This story was first published at Colorado Newsline.
DENVER | Colorado lawmakers approved $10 million to head toward the state’s food banks as federal food assistance benefits pause due to the government shutdown.
Democratic Gov. Jared Polis announced his request for the money last week. The funding, set in $3.3 million increments over six weeks from the state’s General Fund, will go to the food bank network Feeding Colorado through the Community Food Assistance Grant Program.
The Joint Budget Committee unanimously approved the request Thursday.
“I’m certain that this is a hope shared by this committee, that the federal government will resolve and become the partner to us that it should be, and fund the programs that it is legally required to fund,” said Rep. Shannon Bird, a Westminster Democrat.
The approximately 600,000 low-income Coloradans who typically receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program money from the federal government will not get those benefits in November as the government shutdown persists. People use SNAP benefits to supplement their grocery budgets, and advocates predict that a pause in funding will push hungry people towards food banks for help. The average Colorado household that uses SNAP receives $367 per month, adding up to about $120 million in the state each month.
“It is a sandbag in a flood,” Tom Dermody, a policy analyst with the JBC, told lawmakers. “We don’t have the mechanism to actually step in and provide that (full) funding. We’re also in a budgetary circumstance where we don’t have the scale to actually address the SNAP emergency in any sort of truly meaningful way.”
The money from the state is intended to help Feeding Colorado purchase enough food to meet some of the needs, focusing on communities with high shares of SNAP recipients. Food banks have already started preparing for an influx of visitors starting this weekend.
Attorney General Phil Weiser joined a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the SNAP issue, arguing that federal contingency funds can be used to pay the roughly $8 billion for November benefits across the country.
Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Weld County Republican, questioned why Polis hadn’t declared an emergency on the issue, enabling him to use the state’s emergency disaster fund.
“It’s about the poor planning that’s taking place in this state. This is an emergency disaster and I don’t know why we wouldn’t declare that,” she said. “They could have put a process in place two weeks ago to try to identify how to work through this and make sure that people weren’t going without food.”
Democrats on the committee pushed back on that idea, saying it is risky to use emergency funds when there is a chance of other disasters affecting the state, such as floods, wildfires and other impacts from the federal shutdown.
Barb Kirkmeyer should ask her fellow Republicans, “Why aren’t we funding SNAP, and why are we Republicans allowing health subsidies to lapse, causing so many to lose healthcare?” She should call on her party to negotiate on healthcare now. Why is the GOP doing this just so they can give corporations and billionaires huge tax cuts? One in 8 families depends on SNAP! These are the working poor who allow the billionaires to earn exorbitant salaries! We must close the income gap!
Hey Mikey, the USA and Colorado, whether you like it or not have a “capitalistic” economic system. SNAP should not even be part of our system, it’s socialistic.
You want socialism, move to a country that uses it as their system. To say that a majority of us or billionaires need to pay for the food of one out of eight families remains meaningless to most of us. Get a job and buy your families food.
To say that one out of eight families who receive this free “SNAP” lunch are working is a fool’s logic. The billionaires generally create jobs. Do you really think that people on SNAP really want one of those jobs? Not many, if any is my opinion. They go for the “free”!
Close the income gap by having the people work and earn their food.