West Virginia lawmakers who heard an explanation of the Morrisey administration’s approach to clothing vouchers still have questions.
“It seems like information that we want, we get just little bits and pieces, and we don’t — we truly still come away with not knowing the answer,” said Senator Amy Nichole Grady, R-Mason, during a statewide radio appearance on MetroNews Talkline.
Grady is a member of the Legislative Oversight Commission on Health and Human Resources Accountability, which heard testimony last week from Carl Ayers, who was named secretary for the Department of Human Services just a few weeks ago.
Lawmakers questioned Ayers for more than an hour over disruptions to the state’s clothing voucher program for needy families.
“A lot of what was said, we still left not really knowing exactly what the problem was… you know, we still don’t know exactly what the problem was.”
The clothing voucher program’s start was delayed for three weeks this year while the Morrisey administration examined its concerns of a financial gap in the state’s share of funding for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
The application window for the program was then closed after one week because officials projected that the program would hit an $11.4 million budget cap if they left it open longer. However, the state’s computer database is so poor, state officials are now saying they don’t yet have a definitive figure on how many people applied or how many people were approved.
Then, Gov. Patrick Morrisey opened a new front on the matter by expressing concern that clothing voucher recipients were cashing out benefits loaded onto EBT cards and then purchasing items like beer and cigarettes.
West Virginia began loading school clothing allowance benefits onto EBT cards in 2022. Before that, it was a paper voucher program. The administration has said about 50% of the school clothing allowance benefits are being withdrawn as cash and then it’s not sure how the money is spent.
Prompted to name some places where EBT cards had been cashed out, Ayers rattled off “Wanda’s Bar, Venus Lounge, Turf Motel Lounge, Tobacco A and N and Tobacco B A, Stogie Smoke Shops, Rock Spear, C J’s Tobacco and Cannabis, Daddy Lou’s Pub and Pantry, Smoker Friendly, True Leaf, which is a cannabis dispensary, Hot Spot, Max’s Place, and Mamie’s, which are all gaming parlors of some sort.”
Asked later to clarify whether those represented withdrawals from automated teller machines at the store locations, Ayers said yes.
Grady concluded, “We still left not really knowing exactly what the problem was. You know, we funded what the governor asked for. The reason given for the vouchers not being rolled out on July 1 wasn’t sufficient, and there was still no evidence on data to be used to provide clear evidence on that comment that was made about beer spending it on beer and cigarettes.
“And so we’re still left with, you know, nothing. We still don’t know exactly what the problem was.”
Delegate Geno Chiarelli, R-Monongalia, also expressed frustration over the meeting but expressed some empathy toward Ayers.
“He kind of walked into a wood chipper, you know, because we have all this kind of frustration and all this aggression and all these questions about things that have happened over the past, you know, couple of months or so, and he’s only been here for three weeks,” Chiarelli, a member of the health oversight committee, said on Talkline.
Chiarelli described poor execution and communication around the TANF situation and the clothing voucher rollout. He expressed concerns that the handling of the issue created more problems than necessary.
He said, “The big problem here, and it seems to be the the recurring theme, is that people have a problem with the way that this was executed. People have a problem with the way that this whole thing happened, if there were these problems identified from the beginning, we should have heard about them.”
Chiarelli suggested potential reform such as taking the clothing voucher money off the general EBT-style cash card and putting it in a distinct account or on a separate card.
“I think that we’re able to create independent, separate accounts for these clothing vouchers. We can put parameters on them. We can tighten it up a little bit because not one single person in the legislature wants to defend fraud,” he said.
Delegate Kayla Young, D-Kanawha, watched the legislative hearing from the audience. She is not a member of the committee, but Young also left with questions.
“No, I don’t think we we got a lot of information. It became clear throughout the presentation that the data that they had is unreliable due to the way that kind of the system works,” Young said on Talkline.
“And I thought that they acted like it was going to be this big bombshell to drop, this list of retailers that that folks were shopping at. But then it turns out that those were all these ATM transactions, which is allowable under law. So no, I don’t think any of the members were satisfied.”