City Council members to help seniors enroll for food-stamp program

 

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

By HEIDI J. SHRAGER

ADVANCE STAFF WRITER

In an effort to make sure thousands of city senior citizens on the verge of going hungry get the help they're due, City Council members will fan out across the boroughs to personally help them enroll in the federal food-stamp program.

Standing on the steps of City Hall yesterday, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced the on-the-ground campaign amidst anti-hunger advocates and a handful of other Council members.

During one week each month, beginning next week, Council members -- including James Oddo (R-Mid-Island/Brooklyn), Michael McMahon (D-North Shore) and Andrew Lanza (R-South Shore) -- will visit senior centers, community organizations and other places that attract high numbers of seniors.

"We can't just sit up on the dais during a hearing and look at this from a legislative perspective," Ms. Quinn said. "We're going to take City Hall and City Council out of this building, out into the neighborhoods we represent, to find the New Yorkers who qualify."

The goal is to enroll 350,000 eligible New Yorkers into the food-stamp program by 2010, said Ms. Quinn. That will build on other city efforts already under way to make the program more accessible, such as flagging eligible New Yorkers when they visit a public hospital.

Food-stamp enrollment citywide is up 0.8 percent, to 1,095,000 people, according to statistics released by the mayor's office last week.

The news comes a day after Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented a broad, innovative plan to fight poverty, with which the Council's work will dovetail, said Ms. Quinn.

Like Bloomberg, the Council will target certain vulnerable groups of people. While Bloomberg focused on the working poor, young children and young adults, the Council will reach out to seniors this month, and then turn to immigrants, children, new mothers and public housing residents.

Experts say the program will go a long way toward reaching more than 600,000 city residents who are eligible for food stamps but not enrolled. As of January, 16,323 Staten Island households were enrolled in the program.

While eligibility requirements are based on complicated formulas of income versus expenses, a family earning less than $26,000 is typically qualified. There are roughly 20,000 such families on Staten Island, according to 2005 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Targeting the elderly -- whose fixed incomes are failing to keep pace with the rising cost of living -- will lend significant help on Staten Island, where an alarming portion of the borough's more than 60,000 seniors are unsure of their next meal, said Richard Reetz, president and CEO of Community Agency for Senior Citizens.

Heidi J. Shrager covers City Hall for the Advance. She may be reached at shrager@siadvance.com.

 

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