EDGERTON — When Tony Hoff was injured in a car wreck last year and lost his job, suddenly it wasn’t enough that his wife was working four part-time jobs.

Hoff, 46, and his wife of 28 years tried for six months to make it on their own before they applied for public help in March — a step they’d never taken before and now say they put off too long. Then they waited seven more weeks to receive food stamps and state health coverage.

“It’s hard to get bread and milk on the table. It’s getting real rough,” Hoff said.

Safety net programs in Wisconsin are being strained by the deep recession that is devastating families in places such as Rock County, where unemployment has more than doubled in the past year to 13.5 percent.

In spite of a massive budget deficit, the state has boosted spending on Medicaid health care for the poor and newly unemployed — at a controversial cost to federal and state taxpayers. But the state has lagged in increasing dollars to counties to run programs like Medicaid that help growing numbers of needy families cope with job loss.

As a result, families who wait to seek help until they’re at the end of their rope are finding they have to hang on even longer.
“You don’t expect that when you’re desperate and you come in the door expecting help,” said Phil Boutwell, an assistant to Rock County administrator Craig Knutson. “That is a reality of rising caseloads.”

Today, the Legislature’s budget committee is expected to vote on whether to roll back further cuts in county funding in Gov. Jim Doyle’s proposed budget.

No place illustrates the problem better than Rock County, where the jobless rate has soared following a series of high-profile layoffs at the Janesville General Motors plant and its suppliers.

Since 1999, the number of county families receiving government help such as health care and food stamps has more than tripled. In March the total reached 15,174, driven up 13 percent over the last year in part by more families such as the Hoffs who are seeking help for the first time.

Yet state money to pay the county workers who determine eligibility for those programs has remained flat over the last decade, forcing the county to pay more and more to keep the same number of county employees.

In Rock County, each Medicaid and food stamp caseworker already handles an average of 479 families, said Cindy Sutton, who oversees those workers. Counties statewide, including others in the region such as Dane and Sauk, are also struggling with similar rising caseloads, a State Journal review found.

Wisconsin Counties Association lobbyist Sarah Diedrick said it now takes families about four weeks to see a worker to sign up for Medicaid and food stamps and a week for a worker to return their phone calls — a “significant” increase over past years. In 2007, 91 percent of state applications were handled within the state and federal mandate of 30 days, but that percentage is expected to drop in 2008 because of rising caseloads, Department of Health Services spokeswoman Stephanie Smiley said.

Health Services Secretary Karen Timberlake said tight state budgets require government to do more with less and said counties can save money by using the Internet and by joining forces with other counties.

“We can be more efficient in handling even these increased caseloads,” Timberlake said.

Rock County caseworker Micaela Broetzmann thinks she’s already working efficiently. On Wednesday, she arrived at work to find 12 messages on her voice mail — and she already has other outstanding messages that are a week old.

Before getting to them, she interviewed laid-off engineer Rodney Jordan, of Beloit, to confirm his family of six qualified for Medicaid and food stamps, asking him dozens of questions, filling out hundreds of items on computerized forms and then doing more paperwork after he left — easily an hour’s work.

County workers like Broetzmann could once sign up families in crisis with an immediate need for food stamps in one to two days, Sutton said. Signing them up now typically takes six to seven days — barely within the state’s mandated time limit for families with the most dire need, she estimated.

Most cases, as Hoff learned, take weeks. A former construction worker, Hoff now walks with a cane after a September car crash shattered his hip and he doesn’t qualify for unemployment because he changed jobs too often last summer.
He has struggled to find a less physically demanding job. That’s not surprising: When a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant opened in Janesville last month, it was flooded with some 1,600 applications for 111 jobs, general manager Jim Finkle said.

To help support the couple and their teenage daughter, Hoff’s wife, Elaine, works two part-time cleaning jobs at different area hospitals, a third at a nursing home, and also has a business cleaning local houses. The couple applied for public help around March 10 after running up thousands of dollars in overdue property taxes, heating bills and other debts, Hoff said.

After seven weeks — a delay due in part to difficulty getting information from one of Elaine’s employers — Hoff learned Wednesday they would receive Medicaid coverage and $20 a week in food stamps.

Boutwell said Doyle’s proposed cuts would lead to more such delays. Statewide, those proposed cuts add up to $6.6 million a year, according to the Legislature’s budget office, and come on top of other cuts to county human services agencies. For Rock County, the cuts mean $295,000 less for the eligibility programs alone next year and about $1.5 million less for all human services, Boutwell said.

Powerful lawmakers including Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan, D-Janesville, and budget committee member Sen. Judy Robson, D-Beloit, also say they’re worried the cuts could hurt needy families in their district. Rep. Robin Vos, R-Caledonia, said it would be better to provide enough money for counties’ existing work before expanding Medicaid to cover more people, as Doyle has proposed.

Dan Schooff, a top aide to Doyle, said the governor did his best to protect “core services” while closing a nearly $5 billion shortfall with his budget proposal.

“There needed to be cuts in government,” Schooff said. “That was part of the solution here.”