This story first appeared at Colorado Newsline.
BRIGHTON | Nonprofit organizations that offer food and housing assistance in Adams County are anticipating cuts to their services as the county makes changes to its Temporary Assistance for Needy Families contracts.
Instead of renewing annual TANF contracts with local organizations as has been done since the COVID-19 pandemic, Adams County provided three-month extensions at the start of the current fiscal year in July with a drastically reduced dollar amount for several organizations that rely on TANF funding.
That’s in part because the county is starting to see the effects of a 2022 Colorado law that requires more funding from TANF to go to direct cash support for residents as opposed to discretionary funding for contracts. The county has also depleted its TANF reserve funds, or savings, to maintain those contracts at previous levels because of the increased need it saw during and after the pandemic.
The federal government approved the TANF program in 1996 but has not changed the dollar amount each state receives annually to administer the program. Colorado has received about $135 million in TANF funding annually, but because of inflation, growing cost of living, and a growing population in the state, that money doesn’t go as far as it did when the program initially passed.
The state supervises the TANF program, called Colorado Works, while counties administer it to recipients. Funding Adams County previously disbursed for all discretionary TANF contracts totaled just over $4.5 million annually. Adams County is Colorado’s fifth most populous county with 543,000 residents.
Other Colorado counties have drastically reduced or discontinued contracts and non-discretionary TANF funding in recent years, according to a presentation Adams County human services staff gave to commissioners this week. Boulder County has only one contract, which it will reduce by 80% in the next fiscal year. Larimer stopped all discretionary contracts in the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Lynn Baca, chairperson of the Adams County Board of County Commissioners, said that the board is “working to find every available dollar to help families in crisis,” including through funding local nonprofits. But because of the limited funding available and the county’s depleted TANF savings, “we must now make difficult but responsible choices to protect the core benefits required by law — direct cash assistance for food, shelter, and other basic needs.”
“This isn’t about reducing support; it’s about ensuring we can sustain it for years to come,” Baca said in a statement. “We stepped up during and after the pandemic to make a real difference during a time of uncertainty. Now we must make future-focused decisions to preserve TANF’s core functions and protect our most vulnerable families in a financially sustainable way.”
Longtime employees furloughed
Growing Home, a Westminster nonprofit supporting stability for local families in the north Denver metro area, has seen about 600 families coming through its food pantry each month since the end of emergency allotments from the pandemic for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits in 2023.
The organization’s food pantry as well as its housing stability program will be affected by reduced funding from its Adams County contract, according to Growing Home CEO Veronica Perez. She said her biggest worry is “the cliff” the funding cuts will lead to in terms of service reductions.
“Because of this shift that they made, it’s now requiring the furloughing of employees that have been with us for 10 years, eight years,” Perez said. “And the issue is that this program itself, it doesn’t only pay staff salaries, it also pays for the incentives for the participants. So it helps pay for that mortgage and that rent.”
The three-month extension Growing Home received from the county was for $110,000, when their annual contract has historically surpassed $1 million. Perez said Growing Home is in a better spot than some other organizations since the TANF funding isn’t their primary or sole funding source, but since it historically accounted for about 25% of the budget, it’s still a big hit.
Perez said it was difficult to plan ahead because she had no “firm indication of what’s going to happen” after the three-month extension expired, and she’s glad commissioners acknowledged the challenge that created. She also said communication from the county was limited before they were notified of the three-month extension.
None of the organizations that have TANF contracts with Adams County were aware that the county was dipping into savings to fund their contracts until the commissioners’ discussion Tuesday, Perez said. She said everyone who benefited from pandemic recovery funding knew it was temporary, but the TANF contracts were never communicated as temporary.
“I think we were all blindsided by the fact that they have been pulling our contracts from reserves,” Perez said. “Had I known that, I literally would have done programming for the last few years completely differently had I known we were going to be off-ramping this program.”
‘$1 million is hard to replace’
Delaney Coe, deputy director of Almost Home, a nonprofit based in Brighton that supports people experiencing housing instability, said a TANF contract from Adams County has been one of her organization’s primary funding sources for the last five years.
Almost Home’s contract has historically been for about $1 million dollars each year, and Coe said its three month extension from the county was for $145,000. She said her organization is at risk of cutting entire programs if it loses the full contract.
Coe said Almost Home operates the only emergency family shelter in Adams County, and it also uses TANF funding to support eviction prevention programs. Last year, Coe said they helped 155 families through the eviction prevention program and over 100 families each year in their shelter.
“We’re really looking at asking for our elected leaders to provide some sort of planning for how these critical programs, the safety net, will be able to continue and how we can replace some of that infrastructure, because $1 million is hard to replace with little notice,” Coe said.
With incoming cuts to other federal welfare programs such as Medicaid and SNAP, Coe said “more people are going to be vulnerable to losing their housing,” so they will need access to resources to support stable living situations.
“You cannot let housing stability programs leave our community when they’re needed more than ever,” Coe said. “People are going to have to decide between food and rent. They’re often going to choose food.”
More evictions
At the Adams County Commissioners’ public hearing Tuesday, over a dozen community members testified asking the commissioners to renew housing assistance contracts with local nonprofits funded by TANF. That included both Perez and Coe, as well as workers and volunteers with both of their organizations and local school district workers expressing similar concerns about how the cuts will affect services that help people stay in their housing.
“My ask for you today are three things: Number one, find a way to fund rental and mortgage assistance programs across the county. Two, dialogue with people who have lived experience and with social service providers who are strategizing on these topics every day.
And three, move quickly to restore these programs,” said Bev Bishop, a Westminster resident who volunteers with Growing Home.
Commissioner Steve O’Dorisio said during a commissioner study session on the TANF contracts Tuesday that the county needs to be clear as to why it needs to cut down TANF contract funding, as he’s heard many people attribute it to the federal Republican policy bill, H.R. 1, that passed in July, while it is actually the result of state policy and reduced tax revenue for the county.
“We need to be more clear and accurate that this particular issue is not based on H.R. 1,” O’Dorisio said. “This particular issue is from the Legislature and the governor, who decided to put their thumb on the scale for (direct cash assistance) as opposed to discretionary … This needs to be an example of what happens at the Legislature when you make mandates without understanding the potential consequences of that.”
Other Adams County officials said “the compounding effect” of the 2022 Colorado law, recent cuts to property tax revenue, as well as the overall budget reductions from the federal government have led to less available spending for human services.
Community leaders want to be involved in the decisions elected officials make about where the limited funding left should go, Coe said, because “we are on the ground and we can tell leaders better what the absolute needs are.” She said she doesn’t envy the decisions county commissioners need to make with “funding being cut in every direction,” but she and other affected organizations want to offer guidance on what must stay.
Perez said she hopes the county will consider using funding from other sources, like its human services reserve funding or general funds, to support their organizations, because without the TANF contract, Growing Home’s entire housing program will cease to exist, and staff furloughs will turn into layoffs, she said. She has meetings scheduled with several commissioners to continue working through the best next steps.
The funding the county contracts provide to Growing Home and other organizations go right back into the community, Perez said, and she expected more “true reciprocation of that respect and partnership that we’ve been giving them for years” as the county makes decisions about its funding.
“There really just needs to be true dialogue so that we can talk through this and how we can truly be strong partners that are part of their infrastructure in the community, because in all honestly, we are more trusted than the government a lot of the times,” Perez said. “We are a safer place for them.”
Adams County’s human services staff recommended that commissioners extend a TANF contract for domestic violence support services for Family Tree to the end of the fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2026, and extend all other TANF contracts to the end of 2025 at minimal rates to give organizations more time to prepare.
“We are grateful that the County is continuing the funding for our domestic violence services and understand the financial constraints they are facing,” Family Tree CEO Paolo Diaz said in a statement. “At the same time, we know that reductions in other service areas do not lessen the needs in our community and those needs will continue to grow. We hope the County will continue to assess available resources so that we can collectively meet these challenges and ensure vital services remain accessible for all who need them.”
Cuts to housing support services in Adams County will result in higher eviction rates, Coe said. She said while eviction filings have already gone up, more will go through if people don’t have access to resources like the ones Almost Home offers. That will lead to higher costs for taxpayers, she said, because it costs seven times more to rehouse someone than it does to prevent them from losing their home in the first place.
“It’s not just Almost Home,” Coe said. “We’re hearing from all of our partners that they’ll be impacted by this, so all the doors will be closed for people who just need a little bit of assistance to avoid losing their homes.”