From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Well, our first connection this hour is a real disconnection.

As my colleagues at WXXI news recently reported, federal changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program SNAP have left thousands of people locally without benefits.

Monroe County Department of Human Services reports that it closed 3900 cases at the end of May due to noncompliance, or not verifying an exemption to new work requirements.

The new work requirements come from the congressional bill that passed last summer, described by Republicans as one big, beautiful bill.

The GOP promised reforms to root out waste, fraud and abuse and, in their words, to create more rigorous standards regarding who is eligible for food stamps.

So we can talk about that this hour.

We're going to talk about summer meals, programs, cutback, city business and a lot more with a member of Rochester City Council who I think is well positioned to have that conversation.

Mitch Gruber is back with us.

Thank you for being on the program.

Thank you for having me.

It's the first time we've spoken since the Knicks won the championship, and I was expecting an earlier invitation.

Just come to a victory lap.

But this will have to do.

I can't believe you didn't text me.

I mean, like, you really held your tongue and didn't gloat.

But I'm very happy for you.

I don't have a lot of sports wins under my belt.

So listen, as I clean under, I'm not going to start gloating.

Now, I can tell you, as a Clevelander, you take what you can get and you don't gloat.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

Well, it's good to have you back here.

And you were.

So you've talked about SNAP a number of times.

In the last couple of years, going back to the first conversation we had after the big beautiful Bill passed, there was talk about what the exemptions meant, why they were in place.

And so here we are.

Any surprises that you've seen so far?

No, I wouldn't say there's any surprises so far.

I think it is.

It is happening the way, the Republican Congress intended it to happen.

A lot of people, are seeing their SNAP cases closed across the country.

I was just, listening the other day to a story about how half a million cases have been closed in Arizona.

And of course, there are federal, leaders like Brooke Rollins from the USDA who are claiming this is evidence of how many of how much waste, fraud and abuse there was and how many people who didn't need to be on the program who are coming off.

But in reality, what is happening is that there is this is largely death by paperwork.

And there are so many people who, who would still have eligibility who, are just slipping through the cracks all over the place.

I can say that in Monroe County, we have done a really good job of trying to be clear and intentional and comprehensive in our communications to folks.

In my day job at Food Link, I'll just cite that we created a domain, save my SNAP.org, which I'm going to say on repeat over and over again during this hour.

Save my SNAP.org is our version of trying to kind of organize government, speak to people.

You know, folks are getting letters to their houses from oh Tada, the Office of Temporary Disability Assistance or Monroe County Department of Human Services.

They're getting letters.

And oftentimes those letters are going to get opened.

Sometimes those letters don't actually even make it to the right address.

And then if those letters are opened, it's largely in very specific government jargon.

So we created this domain.

Save my SNAP.org, which has all the information on what can you do to retain and maintain your SNAP benefits.

And I think we've done a pretty good job, but we still lost 4000 people on June 1st, which is a lot for Monroe County.

Yeah, no, it's an important point about the fact that some people will not even see those letters.

And we're in a communication era that I think people justifiably, sometimes are even suspicious.

If you get a letter, if you get a text.

Most of us have at some point have gotten a text that reads like, hey, you didn't pay your thruway bill.

Click here to pay an extra $100, right?

And you're going like in the moment.

I mean, do I do I should I do this?

No.

The answer and the answer is no.

But even I've in a moment been like, did I are you I mean, like you ask yourself that and then what happens is you become jaundiced to the whole idea of government outreach because it comes via text or by email or by a snail mail.

Yes.

And then sometimes you don't even look at it.

And then to your point, if you do, if you can't understand it or if it's meant to be impenetrable, you're in a very, very hard spot.

Yeah.

And I think, I think what was particularly difficult about the cuts to SNAP, and I think it's going to be, frankly, even worse for Medicaid, which are coming in 2027, is that, you know, the media environment we live in, too.

And this is no disrespect to to anyone who's trying to tell these stories.

Well, but the media environment was the the big bill.

I'm just going to call it H.R.

one was passed in July of 2025, and there was all sorts of headlines.

These cuts are coming.

Here's what everyone was concerned about SNAP cuts.

But the truth is that no cuts happened from July of 2025, when the bill was passed until June of 2026.

So I think what happens is a lot of people start saying to themselves, oh, well, I'm I'm through the worst of it.

And I didn't see any cuts and stop thinking about it.

It's kind of out of sight, out of mind.

And then next thing you know, you show up at the grocery store and you have no dollars on your EBT card.

So there's just that that delay, I think was really harmful.

And not only was there a delay, but actually initially was supposed to be November, then it became March, then it became May.

So the guidance change and people just get lost in the sauce.

So what we have done, as a community and this is food link together now Mayor Evans rack resiliency table and and of course but well, all sorts of, of individuals and organizations have contributed was creating this idea of save my SNAP, dawg, putting everything on one website and then actually doing paid media around billboards.

We did a lot of, paid digital marketing and I'd like to say that it helped.

And yet, New York City on May 1st and June 1st saw 22,000 cases closed.

We saw 4000 cases closed.

New York City is more than four and a half, five and a half times bigger than us.

So I don't I don't I it's hard to say is this work actually bearing fruit okay.

And we're going to talk more about that in a moment here.

And listeners, if you've got questions about what we have to try.

Oh of course.

And we're going to talk listeners, if you've got questions on SNAP benefits, or anything else that you think, is right in line with what Council Member Gruber can answer, it's 844295 talk.

It's toll free.

84429582552636.

If you're from calling from Rochester 2639994, email the program.

As always, connections at wxxi.org.

Or join the chat on the news YouTube channel where the show airs every afternoon.

So your point about the delayed onset of this is interesting because when January hits and the Medicaid cuts come, which also have work requirement changes and different ones and right, not the same ones.

Yes.

But that that will have been even more time.

And as I think it is obvious that the Medicaid cuts are designed to come after the election.

Yes, in November, but that's going to hit people hard too, because they're going to go, wait, what?

When the heck did this happen?

So I understand how some people are caught off guard.

I also understand how hard it can be to make sure people know if they're eligible or not.

So, Mike, I want to talk to you about eligibility questions.

First of all, if there's around 4000 people locally, or at least in Monroe County, who lost SNAP benefits in June, how many of those 4000 could have kept their benefits through exemptions?

If only they'd known?

Do we know?

No, we don't know.

Do we think it's a significant number?

Yeah, probably.

So the the data that so together now is the organization that created the screening tool.

And I still encourage anyone to go go to see my SNAP.org, use the screening tool.

And by the way, for anyone who lost SNAP benefits if your case was closed you can apply to reopen not so you can apply for a new case to be opened like there is not your case.

Being closed does not mean that you are not allowed to apply again at some point.

So I digress.

What we do know is that of the people who utilize the tool, I think the number that I heard from together now was approximately 60% of the people who went through the tool found that they did have, a viable exemption, 60%.

Yeah.

I don't think the numbers of how many use the tool were staggeringly high.

Okay.

But so I think it's fairly safe to assume that a lot of people have exemptions.

But then it gets to this other point, which is that you also then have to prove the exemptions, which you know, requires, or this is why it's it is death by paperwork.

There's just a lot of reasons why it's very hard to demonstrate or prove the things that are being asked to prove.

And honestly, the state needs to keep building the mechanisms to allow for the proof to be quicker and easier for people as well.

Do you think the death by paperwork is intentional?

Yes, I do, and to be clear, by the by the feds, by the by the federal government, I don't I don't think the state is trying to make things slower than they have to, but I do think that things tend to work slowly through the state.

But in an intentional effort to make sure people who would have legal exemptions can't get them is the definition of cruelty, isn't it?

I think so, I think the, the, the definition of of of, forget definition.

I don't think there's anything more cruel than cutting a program like food stamps, which is the closest thing we have to a real, a real guaranteed basic income.

I mean, it is a simple program.

You're you income qualify and you get money to spend on food and almost every single vendor or retailer around you.

It is so cruel to take that away at a time when everybody feels the pinch of grocery store prices.

It's it is incredibly cruel taking this program away.

Let me take the devil's advocate side of things and say, look, you're very critical of congressional Republicans who passed that bill and advocated for these changes.

They might say, we want to root out waste, fraud and abuse.

We don't want to prevent people who have legal exemptions from getting them.

But we need paperwork.

We need proof so we don't have more waste, fraud and abuse.

Yeah, I mean, that would be the argument that they would make.

And again, I would say the people that broke rounds are probably taking a victory lap right now.

The number of people who have come off the program.

But I think when you dig deep and talk to people, I've talked to many people.

I'm not going to share their personal stories, but I've talked to a lot of people who have lost benefits in the last couple months, and these are people who are not taking advantage of a system, is are people who need need these dollars to put food on their kids table and oftentimes have a very difficult time being able to demonstrate the things that need to be demonstrated.

Or as we said before, just don't even know what changes are afoot all the time.

Okay.

So let's talk about the new work requirements.

Just some examples here so people understand what we're talking about.

So, people between the ages of 54 and 64 now.

Correct.

It used to be that if you were over 55, there was no work requirement at all.

Now it's, for anyone up to the age of 65.

Okay, so 64 and younger instead of 54 and younger.

Correct.

So it's ten more years of a work requirement, exemptions for or work requirements for people who are homeless, who are veterans.

What do we know about that?

Those exemptions have been waived.

Are those those exemptions no longer exist.

So by nature of being a veteran, you are no longer exempted from a work requirement.

You still have to be able to prove y z other exemption, I mean, politically, explain that one to me.

I can't and I don't, and I and I'm not sure anyone has has gotten a clear answer as to how or why that's the case.

The people who pass this bill claim to love veterans.

Yeah, sure do.

They sure do.

And and, you know, every time we've gone and done any advocacy on this place, like the Veterans Outreach Center are equally as flummoxed and frustrated as to why people who serve this country are being asked to jump through additional hoops to get some food support if their income demonstrates they need it.

Okay, a parent whose child is 14 years old or older is no longer exempt from work requirements, right?

Yeah.

Which is interesting, right?

I mean, so this whole idea, the people who are being asked to work requirements are a Bods.

That's the acronym.

They use able bodied adults without dependents.

And the idea that you're not counting a 15 year old as a dependent is pretty interesting.

Why do you think that that change was made?

I don't know, I really I, I don't think there was a whole lot of discourse around why each and every one of these changes was made.

I think that at the end of the day, this was about trying to balance tax cuts for the wealthy on programs that the party in power right now felt were bloated.

And so rather than trying to be precise around, well, this is why we change it from from 55 to 65, there was just a whole bunch of changes thrown in at once to pay for the tax cuts.

For the wealthiest.

It was all part of the same bill.

Food stamps was a direct trade.

You think it was all part of the same bill?

I don't know how you could read it any other way.

I mean, the revenues that were created to allow for this tax cut predominantly came from minimizing the cost of two very expensive programs, which are SNAP and Medicaid.

Do you think there is a lot of waste, fraud and abuse in food stamps?

No.

And there's a ton of studies and data to demonstrate that that's that, that you're not surmising.

You're saying the evidence doesn't support that claim.

Correct.

There are study after study after study.

It's a now there are individual cases of fraud and abuse all over the place.

But as a whole, at a macro level, it is not a place where there's a significant amount of waste, fraud and abuse.

And I don't want to speak out of turn because I know, I know a lot less about Medicaid than I know about SNAP, but I suspect that they are going to have a whole lot more, that there are a whole lot richer opportunities to talk about waste, fraud and abuse there in the health care system than in SNAP.

At the end of the day, this is a program where you income qualify.

You get a, fairly small amount of money on a monthly basis and you spend it on local stores.

There's just there just is not that much waste, fraud and abuse in it.

And I can show you some studies, during the commercial break that demonstrate that point.

Okay.

And you've talked about how this gets reported.

So I think this is actually an important place to put a fine point on it when there is a high profile case of waste or fraud in anything, it ends up as a very, it's very sexy.

It gets a lot of headlines.

Someone is using public support funding might be food stamps, might be Medicaid, might be different dollars.

And they're using it in a way that looks totally inappropriate or gaudy.

And it's a case of fraud.

And it gets a lot of publicity.

I think what you're saying is, yes, those cases exist and they exist.

And food stamps, they exist in probably everything where there's money going out the door.

Yeah, but they're not emblematic of of anything that is typical.

And they are not telling a full story.

And when it comes to the full accounting of it, SNAP is a is a pretty efficient program.

Yeah.

And we're talking about, in the percentages, just like I, I'm going to pull up a study when, when I, when we break and look at my phone.

Okay.

But, I think the studies are, it's under it's, it's, it's decimal points two, 2 or 3%.

Of, of the entire program's budget.

Are there even allegations of these kinds of things like waste, fraud and abuse?

But that is not what the Republicans in Congress have said.

No, they they think there's a ton of waste, fraud and abuse where they I think the other argument that you hear all the time, which it's you can't really prove a counterfactual, is that they is that they prevent people from working.

But this is actually a really good segue to to summer meals, which is something I want to talk about a lot, because one of the one of the things that really is disappointing about the, the world of, of food assistance in the last six years is that during Covid, there was this incredible opportunity to reinvent some programs that were not necessarily working that well.

And one of them was summer meals.

So pretty much every single, the biggest challenge with summer meals in a place like Rochester is right now, the law is back to this.

You can only serve summer meals at a place that is, they call it a congregate feeding center.

So it's a place where kids are eating together.

It's a summer camp.

It's it's a Bible camp.

It's a sports camp.

It's a summer school.

But you can't just give meals to kids who are, you know, playing in a park on their own.

You can't just have a little pop up there or a cooler with, you know, 30 meals and let kids take what they want at a place where, you know, there's there's a kickball game like a rec center.

No, you can't because there's staff there and they can eat together, but in places that are not supervised.

Okay.

Yeah.

Right now the feds will not reimburse for that.

During Covid, all those kind of guardrails went away because everyone was saying, let's just get food to people however we can.

So there was a very well documented case of very significant fraud and abuse in Minneapolis, where an organization who really was not, I don't know if they were doing any meals at all, went from claiming they were giving out, you know, 30 or 40 meals a day to very quickly serving hundreds and hundreds of meals a day and ended up truly ripping off the the federal or the state government, I should say, for millions and millions of dollars, this was a very high profile case.

I don't want to talk about the kind of how it got weaponized in other ways, too.

It got weaponized for a whole lot of reasons besides just right.

But it is a case of fraud, undoubtedly.

And the people who did it should be held accountable and should really, really, there should be a very strict punishment to those individuals who who clearly just ripped off everyone.

Unfortunately, what that case has done, it has now made every single, state government walk on eggshells around how they, disperse the or how they utilize the summer meals program.

We should have the ability to do non congregate feeding for kids.

I have a whole bunch of people in this community who asked me about it all the time.

What if there's kids playing kickball at Grand Avenue Park?

There's no rec center there.

They're just.

There's kids playing on the playground.

Why can't someone just come bring them meals?

Let them eat it when they want to.

Let them take it back to their house.

They're all eligible from a from, every kid in the city of Rochester is eligible for summer meals because we have categorical eligible eligibility across the board for any, meal program, school lunch, after school programs, etc.

but we just need there to be a program that does serve the kids well.

There's tons of kids in this community who just don't participate in organized programs, but because of that case of fraud in Minneapolis, New York State is not going to allow anyone to push the boundaries or to push the envelope because they are petrified of a DOJ.

Investigation on their practices.

And so the result is that, you know, during the school year, about 20,000 kids are eating lunch every day.

We're serving about we collectively, as a community, serve about 9000 some meals a day, 11,000 kids get lunch during the school year and are not getting that free lunch during the summer.

And that's a shame because we know those 11,000 kids, for the most part, need some help.

Their parents need some help, and we can't do it because we can't think creatively because of this one case of fraud.

And I really would attribute it to that one case of fraud.

So what can you do, from your perspective, to try to convince the people who have the power to find a way to allow for a creative solution here?

Yeah.

I mean, first of all, we need to have some champions of it.

So, you know, Senator Gillibrand has always been, a champion of things like the summer meals program.

And I'm going to certainly be advocating with with her office.

You said this is a state decision.

Well, the feds it is with all these things.

It's there's there's federal and state and local layers to it.

But I think we really do need a federal champion to kind of push past this narrative.

Okay.

And then we also need, we, we we just need our state and our state delegation and the governor's office to identify these as the problems they want to focus on.

I think that's a large part of what's happened.

There's so much happening all the time when you're in elected office.

There's so much happening all the time at a at a time when the safety net at the federal level is being cut, that it's hard to get people to focus on specific things.

But I think summer meals is a great example of a place that we should focus and really crystallize a response.

What we do in my day job, I'll put my food bank hat on for a second.

We just do those summer meals distributions without getting reimbursed for it.

We raise private dollars and give out meals.

We drive.

We call it our meal mobile.

We drive up and down places like Dewey Avenue in the northwest.

There's not a lot of rec centers, and we just give out meals to kids that we see, and we just don't ask the, the, the state or the feds to reimburse us for it.

It's a it's a shame because they have the money and we should get them to change their programs.

But that's how we kind of operate in this community on that front.

So you want that food link model?

Well, no, you actually want reimbursement.

You want partners at different government levels saying, we're not scared that what happened to Minnesota is going to get alleged here.

If we attempt an actual creative solution, we're not engaging in fraud.

We're trying to solve a real problem, correct.

Tell us what kind of reporting you need.

Tell us what kind of, what kind of structures and guardrails you need to make this work.

And we can do it.

The feds and the state did allow for non congregate meals to happen in rural communities, so that they made that distinction.

If you are classified as a rural community, you are allowed to have these non congregate feeding programs.

So we at food Bank are actually supporting one in Naples, one in Albion.

And I'm forgetting the last maybe Mount Morris, but we're doing it in three rural communities.

It's working.

Why can't we take that same model and bring it into an urban area, where we know that there are thousands of kids who are under enrolled in summer programing?

And by the way, there is phenomenal summer programing all over this community.

It's just it's not for every family.

Talking to Mr.

Gruber, Rochester City Council member, let me get to your feedback here.

And David is first on the phone.

Hey, David, go ahead.

Oh, thanks.

Yeah.

You, you, I guess, probably knows about the SNAP multiplier effect that since it's federal money, it's basically, if I remember right, the original food stamps for every dollar that came into your county would turn into $1.82 in the local economy.

So it was a almost a 2 to 1 relationship, that you would increase, the currency in circulation in your county and it had a, advantage multiplier effect.

And if I understand, right, Trump has actually heard that he brought it down to $1.50 to first SNAP, but it's still a multiplier effect.

Now, I'm calling you from out in California.

We have a thing that's called, market match.

And if you go down to your foods or if you go down to your, farmer's market, you go to the central booth and you say, I want $40 worth of, SNAP, money for the farmers market.

Well, let's give you an extra 10 or 20 or upwards and, so it becomes more money in circulation, plus the original, dollar and a half or so.

And so there's this multiplier effect of creating a currency in local circulation.

And when you look at the whole history of, you know, the, the currency speculators and, the people who were, opposed to, they, they tried to ruin economies for the advantage of profiteers.

You know, if you run everybody into a ditch, then they're going to be desperate and you're going to create all sorts of new problems.

You keep people fed, they're going to think calmly, and they're going to get stuff done.

And, so there are people that intentionally cause damage, and they these skin plants that want to rip apart SNAP are basically ripping apart the, the, healthy economy.

David, thank you for the phone call.

Mitch.

What do you think?

I have a couple of comments.

Undoubtedly.

There, and this was an argument was making at a time when I was trying to advocate with everyone to not pass H.R.

one.

The SNAP cuts is that it has a massive economic impact.

And, like, yes, there's lots of studies that try to quantify what the what the, multiplier effect is.

Cornell University does a lot of that work.

But we know there is a multiplier effect.

And the biggest thing is that these are dollars going to people's pockets that are all being spent locally.

You can't really spend your SNAP dollars on it at, you know, global or online a starting to get into some e-commerce, but for the most part, they're just spent at local stores.

So yes, it has a massive economic impact.

I will also share that that one of the, assumptions was that a lot of small rural grocery stores are going to close because of the the cuts in SNAP, and we've already seen one big one locally, the only grocery store in Wolcott, New York, the eastern part of Wayne County, closed just I think about a month ago.

And if you are someone who lives in Wolcott, you now have no grocery store for 20, 30 miles away.

And also very limited public transportation options.

There is no doubt that stores like that are doing an analysis and saying, well, we had a whole bunch of money every month coming in from food stamps.

That's gone.

We can't operate like this anymore.

But the final thing I want to add about the economic impact is that, and this is a bigger conversation, you have asked Evan all the right questions about the the work requirements and exemptions.

One of the less sexy parts of the of the conversation is that H.R.

one also shifts a huge amount of the cost to the localities to pay for SNAP benefits.

It used to be pretty much all funded.

100% of the food benefit was paid for by the feds, and a very small portion of the administrative cost was paid for by the state or the county.

This is shifting a ton of that on to the state and then the counties as well in New York, the counties and other places.

They'll they do it how they do it.

But we're all the counties are the, are the purveyors are the users, the administrators of the SNAP program and everywhere but New York City.

So we're starting to see some counties say, hold up.

We don't have the bandwidth to do this.

I think the only and right now there's a whole bunch of bills that are being proposed to delay that cost shift.

Everyone is looking at the writing on the wall and saying, okay, well, H.R.

one, you you balanced your tax breaks on the backs of the SNAP program, but we can actually see these small counties bear the cost of this stuff.

I think our only chance to get one of these bills across the finish line is if every single Republican led legislature starts reaching out to their congresspeople about this, and I, I don't I think that is public.

So I'm just going to say it.

The Orleans County Legislature just passed, a unanimous resolution asking people like, Congressmember Claudia Tenney and other, and other folks to please delay the cost shift.

They are a completely Republican led county.

They know they don't have the bandwidth to be able to handle those administrative cost changes.

So there's so much about the economic impact of SNAP, but also the financial reality of this.

No one wants to see this program change the way the feds have assigned it to change.

And we have limited time to make those changes now.

All right.

I've got a pile of email that we're going to read with Mitch Gruber after our only break of the hour.

He's a member of Rochester City Council.

We're talking about, SNAP and the changes in eligibility, which has resulted in about 4000 people in Monroe County losing benefits and certainly in the in the Rochester Finger Lakes region.

More than that.

You know, Mitch points out, in different states, it is a different story.

And, Arizona, as The New York Times reported earlier this week, it's significantly, proportionately higher.

But still, we're talking about thousands of people.

So let's get this break in.

Your questions on the other side of the break.

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That has been the theme this week on connection Summer sessions.

Some of our favorite conversations from the past year involving young people about various topics.

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We're talking to students who are in robotics competitions.

That's been happening for a long time, but the incursion of AI has already helped remake that kind of space.

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This is connections to your emails.

We go here, here's Jillian.

She says.

I recently tried to apply for SNAP.

It is now several months since I applied.

I've still not even had an interview.

And the same with Medicaid.

Nearly impossible to get a call back.

And now I've been dropped because I couldn't get through to a live person before the deadline.

The ridiculousness of the procedure is mind boggling and to me, wasteful.

I applied online, I get a letter with an appointment that I can't make.

I call the number on the letter and I'm on hold for a half hour and the call gets dropped because they don't take calls past 3 p.m.

I call again the next day.

They refuse to coordinate with my calendar and say I'll receive another letter with an appointment, not coordinating it with my calendar on the phone.

This is a waste of time to waste of money on postage and paper.

I missed the appointment because I fell asleep.

I'm elderly and infirm and I'm now waiting once again for another letter for an appointment.

That again has not been coordinated with my calendar.

That is from Jillian.

Mitch?

Yeah.

I'm not going to, I'm not going to sit here and dispute any of those, things.

I think there's a whole lot of efficiencies to be gained.

I will say that I personally have been I've worked at food Bank for 18 years.

I've been a council member for nine years.

I have never seen, I've never seen Monroe County DHS work harder to meet the moment than right now.

I think they are.

That doesn't mean they're going to get everything right all the time.

I will say that, to the caller, I'd encourage you to call, food bank SNAP line at (585) 413-5091.

We food link, has the a contract with New York State to do SNAP outreach.

So, you know, there's the whole idea of SNAP outreach is that there's an acknowledgment that, county governments across New York State are experiencing backlogs like this.

County governments across New York State are maybe not as, can't get out into the community as much as they want to or as much as they should, maybe.

And so the state has a whole bunch of contracts with organizations to do that outreach.

That contract recently used to be law in New York that did it locally.

Food then took over that contract a couple of years ago.

And so we developed a hotline this 4135091.

And we do, open public hours are pretty much at every single event.

And our team is, responsible for helping people like that.

Caller cut through the red tape to know what's going on.

We can't authorize we don't have the the authority to give someone or approve someone for benefits, but we can help them navigate a very complicated bureaucratic system.

So I'd encourage the caller, or the writer to please call in to that number.

And if no one answers your call today, leave a message.

And it is our commitment to get back to everyone within 48 hours.

And again, if you missed it earlier, there is a website that Food Link has set up.

Save my SNAP.org is also a place where you can be connected to these services.

Save my SNAP talk.

Ben writes to say I'm listening now regarding the show about SNAP benefits and the death by paperwork, I would like to raise the question could eliminating SNAP benefits be part of a plan to evangelize the country?

As conservatives get rid of something that served almost like universal basic income, it ultimately brings people to the food bank so that they have to rely on food pantries and soup kitchens, which are so often associated with religious organizations.

Have they, in effect, driven us to the churches to advance a secondary agenda?

From Ben, I don't know how to answer that question.

I don't think so.

That's seems like, I think that the simple, answer to what happened last year was that and they were pretty honest about this, they being the Republicans in charge in DC, they wanted to have a very, very aggressive tax break for the wealthy, and they needed to be able to balance that, to balance that budget somehow.

And they did it on the backs of social programs that, serves low income folks, that they thought there was rampant.

They incorrectly thought there was rampant waste, fraud and abuse.

I will say one thing that that I don't know if this is it's a bit of a non sequitur from the call, but it's where my brain went.

You know, we should talk a little bit about the upcoming Medicaid cuts.

Not that I know a whole lot of detail about it, but I know that it's substantially different from the SNAP cuts in terms of what people need to prove and how they need to prove it.

They hit in January, they hit in January, and my hope is that the people, the people who are who are going to be hurt most by that are obviously the Medicaid participants, the who will be hurt.

The second most by that are the health care systems.

The health insurance companies, all sorts of there's all sorts of big business that are really going to be hurt by these Medicaid cuts.

And I hope that we start to see some really organized response to this.

One thing that really did surprise me with the SNAP cuts was that there wasn't more of an outcry from big national food vendors, specifically Walmart.

I mean, Walmart has so much of Walmart's total annual sales are via SNAP.

I actually have the numbers somewhere, and I'll try to look it up, but it's a substantial amount of money, staggering amount of money.

And yet they were quiet as a mouse around these cuts.

And I found that to be very surprising.

And I think we really do need to find our advocacy voice that aren't just people who are focused on anti-hunger programs and aren't just the people who are responsible for administering the programs, but the folks who ultimately receive the benefits at the end.

The Walmarts of the world.

We need to figure out how to get all everyone to be advocating.

Don't take money for food away from people who need it.

Let me get back to your emails, Rick says.

I think Mitch Gruber said the quiet part out loud when he pointed out the difference in what can be done in rural red, white or Trump supporting communities and what cannot be done in urban red, black and Hispanic low income communities.

Clearly, Republicans are trying to take our nation back to the pre civil rights era.

How does Mitch believe this kind of partizan and racist policymaking be challenged from Rick, you agree with this characterization?

I think it's a I think it's a reasonable assumption.

I also think there's a there's there is, an another practical explanation for why, which is that in rural communities, there is a massive shortage of programs that that can provide meals to kids.

So, you know, I'll put my food bank hat back on for a second here, but we serve the emergency food network for ten, ten counties.

And in in Monroe County there are food pantries and and meal programs, pretty much multiple of them in every single neighborhood and rural communities.

It can be really, really hard to find places to serve.

And so I think the spirit of allowing for these exemptions in rural communities was, hey, let's let's create workarounds in places where it's just hard otherwise to find a last mile distributor of the food.

But I, I also think there's an incredible amount of institutional racism baked into a lot of decisions that get made.

So I hear the caller's point, and ultimately, my belief is we should have we should allow for non congregate meals to be served in low income communities, whether they are urban, rural, suburban, I don't care what they are.

At the end of the day, we have the ability to feed kids food in the summer months.

We have a program that works.

We have things like like the meals mobile, which is is proven.

We will jump through whatever hoops necessary to prove there is no fraud there.

And let's take some chances.

Let's not let this one story from Minneapolis in 2021 be the thing that dictates the course of this program for the next 20 years.

It's an outlier.

It's not it's not the the representation of the program.

Rick, thank you for the email.

I got an email from an attorney and a nonprofit consultant, named Amy D'Amico.

She says she founded Rochester Grants Pass Resistance, and she writes Rochester Grants Pass resistance.

Held a SNAP clinic a few months ago when we realized how many unhoused people were going to lose their food, SNAP, their food, SNAP benefits, the clinic went very well.

We worked with family nurse practitioner Michael Brennan and Denise Reed.

We got 29 people exemptions to the work requirements.

I sent instructions to the emergency shelter leadership afterwards to ask them to host their own clinics.

Most of them ignored the email completely.

One complimented our work and then brushed it off when others might be using the guidance.

Attached is the guidance we sent them and she sent that to me.

She says it's not too late to exempt large parts of shelter.

Homeless clientele.

I hope this comes up on the show to encourage the shelters to host SNAP clinics.

And she concludes by saying it's not that much work.

We did it for free.

What do you think?

Yeah, I think it's a it's a great idea.

I'm surprised that Amy hasn't said that to me.

At Food Link directly because, you know, most of the, shelters get a decent amount of their food from food link.

And so perhaps if if we offered to either co-host some of these clinics or just give them some of the resources, there'd be a different willingness to to respond.

And Amy knows how to reach me, and I'm happy to follow up that way.

She followed up to send me a note just saying, as an addendum, if you don't have an address or access to work required safety footwear or can't wash your clothes, you meet the physical exemption.

If you have PTSD from being unhoused, you meet the mental exemption.

Those are just examples.

Yeah, there's a ton.

I mean, and so if you go to save my SNAP dawg, the Together Now self screening tool shows you a ton of exemptions.

The one that I tend to highlight the most is there is an exemption if you take care of if you're taking care of someone who's ill, that is, you know, I would say that depending on how you define that, there are tons of people in this community who probably lost benefits, who would be eligible for that exemption, but how would the county ever know?

They wouldn't unless you self screened and found some documentation that that actually could support that claim.

That is what the challenge is now is that these the death by paperwork, you know, the exemptions are there, people qualify for them.

But there still has to be the burden of proof.

And that's was incredibly challenging.

We need to all work together as a community to make it simpler for folks.

Let me zoom out from Amy's point about shelters and just ask.

So right now we've got 3900 or 4000 people in Monroe County and more in the outlying counties who lost their SNAP benefits in June.

And what Amy is saying is, if you're in the homeless population, the only way you're going to get the exemption that you deserve is if the people who are in positions of power almost come to you, meet you where you are because you're not going to get online, you know, you don't have a computer, you probably don't have a phone.

They're going to come to you.

In general, do you think whether it is food, like whether it is government, has government gone to where the people are to say, we think that you're going to lose this, not waiting for the people to come to them and say, do I lose this?

You know, this.

I have this conversation multiple times every day with people.

And I think the answer is, is both a yes and a no.

Yes.

Government is trying substantially to be more, to be more proactive in communications about stuff.

And no, it's not enough.

And both of those and like, it probably never will be enough.

There's always going to have to be people who are doing the work of of trying to keep encouraging people to go, and go to the county office building.

And government needs to keep getting better and refining their their practices of doing more outreach.

Again, Monroe County, Department Human Services did not have an outreach team pre-COVID.

They didn't they didn't have a team of people there who are outreach workers.

They currently do.

And, you know, I, I work with d closely, and she's at every event.

She's out there, she's talking to people.

But does that mean that every person is going to get the proactive outreach from Monroe County?

No, the city of Rochester, you know, Mayor Evans has been very intentional about creating this rock resiliency roundtable, where where folks from all different sectors get together and try to talk and share and then communicate collectively.

Has it done some great things?

Totally.

Has it.

Has it fully scratched the itch of really good communication?

All over the place?

No, there's communication is the hardest thing.

No one does it perfectly.

And we all need to keep trying our best and working together, which is precisely why Fooding said we are going to just buy this domain and put up some billboards and do digital marketing, not because we felt like that is the way to solve the problem, but because that was a thing that wasn't being done otherwise.

And so I'd encourage everyone who's listening right now and anyone who is trying to help make these things better, find ways to contribute, connect with the kind of the local leadership who is working on these issues.

I'm really scared about the Medicaid cuts coming up because, you know, when it came to SNAP, there was a small group of of organizations that could lay some claim to trying to being the kind of leaders in the space with with food Bank rightly being one of them when it comes to health care.

And who leads the conversation about Medicaid?

I actually don't know who it needs to be.

Is it the two hospital systems?

Is it the health insurance companies?

Is it the FCS?

Is it individual, advocacy organizations?

Is a common ground health.

You could you could make the case for a number of folks.

But here we are knocking on the door, knocking on the door of these cuts coming, and we haven't really figured out how is it going to be message or communicated to people.

And that needs to happen now.

Not in January, correct?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Two parter from Dallas.

He says the problem I see is most government programs involve handing out money first before finding anything out as to whether people actually qualify, and then when handing out money is wildly successful.

And it turns out many more people actually show up for the giveaway, we get told the program needs to expand with more and more money.

It's always give out as much money first, and if any effort is made to only give it to needy people, then you are a terrible person for even asking about eligibility.

You agree with that characterization?

No, I think I didn't think you would.

I think I understand what the what the call and there's all sorts of, of, there is generally a movement right now it seems to, to find ways to provide economic relief for everyone and not just for the people who are the lowest income.

I think you see this a lot with some of the narratives around the different tax tax credits, whether they're state or federal.

But again, one of the beauties of SNAP benefits is just the simplicity of the program.

And by the way, I looked at it, it's under 3% of the entire dollar amounts.

Has there been any kind of proven fraud?

And these are numbers that could date back from a from a long time.

I'll send you the study if you want to post it on the site afterwards.

But SNAP is such a simple program.

If you don't have a lot of money, you prove it.

You get a card, you spend money locally on food.

It's just simple and it's good.

And it is very income qualified.

In fact, if anything, those income qualify.

Those income guidelines should go up a little bit in my mind, at a time where everyone's having a hard time affording food.

But they took the simplicity of that program and are trying to make it substantially more complicated, because that is what ultimately kicks people off the benefit.

The emailer goes on to say, I can see all the little grocery stores in the villages and towns around here slowly dying because economies can't survive on handouts.

It's more cost efficient going to Super Walmarts.

I don't really understand the, the the intention of the comment, but I will say this, this, this none of these stores exist only because of food stamps.

But if you take out in a small town like Wolcott, I'm sure they did the math and understood how much comes into the store on a regular basis from food stamps.

And when that money just goes away, nothing replaces it.

There isn't just new money to replace that.

What it means when people lose their SNAP benefits.

It's not that they just find new money to pay for this.

It means they go to the food pantry and get whatever the food pantry has for them, and it means that they buy a lot of lesser of of lower quality, lower cost foods.

But your grocery bill doesn't substantially suddenly get 100 hundreds of dollars bigger because you found new money.

So these stores look at it and say, this isn't going to work for us anymore.

We're seeing that happen across the country.

Jennifer says, aren't most of these changes just going back to pre-COVID requirements, or are they going past those requirements in owner Christmas?

Well, on the summer meal side, the caller is correct.

These are just going back to pre-COVID standards.

I just think we lost an opportunity to innovate.

And that's my biggest complaint.

They're on SNAP.

No these SNAP cuts these these work requirements and and associated cuts and the cost shift are the first time it's ever happened in the history of the food stamp program to this level.

SNAP.

For a very long time was the most bipartisan issue.

It was something that everyone got behind because nobody should have, have, should be at all comfortable with anyone going to bed hungry on any given night in this country.

And somehow, some way in the last couple of years, SNAP has become a Partizan issue, with one party specifically deciding that they want to cut it.

And that's new.

That's not pre-COVID, that's new.

And one more.

This is, Kate says after listening to the mini budget cuts coming down from D.C.

and in her words, Trump's vanity project's spending spree, it's become obvious to me that he's following the model of draining the public programs to fund his own needs.

Last week came his request for taxpayer dollars to make up the cost overruns from the freedom 250 fair on the National Mall.

DOJ's got rid of many of the accounting and oversight folks that would have tracked such nonsense.

Balance.

The budget was always a giant smokescreen.

His fiscal advisors are spouting nonsense.

That's from Kate.

Yeah, I, I applaud that comment.

And I think that's that's very true.

What I will say in the last couple of minutes that I have here is there is an opportunity for advocacy around this.

And again, I think the advocacy starts at a different place than people might be accustomed to.

Instead of advocating for, around SNAP to our federal officials or even to our state delegation, I think the place to advocate right now is to your county.

And I would particularly talk to the listeners of this show who don't live in Monroe County, because Monroe County, this these conversations have been happening.

If you live in a rural Republican led county, it is time to start advocating with your legislators or with your executive office around making sure that they have the ability to maintain the SNAP program when these cost shifts happen.

And I suspect that a lot of these counties are going to say we actually don't we don't have the ability to hire like Orleans counties.

Yeah, correct.

We don't have the ability to hire ten new people to run this program or the ten people who are being paid for, but with federal dollars now we have to cover ourselves.

We can't do it.

And so I would hope that if we see a lot of counties follow the Orleans County lead, we might see some movement at the state and then federal level, and funding will be leading some of that work in the coming months.

When does the cost shift happen to County?

Next year?

20th October, 27th October?

Yeah.

Thank you for for coming in and answering all these emails and phone calls and questions from listeners.

One more time, the food Link website, if people need more information.

Yeah.

Food they can.

Why.org or save my SNAP.org and the SNAP hotline is (585) 413-5091, which Gruber is a member of Rochester City Council.

Thank you, thank you.

More connections coming up.

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