By JOAN JACOBSON
Finally, some light shed on poverty news in Baltimore, but not from the news pages themselves. Turns out it may be hard for Maryland to administer federal stimulus money for the needy. A seven-year hiring freeze at the state’s human services agencies has left buraucracies incapable of administering benefits for years.
The eye-opening information was on the Sun’s commentary page on Friday the 13th, written by J. Peter Sabonis, acting chief counsel of Maryland Legal Aid. Sabonis tells us it may be difficult for Maryland to administer federal stimulus money to recipients of food stamps, unemployment insurance and health care because of severe staff shortages in the state agencies that give out these benefits.
Sabonis, well-known in the homeless advocacy community from his previous job as executive director of the Homeless Persons Representation Project, cited several examples of Legal Aid clients being denied benefits due to a lack of staff in several state agencies.
Who knew?
Since no reporter has covered poverty in Baltimore in more than a decade, it is not surprising that Sabonis is telling us something new, something that any decent reporter assigned to a poverty beat, would have been writing about tenaciously. The Sun’s last poverty reporter, Laura Lippman, left the beat more than ten years ago and the lack of subsequent coverage predated the Sun’s downsizing and the collapsing economy. Under the John Carroll regime at the Sun, it was simply deemed a subject not worthy of writing about on a regular basis at the Sun – or any place else.
Now that the situation is dire, we learn the news.
Sabonis asks some critical questions:
“Can food stamps put purchasing power into the hands of the working poor if there are no state hands to administer the programs?” Sabonis asks. “Will expanded health insurance stem the cost-shifting of uncompensated care to the insured if eligibility decisions are delayed or in error? Can government transfer payments stimulate demand if government is in disarray?”
These are questions a reporter could have asked years ago – and just maybe somebody would have done something about it.
