30 ATTEND VIDEO CONFERENCE FORUM ON REFORM OF WELFARE

More than 30 representatives from local health and social agencies took part in a forum on welfare reform at the University of Missouri Extension Office in Jackson Thursday.

The group were part of a statewide videoconference whose six-member panel included Michael Hartmann, deputy chief of staff for Gov. Mel Carnahan; state Reps. Michael Gibbons, Sheila Lumpe and Mary Groves Bland; state Sen. Joe Maxwell; and Carmen Schultze, director of the Missouri Department of Family Services.

The consensus of the panel was that Missouri's welfare reform will require strengthening child support enforcement and developing extensive work support systems to be successful.

"We will have to reduce the number of people in cash assistance programs by promoting self-sufficiency," said Hartmann. "To accomplish this, we will need to increase the number of adults moving from assistance to work, reduce the amount of state taxpayers' monies spent on assistance and increase the amount on job training. We will also need to strengthen child support enforcement."

Hartmann said child support enforcement can be strengthened three ways. The best means will be enforcing license revocation and expanding it to include hunting, fishing and other types of licenses in addition to driver's licenses. Missouri also needs to coordinate with national and federal databases, he said, to help track down noncustodial parents. A third way to strengthen child support enforcement will be to obtain as much information as possible from the custodial parents or guardians.

The panelists said work support systems include job training and creation as well as external support systems that help people retain jobs. They said the external supports included extending and expanding Medicaid coverage, and assisting with transportation, work costs and child care.

"It was interesting to me to learn that they included work costs like uniforms," said Geneva Allen, an income maintenance caseworker for the Cape Girardeau Division of Family Services. "The panel seemed very positive about how we'll be moving people from welfare to work."

Child care was another issue panelists and participants said will be important to welfare reform. Panelists said tax incentives, such as Bland's proposed legislation granting businesses a state tax credit of $100,000 for providing day-care for their employees, help people make the transition from welfare to work.

"What we have to do is not think about money but think about what we are already doing," said Nancy Jernigan, executive director of the Cape Girardeau Area Wide United Way. She said community programs will be instrumental in helping develop these support systems.

Shirley Ramsey, director of the Community Caring Conference, said the videoconference was successful because it provided a public forum about an issue that is everchanging. "Panels like this one help to educate service providers and professionals, the community at large and the recipients themselves," she said. "The issues we heard here today may be completely different two weeks from now, so these are very important."

Ramsey said people in Cape Girardeau County who are concerned about how welfare reform will occur in the area should consider joining the local Welfare Reform Taskforce being formed by the Community Caring Conference. She said the task force would try to develop better ways of using the money and resources already present in the community.

"We're still in the developmental stage, but we're trying to build resources in our community," she said. "We're already dealing with important issues like transportation that will affect reform locally. This is not just a social issue, but it's also an economic issue."

The videoconference was sponsored in part by Citizens for Missouri's Children, an advocacy group dedicated to protecting children's health and well-being. Other sponsors included the Greater St. Louis United Way, Heart of America United Way, and Office of Social and Economic Data Analysis at the University of Missouri at Columbia.