County receives welfare reform update

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

Feb. 20, 1997

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

Only one thing is known for certain about new welfare reform plans which will take place in Minnesota this year, state senators told county board members from across the state Tuesday -- That there are many questions left to be answered.

The message of uncertainty was delivered by Sens. Don Samuelson, DFL-Brainerd, and Dan Stevens, R-Mora, in a satellite conference that was broadcast to various county boards in Minnesota, including Beltrami. Both are authors of reform bills that will soon enter the Senate at the committee level.

Stevens' plan, more or less the plan proposed by the Department of Human Services, is based on the Minnesota Family Investment Plan, a comprehensive county/state welfare reform experiment that has demonstrated an ability to move people from welfare to work. Samuelson said his plan is more stringent, including a strong focus on the work component.

"My whole emphasis for years has been to reward folks for working," Samuelson said.

Both senators said what will be important after the new reforms are implemented is cooperation among communities' churches, non-profit organizations and residents because much of the welfare burden has been shifted to county governments.

"Last year on Aug. 28, the president signed the biggest social service bill since Social Security was implemented," said John Petraborg, deputy commissioner of the Department of Human Services. "it will be a messy process, and the best we can do is to hang together through the process. We (DHS) cannot do it alone. New partnerships have to be developed."

Petraborg said his biggest concern was the amount of time left to develop a working welfare reform plan for the state. If the state should get delayed and not have a plan in place by July 1, the federal government will sanction the state, withholding some of the state's block grant.

Reiterating that the two Senate bills have not yet even been discussed in committee, he said Human Services would need the bill at least by the middle of the session to get it initiated by the federal deadline.

Samuelson said a bill could be passed by mid-April if the two parties avoid partisan bickering and the bill is pushed through the bureaucracy of the Senate.

"Will there be some people who will stand up and take the opportunity to demagogue?" he asked. "I'm sure there will be. It's hard to avoid politics on the floor of the Senate."

However, Peter McLaughlin, a representative of the Association of Minnesota Counties, said he likes the fact it takes a while for a bill to be worked through because it allows enough time to look at the issue from every possible angle.

"I used to be in the Legislature, and that is the beauty of the process," he said. "This is good because the implications of reforming a 65-year-old bill are large."

The panel's other main concern was that counties need to be allowed to have some flexibility in overseeing reform. There was a concern of several participants about recent discussions of how counties would be penalized if they were not meeting the state mandates.

"We can't talk about sanctioning counties when we haven't even completed the bill," Stevens said. "That's how the federal bill was put together, to sanction states not prepared and capture their money."

Samuelson said because a lot was at stake with the reform, it has to work the first time. However, he added that 65 years of history is not going to be changed in one legislative session.