Proposed Social Service Legislation Causes Anxiety Among Nonprofits

(Friday) February 5, 2010

By Carla Branch

alexandrianews.org

Delegate David Englin (Photo: James Cullum)

Virginia Delegate David Englin’s (D-45) bill that would put Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant funds into a centralized statewide pool has Alexandria officials and nonprofit leaders concerned.

“I think David means well but perhaps there’s another way to accomplish what he wants,” said Alexandria City Councilman Rob Krupicka. “One of the unintended consequences of the first draft of the legislation was that Alexandria would not be able to disperse TANF funds directly to the people who need them.

“I agree with holding human service providers accountable and asking them to provide outcome-based data to support their funding requests. However, as I said, we need to find a different way to go about that,” Krupicka said.

House Bill 80 creates the statewide TANF Program Funding Pool, which shall consist of all TANF block grant funds to be awarded to service providers for expanded TANF programs, up to an amount equal to 12 percent of the total amount of the TANF block grant for a given year. The bill requires the Virginia Department of Social Services to administer the TANF program funding pool and to allocate funds from the statewide TANF program funding pool to TANF expanded program service providers through a competitive grant process.

Mary Agee oversees the Healthy Families Alexandria program for Northern Virginia Family Services. She met with Englin on Tuesday, Feb. 2, and he made some changes to the bill. The Health and Welfare Institutions Committee unanimously referred the new version of HB 80 to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Services yesterday.

“We amended it to delay implementation until July 1, 2012, to put it outside of the current budget, which is also when Healthy Families’ funding is scheduled to shift entirely from TANF to General Fund, so they would be outside of the pool, unless they choose to apply for additional funds from the pool,” Englin said. “I also have a written commitment from DSS to put together a stakeholders group to include Healthy Families to ensure they have direct input into developing the details of the application and award process.”

Agee continues to have concerns about the bill. “Del. Englin is a true advocate for Healthy Families and values the impact of the program for the city. He is trying a different way to get more TANF dollars to programs like Healthy Families that are accountable and that measure their results. We believe this mechanism could result in a significant loss of funding by relying on a competitive funding pool. We are going to try to get it carried over to next year,” Agee said.