The morning after the Senate voted to end the country’s 60-year-old guarantee of relief for poor families, a group of people who have devoted their careers to those families gathered in a tired public-housing assembly room in Manhattan yesterday for one of the gloomiest meetings any of them could remember.

The directors of the city’s 37 settlement houses, which provide charitable services to more than half a million low-income people every year, were stunned by the Senate’s action, and particularly by the strong bipartisan support behind it. There were calls for prayer at their monthly meeting, and there were fears of riots voiced.

Like dozens of others in New York who spend every working day among the nation’s largest welfare population, several said they were gripped by a sense of despair that the social contract had finally crumpled — along with a national sense of hope and compassion that once lent honor to their profession.

“I’m 63 years old, and I’ve worked here since 1957, and I don’t remember a moment that’s been worse,” said Eugene Sklar, executive director of the Union Settlement, a charitable institution in East Harlem founded 100 years ago. “Even during the Great Depression, there was a sense that people cared enough to turn it around. But now, the prevailing public attitude views those at the lowest rungs of society as responsible for the country’s problems. It’s madness.”

There has been a hazy sense of foreboding among poor people and their advocates since the Republican Party gained control of Congress last November. For many, though, the vote in the Senate on Tuesday was the first staggering blow, the most serious indicator of how lives and hopes will now begin to change as welfare benefits are reduced and strict limits to public assistance are imposed.

There were widespread predictions of an increase in homelessness and crime, along with warnings that more children would go hungry with a cut in food stamp benefits. Liz Krueger, associate director of the Community Food Resource Center in Manhattan, said the broad new discretion given the states under the welfare bill would induce the states to compete to offer the lowest welfare benefits. Especially in combination with the profound changes in social services already under way at the city and state levels, the welfare vote seemed to many social workers a shudder in the progress of time.

“We’re going back to the poorhouse mentality, to before the new deal,” said Daniel Kronenfeld, who runs the 102-year-old Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. “We’ve all seen hard times before. But what’s frightening about this is that it’s so broad, on so many levels of government. The entire country seems to think that everything we’ve tried has failed.”

The Senate welfare bill, which appears to have the tentative backing of President Clinton, would put a five-year time-limit on welfare benefits, and would require that half of all recipients be working by the year 2000. Most dramatically, it would end the Federal guarantee of assistance to families that meet eligibility requirements, and instead substitute lump-sum payments to states for distribution.

A similar work requirement began earlier this year for thousands of public assistance recipients without children in New York City, along with stringent new eligibility requirements that the city says will remove 100,000 people from the welfare rolls by year’s end.

Though Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has been critical of the tougher welfare bill passed by the House because it would cut off aid to mothers who have more children while on welfare, he praised the approach of the Senate bill yesterday.

“Generally, I favor the Senate approach to the way in which welfare reform should be done, and that is similar to what we’re doing in practicality here in New York City,” he said at a news conference. “You put the emphasis on work, workfare, getting people back to work and into work situations realistically as fast as you can.”

But in New York, most people in the workfare program are cleaning litter from parks and performing other routine tasks, and Ms. Krueger said they are not learning the kinds of job skills that could prepare them for full-time employment.

Though the approach has now been endorsed by the President and the vast majority of the Democrats in the Senate, she said it would not solve the problem that politicians trying to change the welfare program are trying to fix.

“Workfare is the opposite of work,” she said. “It makes people work for less than the minimum wage, with no benefits or opportunity for advancement, and it lowers the wages of the employed. They continue to fixate on the question of why poor people won’t go to work, when the real question is, why aren’t there jobs for poor people?”

That sentiment was echoed yesterday by several welfare recipients interviewed outside a city welfare office at 14th Street and Fifth Avenue. Any change in the welfare program that might help them get meaningful jobs would be welcomed, they said, but they remained skeptical about that being the real intent.

“I can live with the time period, if something beneficial is down the road,” said Jeffrey Bullard, 37, a Staten Island resident. “But if you look for the cup of gold at the end of the rainbow, it probably won’t be there.”

Verlondia Gardner, a 32-year-old mother of four who lives in a Lower East Side housing project and has been on welfare for 10 years, said the only welfare reform she wanted was a job.

“If they are going to help you benefit yourself so you can get off, that will be good,” she said. “I want to get me more work, a job, something so I can get off. I would really like to.”

Nancy Wackstein, executive director of the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House on the Upper East Side, said many advocates agreed that there were flaws and over-regulation in the current welfare system. But the changes now being proposed, she said, would cause far more problems than they fixed. In particular, she said, moving control of welfare toward the states is a step backward.

“Before the Federal Government got involved, the states never assumed enough responsibility for these issues,” she said. “If everything were left to the states, there would be no civil rights, no environmental protection. Some things have to be left to the Federal Government.”

New York State faces a particular problem in the debate over Medicaid and welfare because its programs are among the biggest and most generous, and the state has a long tradition of doing more for poor people.

New York City, in particular, has high concentrations of poor people, greater numbers of people with expensive diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis and a high cost of living.

In Albany, however, officials in the Pataki Administration said they had settled on no firm plans on how they would absorb the cuts proposed in the House or Senate bills. Whichever welfare bill is passed, they said, could ultimately speed up their own efforts to cut each program, efforts that the Assembly Democrats watered down considerably in the state budget fight earlier this year.

The proposals originally made by Gov. George E. Pataki included time limits as short as 60 days for people receiving Home Relief — the program primarily for able-bodied adults without children — and reduced welfare grants for women with children.

The state is also considered likely to follow the city’s lead and expand its workfare programs and its eligibility reviews.

Photo: Some welfare recipients in New York were skeptical yesterday about the welfare bill in Congress that would end the Government’s guarantee of assistance. Verlondia Gardner, 32, left, with Fantasia King, 2, and Fantasia’s aunt, Shamika Brown, outside a welfare office at 14th Street and Fifth Avenue, said: “If they are going to help you benefit yourself so you can get off, that will be good. I want to get me more work, a job, something so I can get off. I would really like to.” Ms. Gardner, a mother of four, has been on welfare for 10 years. (Edward Keating/The New York Times)

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/21/us/welfare-in-transition-in-new-york-gloom-and-despair-among-advocates-of-the-poor.html?scp=93&sq=workfare&st=nyt&pagewanted=1

The Giuliani administration’s requirement that welfare recipients work for the city a minimum of 26 hours a week is forcing thousands of students at the City University of New York to choose between education and workfare assignments, administrators and students told a City Council committee yesterday.

The workfare program, which requires that all able-bodied, childless adults on Home Relief work before receiving public money, has started to affect more than 10,000 CUNY students, officials said, requiring them to work at jobs like cleaning parks and maintenance work in city buildings.

“Students who receive Home Relief benefits have been forced to leave school and report to the Human Resources Administration’s Work Experience Program,” said Isaura Santiago Santiago, the president of Hostos Community College, referring to the city’s workfare program by its official name.

“They must complete an average of 26 hours of work per week, making it impossible for them to continue a full-time education program,” she said in testimony before the Council’s General Welfare Committee. Those who become part-time students lose eligibility for financial aid programs, she said.

Elsa Nunez-Wormack, CUNY’s vice chancellor for student affairs, said the workfare policy had affected 10,000 of the system’s 210,000 students. She said it would affect 16,000 more students when it is expanded to include those who receive public assistance under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program.

Stephen DiBrienza, a Democrat from Brooklyn who is chairman of the General Welfare Committee, criticized the program as “mean-spirited, overly rigid, counterproductive” because it did not let students work at jobs in the City University system nearer their classes. He said he would introduce legislation in the Council to “create some exceptions for students, allowing them to work at their universities or to work less than 26 hours.”

Meg O’Regan, executive deputy commissioner of the Human Resources Administration, said that the City University had not been cooperating in developing jobs for workfare students. But Ms. Nunez-Wormack said that she had formally asked the administration to develop jobs for them at the university.

Speaking to reporters, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said that he was open to providing some flexibility to the workfare program for students. But he reiterated his enthusiasm for the work requirement.

“I think the idea of having people, including students, work for welfare benefits is a good thing,” he said. “It’s something you want to build into students at an early stage.”

Richard Schwartz, a special adviser to Mr. Giuliani who is a major architect of the city’s workfare program, said that the graduation rate for CUNY students on public assistance “is extremely low, probably somewhere in the range of 10 to 15 percent.” He added that the welfare payments to the students represent “a program that subsidizes CUNY more than it helps the students.”

W. Ann Reynolds, the chancellor of City University system, said that most of the students who receive Home Relief assistance are enrolled in the system’s two-year community colleges.

“About a third of those transfer to a four-year degree program and a large majority of the others go to trade programs and learn skills like medical technology, electrical wiring or computer skills,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/21/nyregion/students-at-cuny-complain-work-rule-limits-education.html?scp=91&sq=workfare&st=nyt

On a sweltering day, hard against the Williamsburg Bridge, Justino Morado and 14 fellow welfare recipients shoveled and raked caked dirt and filth from a stairway that looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in 20 years. Mr. Morado, 42, who is being paid one-quarter the salary of the lowest-level Sanitation Department crew member, said he didn’t mind having to do cleanup work to receive a welfare check. “Nobody should get nothing for free,” he said.

A few steps away, another man sweeping the same stairway was less agreeable. “You get, like, nothing, and you have to kiss their boots,” he said.

Wearing orange vests, riding in vehicles labeled W.E.P., for Work Experience Program, workfare’s official name, the two men are among the 23,000 impoverished adults who are cleaning Sanitation Department garages, picking up litter in parks, or performing clerical tasks throughout New York City in exchange for welfare benefits.

While the two reflect the mixed emotions frequently voiced about workfare, there is scant doubt, eight months into the program, that the city is a cleaner place because of them. Municipal unions, battered by large work force cuts (17,000 in the Giuliani administration alone), may see workfare as a threat, but city agencies see it as welcome payback — compensation for the sharp staff reductions, especially in maintenance.

“They’re saving this agency,” said William J. Diamond, Commissioner of the Department of General Services, which maintains 44 buildings with 40 percent fewer workers since Mr. Giuliani took office.

The “decorative brass is starting to shine” at the Criminal Court Building in Brooklyn, Acting Supreme Court Justice Sheldon Greenberg wrote to the department. Judge Barry A. Cozier also sent a letter praising workfare crews at courts at 80 Centre Street in Manhattan.

Hundreds of vacant lots have been cleaned for the Sanitation Department, which has 2,500 workers. The Transportation Department, with 800, has dispatched cleanup teams to the Staten Island Ferry and terminals. Studies by the Parks Department, with 4,300 the largest workfare beneficiary, show that litter and graffiti are down by a third from levels a year ago. Inspections found that 79 percent of city parks this summer are acceptably clean, up 9 percentage points over last summer.

“This program has saved our lives,” said Tupper W. Thomas, the administrator of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, whose staff has been cut in half, to 35, over the last six years. More than 85 welfare recipients, some on Sunday mornings, are assigned to cleaning the park.

But some caution against too much optimism. Marcia Reiss, policy director of the Parks Council, an advocacy group, said that while the parks are in better shape because of the welfare crews, these workers cannot offset the 50 percent cut in park maintenance staffing since 1989. “I am delighted there is improvement,” she said. “But we need to find other ways to replace what has been lost in the cuts. It’s too easy to point to solutions such as these that are short term.”

With plans to expand the program beginning Oct. 1, the debate surrounding it has intensified. Unions question whether regular workers are merely being replaced at a quarter the price. Advocates for the homeless say marginal applicants are being thrown onto the street. Others criticize the program for abandoning job training in favor of what they say is the railroading of recipients into low-level jobs.

Liz Krueger, associate director of Community Food Resources Center, a research and service group, calls the program a form of slavery. “Workfare doesn’t move people out of poverty and into the labor market,” she said.

In particular, students say they must choose between education to improve future prospects and menial workfare assignments. “I feel like I’m backed into a corner,” said Connie Priester, a Home Relief recipient working as an office aide who needs three more semesters to finish a psychology degree at Medgar Evers College. “I need welfare, but I need education more.” Westchester Effort Served as a Model

As individual states attempt to rethink their approach to welfare, many are watching New York City, which by far has the country’s most ambitious workfare program. In turn, Mr. Giuliani’s workfare policy is modeled on a successful Westchester County program stressing fraud prevention and enforcement, a strategy also copied this year by Gov. George E. Pataki statewide. Though mayoral predecessors have used welfare workers before (David N. Dinkins used up to 10,000), the new mandate — that all able-bodied, childless candidates on Home Relief work before receiving a dime of public money, coupled with tighter requirements and supervision — has doubled the number of workers.

The recipe is sufficiently unpalatable that 75 percent leave the system in any three-month period. Since New York City’s program began, on Jan. 1, the number of recipients has declined from 245,000 to 210,000.

So far, only new entrants to the Home Relief system have been required to work. Since July the Human Resources Administration, which runs workfare, has been evaluating those already on Home Relief, and those found eligible will be assigned work duty in October.

Also starting Oct. 1, new applicants for Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the nation’s largest welfare program, are to be assigned if eligible. These would be women who are able-bodied heads of households with school-age children. Existing recipients in that program, 300,000 adults, will be screened for work assignments next year.

The workfare force “could increase by several thousand, maybe as much as 10,000 for the remainder of this year alone,” said Richard J. Schwartz, a senior adviser to the Mayor who is coordinating the project. Legal Aid Groups Plan to Sue

Legal aid groups, including South Brooklyn Legal Services and Legal Services of New York, say they are collecting information to sue the city to stop the program. They have broken into two groups, one to study the eligibility and verification process, the other to review education.

One ground would be that the program is illegally replacing existing workers, a charge the city says it is prepared to defend on the ground that it downsized government before formulating welfare plans.

Mr. Schwartz insists that none of the workers directly supplant civil servants, but this is widely disputed.

Stephen DiBrienza, chairman of the City Council’s General Welfare Committee, says the committee is to hold hearings in September to study workfare’s effects.

“What I’m concerned about is that what we’ve done is to destroy the public work force, and instead create a pool of low-paid workers,” said Mr. DiBrienza, a Democrat from Brooklyn. “I’m not so sure that’s a net profit, for the city as a whole or for the recipients themselves.”

Martin Lubin, associate director of District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the city’s largest union, said workfare “is perceived by members as a threat.” Nonetheless, his union has tentatively supported the new policy, not least because the union helped frame it, but also because it negotiated for members to be promoted to supervise the welfare workers. 40 Employers In 30 Days

The new system begins with a more intensive interview than was previously conducted, a home visit and then fingerprinting to insure that an applicant is not drawing a welfare check elsewhere. After orientation, the applicant is required to get in touch with 40 employers in 30 days, a requirement that existed previously. But because it is now rigorously enforced, Mr. Schwartz said, as many as 400 applicants are eliminated each month, compared with 50 before the new policy.

Over the next few months, Mr. Schwartz said, this requirement will be replaced by required attendance for three weeks at one of a dozen planned “employment centers” to learn job-search skills.

Under a pilot program, called Business Link, Human Resources holds open job interviews with employers like Gap and Chemical Bank, which receive a Federal tax credit by hiring welfare workers. The security firm Borg-Warner has said it wants to hire 200 welfare recipients, Mr. Schwartz said, adding that since January about 700 have already found jobs through Business Link and other efforts under workfare auspices.

Like the Westchester program, the focus is not on developing marketable skills, but simply on connecting employers with employees. “These are entry-level jobs paying $5 to $6 an hour,” said an official in the Human Resources Administration. “It isn’t training.”

In fact, workfare aims only to teach basic work habits: showing up for work, working in a team, responding to a supervisor.

“Many people on welfare never had a reason to get up in the morning,” Mr. Schwartz said. “They developed these existential day-to-day lives that were in many cases devoid of meaning.”

Turnover is high. The Parks Department said 17 percent of its workfare participants leave every two weeks. Officials say it is too soon to determine what happens to these dropouts, or graduates.

“What we added is a highly structured supervision program,” Mr. Schwartz said. “If a worker misses a day, he has to make up for it in a two-week period or produce a documented excuse.” Agencies Praise Quality of Work

Participants must also work to the satisfaction of supervisors to keep getting checks. City agencies, however, say that overall the quality of much of the work has been high. “In some cases, they’re outperforming the city work force,” said Elliot G. Sander, Commissioner of the Department of Transportation. “Sixty or 70 percent are working out great.”

Mr. Lubin and Mr. Schwartz agree that a particular success has been an arrangement between the union and Board of Education to teach welfare workers cafeteria skills. More than 40 of the original 54 participants have been given $14,000-a-year part-time jobs.

“This is a new vision for the world in terms of helping each other,” said Charles Hughes, architect of the cafeteria plan and president of Board of Education Local 372.

The hope is that as jobs become available within various agencies, workfare participants, already familiar with the job, would have an edge in hiring.

But there are no guarantees. “They’ll have a shot,” said Charles Gili, who manages operations in Prospect Park and said he has hired only one workfare participant, for a season. “But as the numbers grow the odds get slimmer.”

Richard Logart, 35, an East Harlem resident who was laid off from a construction job, said he was glad just to be doing something, which is most often sweeping Central Park. “Welfare has a way of getting you real lazy,” said Mr. Logart, who was in the Air Force for five years. “This gets you back in a working frame of mind.”

His park experience has sparked a new ambition. “I’d like to be one of them park ranger guys,” he said.

But others sense the odds are against them. “It’s a dead-end situation,” said James Newsome during a break from working on a Prospect Park sanitation truck. Mr. Newsome has done well enough to be put in charge of his workfare crew.

“We’re just doing the regulars’ work at lesser pay.”

Photo: Unions say workfare recipients like these on the Lower East Side take jobs from city workers, but agencies are thankful for their help. (Librado Romero/The New York Times) (pg. A1) Graph: “Workfare by the Numbers” shows jobs held by welfare recipients in ’94 and ’95 (Source: Parks Department, Human Resources Administration) (pg. B2)

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/01/nyregion/new-york-workfare-expansion-fuels-debate.html?scp=88&sq=workfare&st=nyt&pagewanted=1

FRIENDSHIP, N.Y.— This region of cornfields and shale-encrusted hills near the Pennsylvania border once seeped with wealth in the form of crude oil. Now the very same hills conceal pockets of poverty and welfare dependency.

In this town where oil barons lived in splendor 100 years ago, today an estimated 1 in 6 households is on welfare and 1 in 4 is poor, about the same percentages as in Brooklyn.

Yet amid this year’s vigorous push in Albany to change the state’s welfare rules, there was little discussion of the problems that afflict the rural poor. The debate focused almost entirely on one thing: reducing welfare costs in big cities.

But the way poor people here tell it, in tightening the rules, the Legislature created hurdles that are far higher for country people than for the urban poor. Paradoxically, upstate Republicans whose main goal was to curb what they considered runaway welfare fraud and abuse in New York City were the ones who championed those changes.

In one major revision, able-bodied adults will start losing their welfare benefits this summer if they cannot demonstrate that they have got in touch with five different employers a week, with no repeats in a month.

But in many mountain towns, welfare recipients might not find 20 employers within a 30-square mile area. So meeting the rule could prove impossible, for here, unlike in New York City, one of the biggest challenges for people trying to get off welfare is transportation.

“That’s an onerous requirement for some of our folks, because of a lack of job openings and the lack of means to travel,” said Joan Sinclair, director of social services for Allegany County.

New rules enacted into law this year will also impose tougher penalties on welfare recipients who miss even one day of their public work programs, known as workfare. One unexcused absence can lead to a 90-day suspension of benefits; four such absences can cause expulsion from welfare.

Welfare workers and recipients said those penalties, too, are likely to fall more heavily on rural people who, because of undependable transportation, are more apt to miss work, or appointments at welfare offices.

“It stinks,” said Sharon DeBarge, a welfare recipient. “What are us people in rural areas supposed to do, if you don’t have a license, or you don’t have a vehicle?”

In Allegany County there are no public buses. Throughout the region, welfare recipients typically can’t afford dependable cars, much less insurance. Those who do have good cars have to sell them: state rules say welfare recipients cannot own vehicles worth over $1,500.

“You don’t have reliable transportation at that price,” said Anne Erickson of the Greater Upstate Law Project, which lobbies for the rural poor in Albany. “In New York City, that’s not going to be a problem. How many people in New York City own cars?”

Even welfare recipients who can keep their cars say that can be a mixed blessing. The cost of upkeep, insurance and gasoline for driving long distances can eat away at welfare checks.

Gertrude Riffle, 60, a welfare recipient who lives in a trailer park in Addison with her mentally retarded son, said that maintaining her 11-year old Pontiac Bonneville was one of her major expenses. “It always needs repairs,” she said. “So I’m just getting by.”

These problems can have devastating effects. Susan Lewis spent years refiling job applications along her town’s four-block main street because those employers were the only ones she could reach on foot.

“You get embarrassed because you’re letting people know you’re still not working, week after week,” she said. State social service officials argued that five job applications a week is not an excessive number for rural residents. “We believe there are a lot of jobs out there,” said John Fredericks of the State Department of Social Services, in his office in Albany.

State officials have contended that tougher work programs in rural areas have reduced welfare rolls. But it remains unclear whether the people quitting welfare have found jobs or simply vanished from the state’s view.

Senator Joseph Holland, chairman of the Senate Social Services Committee and an advocate of tougher welfare rules, said he did not think the new regulations would have a harsher impact on rural residents. But Senator Holland, a Rockland County Republican, acknowledged that the effort to tighten the rules was done with city, not rural, recipients in mind because “people think welfare is better controlled upstate.”

He also said there is bipartisan agreement among legislators from outside New York City that more must be done to reduce welfare spending.

“I guess the people in need come to major cities because more services are there, so they have a different philosophy,” the Senator said. “We are not separated by parties on this issue. We are separated by upstate and downstate.”

In dozens of interviews, welfare recipients in Allegany and Steuben counties said they wanted to work but couldn’t find accessible jobs.

Dan Barber lives in Belmont, a village of 1,000 people, one stoplight and a handful of stores. Though Belmont is the seat of Allegany County, Mr. Barber can visit all of its businesses in a day or two. Then he must go elsewhere to fulfill the job-search obligations.

Because he can’t afford a car, Mr. Barber, 25, does his job canvassing by foot, sometimes hitching rides. On Fridays, his day off from a county workfare program, he rises at 3 A.M. to travel 30 miles to Olean, a city of 18,000, where he scans want ads for minimum-wage jobs at grocery stores and fast-food restaurants. He is worried that he won’t be able to reach five employers a week, as the new welfare rules require.

Inevitably, the subject of transportation arises in job interviews. The typical exchange has become depressingly familiar, said Mr. Barber, who is single and has been on welfare since 1991 when he severely injured his foot in a work accident.

“They ask how I got there, I tell them I walked,” he said. “After that, the interview doesn’t go any farther.”

David DeBarge lives in a three-bedroom trailer home on a wind-swept bluff overlooking Addison, population 2,700, with his wife and three children.

Last March, he found full-time work as a machine operator in a metal stamping plant in Elmira, 40 miles away. His driver’s license had been suspended three times since 1991, and he could not afford the $500 needed to reinstate it. So he relied on two co-workers for transportation, an arrangement that worked well for a few months.

Earning $5 an hour and working full time, he managed to pull his family off welfare. “I was scared to death,” he said of the decision to exchange a steady public assistance check for the vagaries of private employment. “But you’ve got to take that leap sooner or later.”

But then in June, he lost one ride after arguing with the driver. The next month, a second ride stopped traveling to Addison. With no buses available during his night shift, he stopped going to work. His bosses told him they would hire someone else to fill his job.

Now Mr. DeBarge, a tall, coarse-voiced man of 33 with tattoo-covered arms, is debating whether to reapply for welfare for his family. If he does, they may have to wait three months for their first check. Then he will face the same transportation problems as he tries to meet the rule requiring five job contacts a week. “I’m a recovered alcoholic,” he said. “Now I know why people relapse.”

In Albany, the welfare debate has pitted urban Democrats against upstate Republicans, who contend that cities are sponges for tax dollars.

Statistics from the Department of Social Services show that New York City, with 40 percent of the state’s residents, receives 72 percent of its welfare spending, over $2 billion this year.

But a recent study commissioned by the Republican-led Senate found that in several poverty indicators, the state’s rural areas were losing ground to its metropolitan regions. Rural areas have higher unemployment rates, lower per-capita income and a smaller percentage of adults with college educations, according to the report by the New York State Commission on Rural Resources.

Moreover, between 1950 and 1990, most rural areas experienced faster growth in the number of families living in poverty, the report found. It concluded that a continuing decline in manufacturing jobs had left rural areas with low-paying service jobs that rarely provided benefits like health insurance.

Allegany County regularly ranks near the bottom of the state’s 62 counties. It has the third lowest per-capita income. The 1990 Census found that it had the fifth highest percentage of families living in poverty: 15 percent of its 55,000 residents, lower than the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan, but significantly higher than Queens and Staten Island. That same year, 10 percent of Allegany County’s households received public assistance, just below Manhattan’s 11 percent.

In Allegany County, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2 to 1. Several welfare recipients who are Republicans said they thought Republican lawmakers had overlooked the possible damage that sharp cutbacks in welfare might cause.

“You’ll start seeing things here that you only expect to see in New York City,” said Susan Lewis, who spent several years on welfare.

Ms. Lewis, 28, is one of the success stories of the welfare system. In late 1989, her boyfriend was laid off, and she went on welfare.

In 1992, the county placed her in a workfare program, training her in secretarial skills. Her break came late last year, when she was hired from a pool of 30 applicants for a receptionist’s job at a home health-care concern. She earns less than $5 an hour and receives no health benefits, but with her boyfriend’s income, it is enough.

Photo: State rules tend to discourage welfare recipients in rural New York from owning dependable cars. Gertrude Riffle, 60, who lives with her son in Addison, N.Y., said that her 11-year-old Pontiac Bonneville was a major expense. “It always needs repairs,” she said. “So I’m just getting by.” (Michael J. Okoniewski for The New York Times) (pg. B4) Map of New York (pg. B4)

ALBANY, June 2— Because it does not pick up the garbage or put out fires, the state government often seems a distant and passive bureaucracy. This year’s budget may cure that misimpression once and for all.

By delivering tax cuts, some of the deepest spending reductions in recent history and new directions in welfare and criminal justice policy, the budget agreement just completed by Gov. George E. Pataki and the Legislature should leave its mark on virtually every resident of the state.

Here are are a few areas in the 1995-96 budget that will affect a variety of groups:

Taxpayers

The centerpiece of the budget is a three-year phased reduction in the personal-income tax. By the end of the three years, married couples with adjusted gross incomes of $55,000 or less will see an average 25 percent reduction in their top rates — from 7.875 percent to 5.9 percent. Those with incomes of more than $55,000 will see an average 13 percent reduction, to 6.85 percent.

In addition, tax brackets have been expanded, meaning that fewer people will pay top tax rates. And standard deductions have been raised, meaning that those who do not itemize their deductions will pay less.

For a family of four making $25,000 and taking the standard deduction, the changes would mean that the 1994 tax liability of $605 would shrink to $420 in 1997, a savings of $185, or 31 percent. For a family of four that makes $100,000 and itemizes its deductions, state income taxes would shrink from $5,364 in 1994 to $4,496 in 1997, a savings of $868, or 16 percent.

The catch, according to critics of the plan, is that low-income and middle-income earners will receive little benefit in the first year. Many will pay the same amount of taxes as they did in 1994. That may pressure the Legislature to keep its tax-cut commitments through 1997, when the largest part of the reduction kicks in.

But unless the tax cut spurs remarkable growth in state revenues, it also may require deep spending cuts in the next two years. And the programs that get slashed may be those that most benefit the middle and lower classes. The threat of similar cuts in 1990 persuaded the Legislature and Gov. Mario M. Cuomo to renege on the final installments of their 1987 tax cut. Welfare Recipients

Assembly Democrats fought off Mr. Pataki’s efforts to cut benefit levels and to place time limits on welfare eligibility for recipients who are able-bodied and childless. But the Legislature agreed to other changes intended to regulate the behavior of welfare recipients.

Able-bodied recipients will be required to work, either in the private sector or in workfare jobs for government and not-for-profit agencies. Parents would lose benefits if their children (through the sixth grade) are persistently truant from school.

Youngsters under 18 who are on welfare will be required to live at home — unless they can demonstrate a well-founded fear of abuse. And all welfare recipients will be electronically fingerprinted when applying for benefits.

Medicaid Recipients

Again, the Democrats beat back Mr. Pataki’s efforts to eliminate Medicaid reimbursement for some services and to limit the number of hours that Medicaid would pay for in-home assistance provided by personal-care aides.

But the cuts approved are likely to mean that many patients who receive personal care services will have to share aides with others in their buildings or neighborhoods. They also may have to use personal emergency-response beepers.

The largest cuts will fall on hospitals and nursing homes, which will see their Medicaid reimbursement rates cut by a combined $280 million. Daniel Sisto, president of the Healthcare Association of New York State, said that hospitals and nursing homes will have to accelerate laying off workers, including nurses and social workers, and will have to defer purchases of new machinery.

“This year’s cuts are sort of a body blow to the solar plexus, and then Washington will follow with a knockout punch to the face,” he said. University Students

State residents who attend the State University of New York or the City University of New York are in for a bit of sticker shock. Annual tuition, $2,650 for undergraduates at SUNY and $2,450 at CUNY, will rise by $750 next year. The SUNY and CUNY boards have the final say, but the cut in state aid is expected to force a tuition increase of that magnitude.

Money for the state’s student financial aid programs, the Tuition Assistance Program and the Aid to Part-Time Students program, will be cut from $610 million to $606 million. That will reduce the maximum annual grant for dependent children from $4,050 to $3,900.

For independent children, the maximum grant will drop from $3,325 to $3,025 for freshman and sophomores and $2,575 for juniors and seniors. For graduate students, the maximum award will fall from $1,125 to $550. Inmates will no longer be eligible for tuition assistance, and aid for students at trade schools will be cut almost in half.

Students who benefit from the alphabet soup of remedial tutoring programs like the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) at SUNY or the Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge program (SEEK) at CUNY will suffer cuts as well. The $57 million spent on those programs last year will be reduced by about 25 percent, meaning that schools may have to cut enrollment in the programs.

Drug Enforcement

If you’re a drug dealer, there’s some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that second-time felons arrested for nonviolent drug offenses will no longer automatically be sentenced to prison. Instead, judges will have the discretion to sentence defendants in such cases to a two-to-three-month drug-treatment program that will be housed at the former Willard psychiatric hospital in the Finger Lakes region.

The goal is to free prison space for hardened, violent felons, who will be required to serve most of their terms without parole.

The bad news is that your defense lawyers have lost a major loophole. Mr. Pataki and the Legislature agreed to rewrite the drug laws to circumvent a 1993 Court of Appeals ruling that effectively prohibited convictions unless defendants knew the weight of the drugs they had.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/03/nyregion/albany-s-budget-the-impact-plan-will-leave-mark-on-every-resident.html?scp=76&sq=workfare&st=nyt

ALBANY, May 21— The budget that Gov. George E. Pataki proposed in February rested on the three philosophical pillars of his campaign: to cut state income taxes, to put welfare recipients to work and to reduce state spending. Nearly four months later, the budget negotiations that Mr. Pataki seems close to completing would largely achieve those three goals.

But in each case, Mr. Pataki will fall short of the specific goals he set in his original budget proposal, and perhaps nowhere more than with welfare. Although public opinion polls suggest that welfare may be the strongest issue in Mr. Pataki’s favor, the Republican Governor bargained away several of his most significant welfare initiatives to secure agreement from the Democratic Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, on a tax cut package.

That agreement, sealed late last week as part of the larger — and as yet unresolved — state budget negotiations, provides for a three-year package of income tax cuts that would reduce rates by 25 percent for two-thirds of all filers. Although it differs in size and shape from the tax cut proposed by Mr. Pataki, it enables the Governor to deliver on a respectable portion of his most important fiscal promise.

That may explain why the Governor was willing to give up the welfare proposals that had gained the most attention in Albany and around the state.

Mr. Pataki’s inability to reduce welfare benefit levels or impose time limits on able-bodied welfare recipients distinguishes him from many of the Republican governors he cites as models, like John M. Engler of Michigan and George V. Voinovich of Ohio. It may, however, provide political ammunition for Albany’s Republicans. Several Republican lawmakers and political strategists said last week that their party’s shortcomings in the budget process would simply allow them in the 1996 legislative elections to portray Democrats as obstructionists to welfare changes.

Mr. Pataki will still emerge from the budget negotiations with significant changes in welfare. Workfare will be mandatory for able-bodied recipients, who will otherwise be kicked off the welfare rolls. Parents will lose benefits if their children are chronically truant from school. Electronic finger-imaging of welfare recipients will be imposed statewide and other anti-fraud tactics will be strengthened.

Mr. Pataki stressed the point today that many of those measures had been proposed in Albany before, either by the former Democratic Governor, Mario M. Cuomo, or Republican legislators, but had never been pushed through the Democratic-controlled Assembly.

He also emphasized that the state spending would decrease by about 1 percent. Although that is well short of the 3.5 percent reduction the Governor wanted, state budget officials say they believe it would be the first time since World War II that a governor proposed and the Legislature enacted a real spending cut.

“The budget is not done, but we have the potential to have a real historic break from the past,” Mr. Pataki said in an interview today.

Mr. Silver, for his part, expressed satisfaction that he had succeeded in moderating the most stringent welfare sanctions and in refocusing the income tax cut to give greater benefit to the middle class. He said today that nearly two-thirds of the plan’s total savings would go to taxpayers who earn less than $100,000.

Those making more than $55,000 would average a 13 percent cut in tax rates, rather than the 25 reduction for everyone proposed by Mr. Pataki. Mr. Silver also succeeded in killing the fourth year of the tax cut, which would have had the most severe fiscal impact on the state. Under Mr. Pataki’s plan, the fourth year would have cost the state $6.8 billion in revenues. The third year of the consensus plan is expected to cost just over $3.5 billion.

Mr. Pataki, according to Mr. Silver, cannot declare total victory.

“We had a Governor who thought he had the right to dictate everything and he found out that he didn’t,” Mr. Silver said. “He had to come to the table and give and take like everybody else. It wasn’t going to be this great home run that he was going to hit out of the ball park.”

Indeed, Mr. Pataki and the Republican State Committee ultimately fell somewhat short in their efforts to circumvent Mr. Silver and apply pressure directly to individual Democrats in the Assembly. The advertising campaign that the state Republican chairman, William D. Powers, ran against Democratic lawmakers in their districts increased the hostility of this year’s negotiations but never persuaded members to break ranks with the Speaker.

“The whole Pataki game plan was that he had this incredible leverage because he could go around the Speaker,” said Mel Miller, a former Democratic Speaker who is now a lobbyist. “The notion that he could rule by this coalition of Republicans and moderate and conservative Democrats absolutely failed.”

Mr. Silver vowed today that he would be able to get the budget passed with only Democratic votes in his house, which has 94 Democrats and 56 Republicans. Pataki administration officials and lawmakers in both parties have speculated that Mr. Silver would need Republican votes to get the budget through the Assembly.

Earlier this year, Mr. Silver said he could support time limits for able-bodied welfare recipients as long as they were provided with job training and other tools needed to survive in the workplace. But throughout the negotiations, Mr. Silver apparently took a hard line against time limits and benefit reductions.

It eventually became clear to Mr. Pataki that those proposals would have to be jettisoned to enact the tax cuts and other welfare changes. “That was his victory,” one Pataki administration official said of Mr. Silver. “But we’ve used that to leverage every welfare reform we could think of.”

Pataki administration officials also questioned whether the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, would have upheld time limits on welfare benefits, and argued that what they gave up might have been struck down anyway.

“When you look at the tax cuts, the Medicaid changes, the decrease in spending, the business tax cuts, none are things the Assembly wanted,” said one administration official, insisting on anonymity. “And the biggest thing we gave up was something we didn’t think our court would uphold.”

Chart: “ADDING IT UP: The Albany Tax Cut” shows estimated savings for a family of four under Governor Pataki’s budget plan. (Source: State Department of Taxation and Finance)(pg. B6)

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/22/nyregion/pataki-yielding-a-bit-on-welfare-plan.html?scp=75&sq=workfare&st=nyt&pagewanted=1

America’s generous image if itself is in grave danger this Mother’s Day. Out of habit, we’ve sent 155 million cards to moms, grandmoms and moms-in-law, and millions of $25 bouquets. Today we’ll call or visit, and maybe go out to dinner — reinforcing the piety that motherhood remains sacred. But the vocabulary of America’s politics no longer jibes with our greeting-card sentiments. Motherhood among the poorest Americans is now held in contempt, and the children of those poor mothers are being promised “liberation from dependency” on public support.

There is nothing new, of course, about taxpayers resenting support for people who cannot or will not work. For decades, even while tolerating modest programs to sustain mothers with dependent children, voters grumbled about careless women and teen-agers and irresponsible men, and deplored the family breakdowns that seemed to perpetuate dependency.

But suddenly, in the name of deficit reduction, the newly Republican House of Representatives began to hack holes in the “safety net” that had survived even Ronald Reagan’s crusade against welfare. And House leaders argued that they were acting above all for the good of the poor: no need to feel guilty about withdrawing support when that very support was enfeebling the destitute. With remarkable speed, the House voted to cut assorted welfare programs over the next five years by about $70 billion while proposing simultaneously to reduce the taxes of more fortunate Americans by $190 billion.

The biggest single item in the House’s cutback — about $17 billion — would come from denying aid to legal aliens. That plan is not only unkind but almost surely unconstitutional, since legal immigrants are taxed the same as citizens. The cruelest cuts, a potential Federal saving of only $2 billion to $4 billion in the foreseeable future, would come from a five-year-limit on aid to unwed mothers, the denial of aid for any additional children born to welfare mothers and the withdrawal of support from teen-age mothers.

Surely, the harshest of these measures will not be enacted into law. The Senate may well demonstrate more guilt, or humanity. Few Senators still pretend that they can balance budgets with welfare cuts while sparing Social Security and Medicare for the middle class and the rich. The Senate is being further restrained by Republican Governors, who resent the imposition of new Federal regulations for programs that they are expected to manage with fewer Federal dollars. When all the jockeying is done, the Republican welfare “reform” will either change very little or appear so flawed that President Clinton can safely veto it.

Even the President, however, has promised to end “welfare as we know it” without facing up to the cost of trying. He thinks welfare mothers should work their way off the dole and has authorized state governments to experiment with “workfare” measures that might provide suitable jobs, training and day care. Yet every student of the problem agrees on one thing: effective and efficient welfare reform would cost money, not save it.

Making the poor poorer will not rescue them from poverty. On the contrary, it would increase the cost of poverty’s consequences. You can write off the poorest mothers as shirkers, ingrates or addicts, but there’s no way to punish them without thereby condemning yet another generation to ill health, crime, illiteracy and incompetence. And the House’s hope of pushing the cost of welfare payments down from one level of government to another is the worst of all remedies: that saddles impoverished cities with a greater burden and can only add to their deterioration.

Maybe Mother’s Day can be the one day this year when Americans will acknowledge that the search for a policy to strengthen family structure among the poor must be driven by love — love for the children that need to be rescued from a social collapse just as devastating as the collapse of an Oklahoma office building. And maybe the greeting-card companies, which are always looking for new occasions to tap our postal addiction, will compose a few million more messages — to Congress. Even among the politicians whose sympathy for poor mothers is depleted, there must still linger some feeling for the innocent young.

As James Q. Wilson, an eminent and conservative scholar, put it in a recent lecture at the Manhattan Institute: “Our overriding goal ought to be to save the children. Other goals — such as reducing the costs of welfare, discouraging illegitimacy, preventing long-term welfare dependency, getting even with welfare cheats — may all be worthy goals, but they are secondary to the goal of improving the life prospects of the next generation.” And, he added, “nobody knows how to do this on a large scale,” least of all the Federal Government.

Wilson demonstrates that even in their current zeal for reform, politicians are ignoring the evidence about welfare that scrupulous research has amassed. It has been found, for example, that the size of welfare payments no longer promotes births among unwed mothers. Studies of illegitimacy have found that “some important cultural or at least noneconomic factor” is at work. Wilson also reports that the evidence linking family dissolution with the geographical distribution of jobs is weak, making “enterprise zones” — a favorite conservative sop to inner cities — a dubious investment. He is impressed by many small programs that teach responsibility and parenting skills and create new environments, like group homes for young mothers. But these programs are clearly experimental, costly and dependent on the dedication of extraordinary people.

Wilson suggests that we turn over the task — and the money! — for rebuilding lives to states, cities and private agencies on two conditions: that they all provide minimally decent and equal protection to the poor and let independent observers evaluate every major initiative by accepted scholarly standards. Some states may do no better than the Federal Government has done so far, but the great variety of experiments is bound to enrich the effort.

If we really loved children and respected motherhood, we would take his advice. We would petition our leaders to think of welfare with humility if not charity. How many cards would it take to convince them that to preach a work ethic without providing work is to taunt society’s victims and mock its values? How many cards are needed to make them aware that for every mother they punish for her fertility, they deprive two kids of opportunity?

Dear Senate, House and President,

Just once a year, be penitent.

Take inspiration from above

And try to write this law with love.

Drawing

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/14/magazine/word-image-mothers-dear.html?scp=73&sq=workfare&st=nyt&pagewanted=1

Mildred Williams sat nervously in a room with blue walls early Wednesday, waiting for her name to be called. She had come to the welfare office at 330 Jay Street in Brooklyn seeking public assistance. It was the second time in two months.

Ms. Williams said she came first in mid-February, filled out an application, answered some questions and left. The next day, she said, she went looking for work.

“An investigator stopped by the house while I was gone, and because I wasn’t there, I have to go through this process again,” she said. “They said the people who answered the door were uncooperative. What’s uncooperative? Was it because this person was not invited in because I was not home?”

Ms. Williams is among the more than 10,000 childless adults who applied for welfare in New York City in the first three months of this year and were rejected as a tough, new screening process was instituted for the city’s Home Relief program for childless, able-bodied adults. Most of them, said Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, tried to cheat the system by giving false addresses or Social Security numbers or failed to disclose other sources of income.

But advocates for the poor as well as many people who were interviewed at welfare offices and soup kitchens criticized the way the new program is being carried out, and they said some applicants were turned down because of inadequacies in the way fraud investigators checked out where the applicants lived.

Too often, investigators made only minimal attempts to verify addresses, said Liz Krueger, associate director of the Community Food Resource Center, who works closely with many Home Relief recipients. She pointed out that many poor people often live doubled up in apartments or shifting between relatives — undocumented, unstable and unconnected to the anchors of middle-class life.

“They may have been unable to document your residence, but it doesn’t mean you lied about it,” she said. “It means they couldn’t find the house or they rang the doorbell twice and you weren’t there, or the manager didn’t know you because you weren’t on the lease.”

Ms. Krueger and other advocates have also complained that the Giuliani administration has created a veritable obstacle course for poor people wanting to apply for benefits by forcing people to go to several offices over a 45-day period to fill out forms and to be interviewed.

Administration officials defend the new crackdown and say that jobless people have enough time on their hands to go through the application and interview process.

And some of the poor and homeless people interviewed in recent days confirm the administration’s position that there is plenty of fraud to be found.

Over all, nearly 250,000 New Yorkers receive benefits through Home Relief. Since January all new applicants were required to submit to interviews to determine their identity, assets and living situations. Once accepted, the new recipients have to agree to work for the city. The rules do not apply to the broader Federal welfare program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

Some applicants said they were not told why their applications were rejected. Johnny Howell, who was back in line at the welfare office at 260 West 30th Street in Manhattan yesterday, said he first applied for public assistance on April 4.

With a a black leather jacket and a green Philadelphia Eagles baseball cap turned backward on his head, Mr. Howell said he was sent to the Jay Street office in Brooklyn, where he was interviewed by a welfare worker wearing a badge.

“The dude asked me a lot of personal questions, like how did you become homeless and how do you clean yourself,” he said.

Mr. Howell, 34, said he was given a letter to bring back to the welfare office on 30th Street. There, a worker told him that his application was denied, but did not give a reason.

Mr. Howell said he moved to New York from Philadelphia three years ago, one step ahead of drug-dealing enemies he had made in his hometown. He said he quickly began selling drugs in New York, then became addicted and lost his apartment. He said he has been drug-free for six months, and homeless since he left a drug rehabilitation program in March.

“I’ve got to get some kind of income,” he said. “I have urges to go in a store and shoplift, but I’m not trying to end up in jail. I’m trying to do things right for a change. I’ve got a conscience now, plus I’m tired of living like that.”

Mr. Howell said he has been looking for work at the grocery stores and fast-food restaurants in midtown Manhattan. But employers always want to know about the gap between his last job as a maintenance man in 1990 and now.

“I can’t say I was selling drugs,” he said. “Then too, if I tell them I’m a recovering addict, they might get funny.”

Fred Cain said he also was not told why his application was rejected in March. Mr. Cain, who was interviewed while standing in line at the Holy Apostle Church soup kitchen on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan on Tuesday, said the rejection came after he was interviewed in Brooklyn and returned to the welfare office on 30th Street in Manhattan.

“She told me I’m not eligible,” he said. “That was it.”

In a handful of cases, officials and advocates say, the applicants have successfully appealed the rejections. Ben Wizner, an advocate with the Legal Action Center for the Homeless, said one of his clients, a man in his 50′s who has lived at a single-room-occupancy hotel on the Bowery since 1991, was rejected for public assistance in March because fraud investigators could not confirm his address.

Mr. Wizner said his client never found out why the investigators decided he did not live at the hotel. But at a hearing, the man was able to present enough documents and personal testimony from hotel employees and other residents that the decision was overturned.

Richard Schwartz, a senior aide to the Mayor and the main architect of the screening program, strongly defended the home visits, saying investigators make every effort to confirm the addresses of applicants. Investigators visit the listed address within days after the person has made an application, he said. If the person is not at home, investigators interview other people in the building and even neighbors.

If those approaches cannot confirm that the applicant lives there, he said, the investigator leaves a letter telling the person to contact the welfare office. “This program was put together very carefully with a lot of sensitivity and a lot of thought,” he said. “It was put together with a great deal of care so it would be fair.”

And despite the stories of people saying they were wrongly rejected, Mr. Schwartz said only nine of the rejected cases have been appealed for hearings. “Those numbers speak for themselves,” he said.

Mr. Schwartz and the Mayor said that in the first three months of the crackdown, investigators rejected 57 percent of the applications, compared with 20 percent in the same period last year. The rejections included those people who successfully made it through the screening process but failed to report for their work assignment.

Mr. Wizner and other advocates question whether the intensive screening would have long-lasting effects. Many applicants, he said, will reapply and learn from their previous mistakes. “My guess is that the vast majority of these people who were denied reapplied right away and are still in the system,” he said.

The city’s program was modeled after one in Westchester County, but by combining the intensive screening process with the workfare requirement, the city was able to make bigger reductions faster.

But for people like Ms. Williams, who lives in the Marlboro Houses on Coney Island, the program seems to need a lesson in human dignity and understanding.

“They asked me all kinds of demeaning questions,” said Ms. Williams, who was dismissed from her job as a nanny about a year ago. “They asked if I would work, what I’ve been doing for the last 12 months, how I’ve been supporting myself, do I have any children, who lives in the house with me and what are their ages,” she said. “These are all quesions that I’ve answered before. They’re just repeating themselves.”

Yesterday, a woman who answered the telephone at Ms. Williams’s residence said Ms. Williams was out looking for work. She said a city investigator had already phoned.

Chart: “STEP BY STEP: Applying for Welfare” New York’s tough new screening process, along with requirements that recipients work for benefits, has reduced the number of people on Home Relief, the welfare program serving mainly single, childless adults. Below are the steps applicants must take as well as a reporter’s observations about the process. STEP 1. Applications are filled out at income maintenance centers that serve certain zip codes. Applicants are assigned a counselor and told to return in a week; if in need of emergency assistance, they must also return the next morning. WHAT TO EXPECT: It takes about five hours to be assigned a counselor. Rooms are poorly ventilated with few chairs. Workers tend to be unresponsive to questions. Frequently the office runs out of either English or Spanish forms, and there is no translator available. STEP 2. If seeking emergency assistance, an applicant returns the next morning. A counselor fills out forms for a photo I.D. At another window, papers are processed for the I.D. The applicant then must go to an office at 109 East 16th Street in Manhattan for the card. The applicant returns to the original center to get the emergency check. WHAT TO EXPECT: It takes two to three hours to get a card at the I.D. center. Tempers are short, with frequent outbursts by disgruntled applicants. Back at the income center, it takes about an hour to get the check, usually for about $29. STEP 3. A week later, applicants return to the income maintenance center for an interview. The applicant fills out a form, listing assets, sources of income and providing proof of residency, like a lease or utility bill. If homeless, applicants can give the address of a shelter or the General Post Office in midtown Manhattan. An appointment is made for an eligibility verification review — the new investigation into eligibility — at 330 Jay Street in Brooklyn. WHAT TO EXPECT: Many applicants do not know they need to bring residency documents. If they don’t bring them, they must return again. STEP 4. Applicants go to the Office of Employment Services at 98 Flatbush in Brooklyn for a talk on job hunting. Before the Giuliani administration began intensive screening, applicants attended the seminar only after being approved for welfare. Also new, applicants are given a logbook in which they must record the names of places they look for employment. Step 5. Applicants attend an eligibility verification review. According to the Mayor’s office, the review consists of: Computer comparisons of wage reporting, unemployment benefits, disability benefits, Social Security number, address, motor vehicle registration. Credit check to try to turn up information on possible assets. Unannounced home visits. WHAT TO EXPECT: Meetings often last less than an hour. In one recent review, eligibility specialists did not know the applicant was on parole and had listed different addresses on his welfare application and with his parole officer. They also failed in a number of cases to detect that applicants owned property outside New York. STEP 6. Applicants deliver sealed envelopes, given to them by eligibility specialists, to their counselors verifying that they attended the eligibility review. STEP 7. Applicants look for work, recording efforts in the logbook. They must apply for at least 40 jobs before being approved. STEP 8. At some point, an investigator makes an unannounced visit to verify residency. Applicants can be dropped for giving a false address. WHAT TO EXPECT: If no one is home to talk to investigators, or if neighbors, roomates or landlords do not cooperate, officials may question whether the applicant lives there. STEP 9. If 45 days after applying, applicants have not found jobs, they return to the income maintenance center to learn whether they have been accepted. If accepted and deemed able to participate, recipients are told to report the next day for part-time workfare assignments, which include cleaning graffiti and picking up trash in public places. If recipients fail to report for work, they are dropped from the rolls. STEP 10. Benefits, from $313 to $352 a month, are distributed through designated check-cashing companies. ESTHER B. FEIN (pg. B3)

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/21/nyregion/poor-see-new-indignity-in-welfare-fraud-war.html?scp=70&sq=workfare&st=nyt&pagewanted=1

THERE is a well-recognized phenomenon in the world of welfare called churning, and it happens whenever politicians decide to shake up the welfare system.

Here is how it has worked when other cities and states have tried what Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani is doing in New York City: Government tightens the standards. Some people are either scared away and never even apply. Others apply and do not qualify. The welfare rolls shrink. But then they rise again — though not to their original, pre-churned levels.

The Mayor’s announcement this week that he has reduced the number of New Yorkers on Home Relief — welfare for able-bodied, childless adults — was nothing short of startling. In three months of tighter welfare screening, 57 percent of the applicants were rejected as ineligible, compared with 20 percent during the same period last year. The overall number of people receiving Home Relief is now 60 percent lower than last year, and 27 percent fewer are applying.

The results surprised even City Hall, which had anticipated a reduction of 20 or 25 percent. But now what? Is this a social revolution or a statistical blip? The experts say the the Mayor should go slow and make conservative estimates about what this will mean in the long run.

EXPERIENCE elsewhere shows that once the churning settles down, the size of the welfare population will indeed be smaller than it was at the start, maybe significantly smaller. But the 60 percent figure is probably unrealistic, because some of the wily welfare cheats and the legitimately needy learn their way around the new system and land back on the rolls.

“Any time you’re dealing with this population, the bureaucracy knows you can cut down on the number of people getting benefits just by making the application process longer and more complicated,” said Christopher Jencks, professor of sociology at Northwestern University. “Then a lot don’t reapply. We don’t know whether they were ineligible, had something to hide, or got discouraged. It’s one of those urban mysteries.”

Advocates for the poor don’t see a mystery in any of this. They argue that the city’s policies are imposing unseemly hardships on thousands of people who need help but aren’t getting it because of the new system. Richard Schwartz, senior adviser to Mayor Giuliani, has a different interpretation. He anticipates continuing success in reducing the rolls because the city has yet even to begin using fingerprints to detect fraud.

Mr. Schwartz attributes the record so far to two things: the city’s emphasis on workfare, he said, is discouraging some people from applying for welfare and encouraging others to take jobs rather than working for welfare benefits. He also contends that the welfare numbers are down because of the city’s new effort to examine applicants’ addresses, Social Security numbers and identities using personal interviews and computer database checks.

That effort costs about $12 million in staff expenses, while Home Relief costs the city $803 million a year and the state spends $1.1 billion for both Home Relief and related Medicaid expenses.

According to Mr. Schwartz, in the past the eligibility check consisted of only a brief interview and filling out an application form. In his view, fraud has been common, and the city is now uncovering it.

THERE is, probably, welfare fraud: people hiding income, working for cash, double- or even triple-dipping by using false identities and bogus Social Security numbers. There is also, however, what all but the purists might call petty fraud: people working at odd jobs for cash, getting Home Relief and just getting by.

Yesterday, for instance, a 31-year-old man at the West 30th Street welfare center who identified himself only as James said he collects Home Relief and works at odd jobs washing cars or moving furniture. He is paid in cash, also collects Home Relief, knows he is violating the rules but says everybody does to survive.

“If I could get a job, forget welfare,” he said. But it is clear he cannot hold a responsible job. His drug habit gets in the way.

The question for New York is whether dropping the Jameses of the city from the welfare rolls would force them into even greater dependency, perhaps into homelessness, or transform them into productive citizens. And what if the Mayor were to eliminate Home Relief altogether?

Other states, including Ohio and Michigan, have done just that, with great fanfare. But the results are nothing to celebrate. University studies have shown that about the same percentage of former welfare recipients were employed both before and after they lost their benefits, about 20 percent in Michigan.

At the same time, the number of people without permanent housing increased, and Detroit’s homeless population grew dramatically, though for several reasons, according to officials in that city.

Over all, the studies found that most former recipients, deprived of their benefits, were just tottering on the edge of subsistence. They worked at odd jobs, stayed with relatives, added to the homeless population.

Their lives were clearly not improved despite the rosy claims of elected officials in those states, and now in New York. But taxpayers saved money, which, after all, is the underlying goal of what some call welfare reform.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/20/nyregion/metro-matters-welfare-numbers-game-or-reform.html?scp=69&sq=workfare&st=nyt

A day after touting the success of tough new eligibility rules for New York’s welfare program providing benefits to childless, able-bodied adults, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said yesterday that he actually favors abolishing the program altogether.

The Home Relief program, created in 1931 by Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was the Governor, now provides benefits to about 245,000 childless city residents who are able-bodied or whose disability does not qualify them for benefits under larger Federal programs. The city and the state share the cost of the $1.9 billion program, which provides an average benefit of $325 a month, or $3,900 a year.

The Mayor has mentioned his dislike of the welfare program before, but rarely, if ever, as bluntly as he put it yesterday, when he said “yes” when asked whether he believes it should be phased out.

Speaking at a City Hall news conference, the Mayor did acknowledge that the State Constitution may prohibit total elimination of the program. Article XVII of the Constitution says the state and its subdivisions shall provide for the “aid, care and support of the needy” as determined by the State Legislature. Even if that hurdle could be crossed, the Democratic-controlled State Assembly is not likely to agree to scrap the program.

Because of those obstacles, Mr. Giuliani said he wanted to narrow time limits on Home Relief benefits as an interim step toward total elimination. As he proposed last October, employable people on the program would be limited to 90 days of benefits, after which they would be cut off and not allowed to reapply for two years. The Republican Governor, George E. Pataki, and the Republican-led State Senate have agreed to a 60-day time limit, and the disagreement will not be settled until the Legislature passes a budget for the current fiscal year. Thus, those applicants who successfully struggle through the new eligibility requirements hailed by the Republican Mayor on Tuesday and who agree to work for their benefits would be removed from the welfare rolls 60 or 90 days later if the the Republican proposals become law.

For opponents of the Republican plans, the tightly controlled time limits undermine the Mayor’s assertions that tough new eligibility rules are restricting welfare to the truly needy. If recipients are truly needy and are working for their benefits, they say, then why put them back on the street after a few weeks?

“The Mayor is congratulating himself for being tough and forcing these able-bodied people to jump through hoops and give something back to the city, and that’s fine,” said Stephen DiBrienza, head of the City Council’s General Welfare Committee. “But what happens on the 61st or the 91st day? They get cut off, and go right back on the street. And then what do you do with them?”

He said those taken off the welfare rolls — who would also lose their Medicaid benefits — would eventually become an even bigger drain to the taxpayers if they go to live in city homeless shelters or seek medical assistance at public hospitals.

Anne Erickson, legislative coordinator for the Greater Upstate Law Project, a lobbying group for poor people, said she was counting on the courts to uphold Home Relief against those who would kill it. She is relying on the constitutional provision as legal bedrock. “I don’t think they will ever be successful in eliminating Home Relief,” she said, “and I hope these attempts to circumvent the Constitution and trash the system with time limits will not be successful either. Where do they think those people are going to go?”

Only New York, New Jersey and Alaska still offer welfare programs for the able-bodied, and New York’s is by far the largest and most expensive. Marion Nichols, a researcher at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, said several states that did offer such programs have either eliminated them, as Michigan did in 1991, or have cut them back, as have Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

Pennsylvania, she said, now offers welfare to able-bodied recipients for 2 out of 24 months. That program is similar to the Mayor’s proposal.

Those who support the Mayor’s and the Governor’s plans say they want to build incentives into the system to push able-bodied recipients back into the work force. Richard Schwartz, a senior aide to the Mayor and a leading architect of his welfare plan, said those recipients who were not employable would not have their benefits cut off by a time limit.

“We’re supportive of helping an individual out for a limited period of time while they reorganize their lives and find a job,” he said yesterday. “The time limit is a very reasonable, practical step necessary to help these people find a life.”

He said a large number of benefit recipients in the city’s Home Relief workfare program, which began in January, have found private jobs and left the program, but he said he did not have exact numbers. The city plans to work with the private sector to set up a “job bank” of private jobs for those whose benefits would be cut off after 90 days, he said.

He noted that the proposed cutoff would not apply to those considered unemployable by reason of age or medical condition. According to state figures, just over half of the city residents on Home Relief are considered unemployable.

Asked yesterday what would happen to the truly needy if Home Relief were eliminated, the Mayor said he hoped to learn the answers to that from the city’s current experience with workfare. He seemed to leave open the possibility that a part of the program could be saved if it only serves those who do not qualify for any other program, like Aid to Families With Dependent Children, for families, or Supplemental Security Income, for the disabled.

“If in fact there are people that are going to fall through the cracks because either they’re disabled or they want to work but just can’t, then I think that would offer a lot of political support for continuing the program for just those people,” Mr. Giuliani said.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/20/nyregion/mayor-favors-phasing-out-home-relief.html?scp=68&sq=workfare&st=nyt