forums.

And again, we're in that both and situation. There's a lot of stuff that's happened and that we appreciate. And we're seeing that there is opportunity to have a more meaningful engagement that values the expertise that we bring to the process as people who work on a daily basis with folks who are trying to navigate these systems.

And so we hope that as the LAO is going to present, the goals laid out by the LAO would be implemented in a way that builds in stakeholder engagement, can build trusting relationships between our stakeholder groups, and result in timely inclusion to support future timelines. And thank you for the efforts to support. We appreciate your support and look forward to celebrating our shared success.

Thank you so much. Turning it over to Kevin there is a Kevin here.

Good morning. Good afternoon. My name is Kevin Aslanian. I'm with the Coalition of California Welfare Rights Organization, and for years we were testifying that all three systems should be integrated. I've testified many times and finally, the feds beat up on them and they finally decide to do that. And we're grateful for that.

In fact, CalSAWS the initiation was on June 22, 2019 when the President of Antonio Jimenez got up and said, finally, a computer system for the counties by the counties, or as Cathy says, county led. And that excluded just about everybody else except for the counties. And the composition of the CalSAWS board is majority. CWDA board members and CalSAWS board has self dealt with CWDA and they gave CWDA $732,000 for three years to provide information to CalSAWS that they were providing before.

I think this contract was done October of last year, and they call that self dealing in the legal world. OSI, DSS and Department of Healthcare Services are non voting members of the board. In California, and there's no representation from the legislature on that board. It's all county. The next slide three shows that the county share the skin in the game is 2%, 3% and 4% from each year. The DSS and Department of Healthcare Services are the single state agency. They are the principals.

The counties, according to the law, are the agents of the principal. But in this system that we have, apparently it's the reverse. The counties are running the system. DSS and Department of Health Care Services does not have infethered interface between CalSAWS and CDSS. It's controlled interface and they should have inferred interface. CalSAWS insists that all CalSAWS data is county data, even though most of it is paid by federal and state government.

In fact, CalSAWS has told the state that they cannot publish the data that they get from CalSAWS unless they get permission from CalSAWS. CDSS and Department of Healthcare Services must pay $258 an hour for calves for DSS to get information from CalSAWS that they should. If they had an interface, they could just go in there and get that information, but they have to pay for that. Due process requires that when you ask for a hearing that people.

The case file has to be available during the hearing. Under this system, it's not available. They have talked a lot about migration, migration, migration that you would think that most of 90% of the work that they do is migration. And we looked at the data and found out that in a given year, in 2019, only 14% of the work that they did is migration. And then the subsequent years, it's 11, 10 and nine.

The next slide is slide six shows that the money that they got, only 14% of it in 22-23 was used for migration 85% of the money was used for other than migration. That's their own numbers and as you know what they say, follow the dollars if you want to know what's happening. And in 21-22 it was only 16%. How does CalSAWS do automation? A system change request can only be initiated by counties or CalSAWS staff.

The system change request goes to 32 CalSAWS committees whose meetings are closed to the public. The public cannot participate in that. We do get the minutes at the end of the meeting, but we cannot participate. It's closed meeting. Once the SRS is approved and it goes to change board control for approval and priority setting, those meetings are also closed to the public. Once the control board approves the system change request. It's built by various contractors.

In some cases, CalSAWS steering Committee or the board gets to see that. So what's the harm? Why are we concerned about this? We're concerned about it because during the wave of 40 counties, for five weeks, people were not able to do their renewals and BenefitsCal because they could not use their YBN account. In Los Angeles County, families who were dv survivors were not able to set up a BenefitsCal account and their YBN account was gone.

During the pandemic, CalSAWS refused to involve advocates in a benefit discovery process for student automation that resulted in thousands were unable to report their eligibility to the county. CalSAWS told advocates that they would need email to have a BenefitsCal account and we objected to that, but they insisted and people today without an email address cannot have a BenefitsCal account.

Covered California, 21 other states in America, you are able to open up an account without an email address and a lot of our folks don't have email addresses. I'm sorry about that. Especially cappy recipients. The elderly disabled what is that automated? The law says that the CalSAWS system should automate the system to be more responsive to clients'needs.

CalWORKS immediate need emergency assistance is not automated CalFresh expedited service not automated replacement of skin benefits since 2020 not automated not requesting verification already submitted as a woman testified to ask for the death certificate three times. It's not automated because if you have it in the system, the system should show you should not request that they were previously submitted. CalFresh interview FNS waiver FNS gave a waiver in 2020 to waive the interview that's not automated. You know what's automated?

They tried to automate sanctioning CalWorks recipients for CalFresh and they actually spend 1225 hours and they tried to automate but never went through because we objected to it and found out that it was done incorrectly. The BenefitsCal also agreed in their requirements to accept Cal Works, CalFresh, Medi Cal, CAPI applications. But when it went live, CAPI applications were excluded. So a CAPI recipient could apply for Medi Cal and Calfresh online and then has to go to the welfare office and apply for CAPI. And to this date.

And that was supposed to be in release one cappy application and now we're in release five. There's still no CAPI application and we got a bill to try to do that. That's still not happening. Support services like transportation, childcare, ancillary services are not automated. The problem is that for childcare, when the welfare to work program was initiated, we did a survey needs assessment. The state did a survey, DSS, and found out that 70% of the people who are participating would need childcare.

To this date, only 30% get childcare. So one reason is that people are not able to reach their worker to request childcare. There's 33 counties have call centers and you just can't. It takes hours. So many people don't get childcare. Transportation, the same thing. In transportation, 60% of the people who are participating, welfare to work don't get transportation. That's just like saying 60% of your staff who travel don't submit travel claims. And there's a reason for that.

Because a welfare to work participant cannot pick up a piece of paper, fill it out and give it to someone and get paid in your office. You could do that. And we tried to automate that and what they did, like Jen was saying, you have to write an essay. And all we ask CalSAWS is have checkboxes, just like all welfare applications. Have you checked the box? I want childcare and I want full time childcare, part time childcare. I want mileage, I want parking assistance.

But they refuse to do the checkboxes. That's because when they did the discovery, we were excluded. They presented us with the final product. On slide 11. We have what they do. They automate the GR application. But it's a county option. Not every county allows you to do online GR or GA application call me back function. That's where a person calls up the call center and join the at t. They will call you back. That functionality is there, but it's up to the county.

Some counties do it, some counties don't do. I mean, I think if we spend all that money to create the functionality, they should all do it. And the same thing is true for EBT and Medi-Cal card replacement system.

So we suggest that we've given you language for trailer bill language to make the CalSAWS board more representative of California, not just by the county, but also should include legislature people from somebody appointed by the speaker, somebody appointed by the president pro tem by the governor, and members of the public. The board should be modified to represent California, not just the county, provide for interface and feather interface. CalSAWS is not the county.

Yeah, I think I have. Oh yeah. Required that all Calsaw's meetings be subject to the Brown Act. Transparency should suffice. And I've given you trade of Bill Language. I think I've gone on too much. Thank you.

Thank you. This is also to be able to read along. Turning it over to LAO.

Good afternoon. Brian Metzger from the Legislative Analyst's office. We were asked to provide our assessment of stakeholder concerns that were raised during the meeting. We met with advocate stakeholders as well as the Administration and project staff, and we identified three main categories of stakeholder concerns, the first of which was a perceived lack of substantive engagement with advocate stakeholders, uncertainty about the prioritization and uses of the project's, quote, backlog, as well as an unresolved tension between customer access and data security.

So I'll go over those three categories and then provide some additional information thereafter. First, advocate stakeholders questioned the efficacy of existing forums for stakeholder engagement. For example, advocate stakeholders cited their lack of consistent involvement in the conceptual design sessions of the project and felt their proposed changes to public facing elements were not included and or prioritized.

The Administration and the project felt that they had included advocate stakeholders during the design of the project and captured their proposed changes, but also felt that there were some unique challenges associated with stakeholder engagement and that it did evolve over time and that it could benefit from additional maturation and structure. The second was that advocate stakeholders cited the project backlog as a potential source of changes and enhancements that could benefit customers, but raised concerns about how those were prioritized and scheduled over time.

The Administration and project said the project backlog contains changes and enhancements that have not been thoroughly reviewed and vetted quite yet, and they want to make sure that it's vetted to avoid, for example, potential conflicts with current state policy. Some of the new processes have been introduced and will be used to review and vet the backlog, but those are preliminary and so new draft documentation will be reviewed by stakeholders in the near future.

The third is that advocate stakeholders raised the issue of improved customer access to, for example, benefits Cal. As was raised, one point of contention was the email address requirement for benefits Cal accounts. They cite that it's unnecessary as other health and human services it systems such as calhears do not require an email address. The Administration and project did acknowledge the need for improved customer access, but they also cited concerns about data security.

So using the email address for benefits Cal, for example, allows users to maintain control over their accounts and perform routine tasks such as password resets. They also said that Cal here's current login options, such as a phone number, have led to issues such as duplicate accounts within Calsaws. So in response to these concerns, just as kind of potential next steps, we requested that the Administration and project provide a list of their stakeholder engagement goals over the next fiscal year.

In sum, the Administration and project expects to, one on a quarterly basis, prioritize Calsaw's enhancements using CBO and customer feedback that is shared with advocate stakeholders to formalize and improve the project's collaboration model, which was mentioned to gather proposed changes and build out an annual roadmap. Three, share the current status of implementation of enhancements that are prioritized by stakeholders and four, use a stakeholder input document for better aggregation and use of stakeholder feedback.

These goals, along with other goals that could be identified by advocate stakeholders, could be finalized and incorporated in language that's adopted by the Legislature. It could be supplemental report language with some goals around improving stakeholder engagement. There could be quarterly updates on the progress that's made toward these goals and include certain types of information that might be beneficial to this conversation going forward.

For example, how many of the advocate stakeholder requests that have been made are actually scheduled for future system releases so that we can track those over time? Were the Legislature to consider this option, we'd be happy to assist with the drafting of the language. Thank you.

Thank you. Department of Finance. Got you. Okay, so let's start off with some of the questions. Well, some softball questions first. John, you mentioned some of the timeline policy regarding how to implement some of the priorities. You mentioned approximately 20 policy priorities are still waiting to be implemented. And you mentioned, for an example, if we were to increase Cal Works grants, that could potentially be, and it were to pass this legislative year, could be. In effect by-

- October of this year.

Yes, we have a stakeholder proposal, and I just want to make sure this is what it falls under. A stakeholder proposal to add $20 to calworks recipients for menstrual products. Is that the example that you were given? Would it fall under that?

It depends on the policy. So what is the population? Is it across the board? That would be a simpler change on that $20 to be able to do that. So presuming that we could apply that across the board and it's the same Cal Works family, same application process, and we could apply it across the board if we got policy in July from CDSS, yes, we could apply that across the board rate change and be able to have that in place by October. But it's clear. What population does it apply to? Is there new eligibility criteria? Isn't there new eligibility criteria? Is there new verification requirements? Aren't there?

And what's the notification requirements and the reporting requirements that go along with that? But if it is across the board change, that is just a grant increase for the entire population getting that from the cdss by July, we get to have that in place by October. And that allows us really, we have to get automation done earlier than that. So when the eligibility worker is running for the come up month, that we actually have that in place earlier in the system. But yes.

Right. So it sounds like we also earlier today heard a stakeholder proposal of across the board of Calfresh recipients to increase it. If that's addressing every single recipient of calfresh, that might be easier since, yeah.

Some of those things are easier when it's more across the board and it isn't nuanced populations. And again, that's where we look to our state partners to be able to define that, the reporting requirements, the noticing requirements, the requirements on the counties to be able to make that. So if it can be automated and it's across the board rate change, those things are easier to put into effect.

Though, if I might add, I know that at times things are made more complicated by whether they're being funded by the Federal Government and the state in combination or the state on its own. And so as a question, we'd have to work out with the state, say we up the minimum, something we support.

I would just say on the side, it's likely that that extra increment that we're providing as a minimum benefit for those who would otherwise, say, be getting $20 and now they're getting 50, we're going to have to pay that out of state funds. So just, we'd also have to bake in the complexity of how do we claim just the 20 and not the 30 and draw down extra federal fees. So it gets a little more complex.

Sorry, just on the fly to show you how it can get a little tricky and how it takes sometimes a little longer to work through those policy questions and then actually get it automated.

Absolutely. Because if it is coming just out of state funds, then it has to be split up to be able to do that. In what population percentage. So that's where the complexity comes in. We have to have clear timelines and understand the funding and the reporting that goes along with that.

So when we talk about October 2023, Cal sauce is ready to go. We're just talking about just the basic functions. If you win. When I use basic very loosely here, because as new policy is implemented, you're going to have to add a new feature of automation.

I would say it's much more than basic functions.

Yeah, I know. That's why I use it very loosely.

Because as we've said, what is part of Calsaws is the Calsaws case management system for all of the programs listed that Brandon went over, Calfresh, CalWORKS, cappy, medical, all flavors of medical, General assistance, General relief, all the noticing, reporting financial requirements associated with that to be able to do that. As we look at the policy changes, we already have 2324 policy changes in progress, and we have commitments to the Legislature that we made last year on state policy commitments that we're working through now. So when we start looking at that telephone based services model in all counties supporting Telephonic Signatures, as the counties migrate, they get that functionality. Special flyer for medical renewals. They're coming in this month.

How we're coming to a central print model, looking at our discontinuances, early infant supplements coming in July of 2023. So all of the things last year, as we're getting that policy, we're queuing those things up, just like the things that come out of the legislative session this year, we're going to be queuing those up for the future years. So it builds on that base.

And you mentioned some of related to CPAP. You brought up CPAP. You heard the discussion earlier was around privacy. Know the Federal Government. Would you say that's the same thing with the Medi Cal expansion in the platform to get Medi Cal for all ages starting next?

Know from a policy perspective. Kathy, could you help me out with that?

Yeah, I think the question is related to, as we expand Medi Cal now to all undocumented residents in California, how do we ensure that we have privacy of data?

There was a concern here on CFAP specifically, but Medi Cal is being expanded to everyone.

It is. And part of what complicates the conversation with Medi Cal is that many of those individuals who are undocumented and receive Medi Cal could receive potentially emergency services for which we could claim federal dollars. And so unlike an expansion for, say, CFAP, where that's totally state funded and we don't have to report to the feds at all on the medical side, we do have to send data to them at times on people who are undocumented so that we can pull down those emergency services funds.

And so it's a little different, I think because of that because we know on the Medi Cal side, there's going to be data shared on people for whom they don't have that legal status here. And it is the policy of the Federal Government that they don't utilize that for anything other than the reimbursement at this time. And so we sort of have to bank on that. But we do send their information.

That's something that the state has to do in order to draw down those federal dollars. On CFAP, though, I think it's a different conversation. But we do send information on Calfresh. So I think they're talking about trying to segment that off and make sure that they don't make like, if it's a mixed household, for example, you don't want to send that person over to the feds. So I think that's probably the issue and why it might be a little different on Medi Cal.

Switching over, the presentation that Kevin gave here, I'd like to see if this point was correct. If CDSS and DHCs is per pain when they're looking to pull data, I see 258 an hour. Is that a correct statement?

I'll be honest. This is Brandon from office systems integration. I have not seen what Kevin has presented. I think I need to actually see that, take that back to see in what context this is being presented.

What it is, is the state DSS pays Calsaws $258 an hour to respond to the skiffers and siffers. Is that incorrect?

So I'm not aware of that right now. I would have to take this back.

By the way, I got that number from Calsaws, Calsaws gave me that number.

Madam Chair, I could give you a little bit of context if you'd like.

Can. I'll turn to Director Johnson. I don't know, because it states here CDSS also what I can say, and.

We're glad to follow up on the specifics and report back to the Committee. What I can say is that what Mr. Aslanian is referencing is that for, let's say, an estimate of proposals that you've put forward today? What we do is we submit a request to calsaws to get a sense of how many people it impacts and actually create a projected cost estimate for implementation on the automation component.

And so there are components of our processing steps that are part of the MNO, part of the contract, but there is some built in understanding that we are going to ping and ask, and I think it's at a certain point in time, if we are going kind of over what the original contract and scope entails, we have some additional conversation on that, but glad to get specific in terms of the.

Yeah, I'd like to turn to legislators who've been here. Is this a common practice for departments to pay to request data of what seems a program under California? That's where I'm having some confusion. Maybe your insight would help with that.

Yeah, I think one of the items is that this huge database was created to be performant for our county workers and for the public to be able to go through that. As you go through this database that has thousands and millions of data, pieces of data and records and things like that, the data model is very, very complex.

So as CDSS comes in and they're starting to self serve, to be able to pull their own data, if they need to talk to a database analyst, to be able to look at the data model and pull that out so that the data that's being extracted is being interpreted accurately as they're coming to conclusions, that takes highly skilled vendors to be able to assist them to do that.