Word: programing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wouldn't be here," says Jesus Vigil, 53, a former construction worker disabled in an accident. He draws $340 in disability insurance payments, from which he pays a $126 mortgage and partially supports a son. He has the papers that he hopes will convince the Denver food stamp program of his need: a $319 overdue utility bill and a $97 overdue water bill. "Food is so high," he says, "I just can't stay ahead." Vigil is allotted $33 a month. Each month, Jose Chavez, 72, a retired sheepherder, is driven by his granddaughter three miles in order...
These drab monthly rituals have been going on for 16 years at centers like the schoolhouse on West Byers Place, ever since the Department of Agriculture expanded its food stamp program as part of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Currently, 12.5% of Denver's residents use the program (the nationwide figure is 10%), which provides an average of $ 138 a month to 24,000 households. Denver is a boom town. Yet because it is an urban area with lots of poverty as well as wealth, as many as 60,000 people there now depend on the stamps...
...cumbersome administrative hearing, the recipient may be temporarily disqualified or ordered to pay $5 or so a month in restitution. The fact that 70% of those who claim to be unemployed never subsequently register at a state employment office, as regulations require, indicates that fraud is rampant. The Denver program, its administrators concede, is taken for at least $90,000 a month; the true figure is probably much higher. The horror stories abound: the woman who got stamps under five names, the three men who together used 27 names...
Unfortunately, cutting costs creates a catch-22 squeeze. Even before Reagan proposed a cutback in the program, Denver had reduced its administrative staff from 173 workers to 83. This made it all the harder to catch cheaters and carefully to determine eligibility. Says Program Assistant Rosemary Engard: "We are stretched so thin that more errors are bound to occur. The paperwork has become horrendous...
Food stamps play an important role for the truly needy. "It has meant the difference between some degree of nutrition and ill health in thousands of cases," says Denver Program Director Ronald Rice. But despite such good intentions, and the good work that results, the food stamp program leaves a lot of room for tighter cost controls...