Update 2 on GAU: House, Senate Pass Deal for Disability Lifeline — Bill Goes to Governor

UPDATE: The House and Senate have passed a compromise bill to keep the state’s General Assistance-Unemployable program going — minus what is now a potential cut of 3,000 to 4,000 recipients.

That’s how many people human services advocates say could be cut Sept. 1 from the program under the latest version of HB 2782, a bill sponsored by Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle) that would make changes to GAU and rename it the Disability Lifeline. The program, a state version of federal disability relief, provides people who are temporarily incapacitated and cannot work with medical coverage and a monthly grant of $339.

In a vote of 59-36 on Friday, the House passed the compromise bill, with the Senate concurring today, 28-16, as legislators entered a second week of a special session in which they can’t agree on what taxes to raise to help close the state’s $2.8 billion budget gap.

Passage of the compromise, which Dickerson, chair of the House Human Services Committee, negotiated with her Senate counterpart, Jim Hargrove (D-Hoquiam),  is expected to save GAU, a $188 million program that is currently paid for entirely by the state. The U.S. House’s final passage of national health-care reform legislation on Sunday, however, will allow federal Medicaid dollars to pay for up to half of GAU’s medical services in the future.

In her original budget, Gov. Gregoire called for cutting the entire GAU program and its 18,000 recipients, many of whom are homeless. The governor’s second budget called for reducing the monthly grant to $250 and instituting a six-month lifetime cap on benefits. The Senate’s proposal was a 12-month limit.

The first agreement that Dickerson reached with Hargrove last week called for a lifetime cap of 24 months. But human services advocates say the governor took a hard line and insisted on a 12-month limit in a three-year period.

Dickerson tried to compromise at 18 months in three years, but that proposal, says Tony Lee of Solid Ground, a Seattle housing and human services provider, would have resulted in some 4,500 people being cut from the rolls on Sept. 1.

The final compromise bill passed by the House and Senate sets the benefit limit at 24 months in a five-year period — a less restrictive cap and one that’s also temporary, Lee says: It’s set to expire in three years, in mid-2013. But 3,000 to 4,000 people who have already been on GAU for 24 months as of Sept. 1, he says, could be dropped immediately.

Before that happens, Dickerson says, the legislation requires the Department of Social and Health Services to review the cases and, where possible, move recipients to General Assistance-Expedited, a separate category of people who are waiting to get federal Supplemental Security Income benefits. When they do, the feds reimburse the state for the cash benefits paid out to GAX recipients, who are not subject to a time limit under the bill.

“All the people that might come up to the limit must, under the bill, be reviewed for SSI eligibility,” Dickerson says, so “we don’t really know how many people will be cut.”

“If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t have had a 24-month limitation, but it’s what we had to do to compromise,” she says. “It’s been a long, hard road and there were times that I feared we might not get to a position that the governor wouldn’t veto and take drastic administrative action to cut the program.

“I think we’ve come up with a compromise solution,” she says, “that has some real benefits for people and real benefits for the state.”

A state housing voucher program put forward by Hargrove remains part of the package. Under that provision, if a housing program is available in an area, a homeless person who is mentally ill or addicted would get a rental payment voucher and $50 a month instead of the $339 grant.

“It’s still not great,” Lee says of the final bill. But, “It’s the best we’re going to get.”

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