After losing her job late last year, Alex Curry moved back into her parents’ St. Paul home with her three children.
Having no other source of income, the single mother applied in early January for benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food aid to people in need.
Weeks turned into months as Ramsey County processed her application, leaving Curry to increasingly rely on her parents for help feeding her kids.
“Every day was just kind of a waiting game,” she said. “You have that worry, that stress and that anxiety. … I don’t want my parents to have to deal with a financial struggle because I can’t help them with groceries.”
Last week, Curry received the SNAP debit card that will allow her to buy groceries for her family, nearly three months after she first applied for aid.
“It just makes you kind of feel like, who can you depend on?” she said of the wait. “I don’t really have a lot of trust in the system at all.”
Curry is one of thousands of Ramsey County residents whose applications for SNAP or cash assistance have lingered for several weeks in the county’s Financial Assistance Services department.
Surge in applications
FAS has struggled to keep up with a surge in applications that began with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerated in late 2021, when state officials made it easier for Minnesotans to apply for aid. The department now fields more than 1,100 SNAP and cash assistance applications weekly — roughly double what it saw pre-pandemic.
With just 37 full-time employees who each process an average of 19 applications a week, FAS fell far behind. As of last week, the county reported a backlog of 4,166 applications waiting to be assigned to an intake worker. The oldest of these were submitted in mid-February.
This is an improvement over a couple of months ago, when the backlog was nearly double that, said Trista MatasCastillo, who chairs the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners.
“We are definitely making progress,” MatasCastillo said. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t give a lot of reassurance to people who are waiting in that backlog. … This is not something we’re taking lightly.”
FAS officials initially hoped application volumes would return to normal, said Ali M. Ali, who was appointed the department’s director last week after serving in that role on an interim basis for the past year.
“We’ve started acknowledging that this is the new normal, and we need to make some changes,” Ali said. “We have already seen some improvement with what we have been doing.”
These changes have included hiring additional staffers to screen and evaluate applications, as well as streamlining the process itself. Ali said he hopes to have processing times back to pre-pandemic levels by late May.
MNBenefits launched
Applications for need-based aid programs like SNAP and cash assistance first spiked in Ramsey County during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as residents were laid off or furloughed by businesses that were shuttered due to the virus.
But the backlog didn’t reach a crisis point until the state’s Department of Human Services launched its MNBenefits online portal, which allows Minnesotans to apply for nine different social assistance programs by filling out a single web form.
MNBenefits was a game changer for people seeking food aid, said Mesa Siebert, neighbor services outreach manager for Second Harvest Heartland, a Brooklyn Park-based hunger relief organization that helps Twin Cities residents apply for SNAP assistance.
While the paper SNAP application consisted of 10 pages and took about 45 minutes to fill out, this new online form could be completed in a fraction of the time, Siebert said.
“It’s such a nice user experience to be able to submit an application in five, 10 minutes,” she said. “You can upload your documentation right there — proof of income, proof of identification. So that’s huge. You used to have to print that off and mail it in.”
Since MNBenefits went live in November 2021, Ramsey County has seen its SNAP and cash application volumes increase by roughly half.
“The system is doing exactly what it was created to do,” Ali said. “It removed the barriers so our residents can apply for programs faster.”
But while the front end of the application process has been streamlined, the back end still relies on financial workers in each county to manually enter data from a PDF into a state-run database, said Dana DeMaster, research manager for the county’s Health and Wellness Administration.
“It’s a very old database,” she said. “You’d assume nowadays that it’s all electronic. But on our end, we’re still getting essentially a paper application.”
By last November — one year after the launch of MNBenefits — the median processing time for SNAP applications in Ramsey County had more than doubled from 19 days to 52 days. For cash assistance applications, the processing time went from 27 days to 35.
DHS requires that processing be completed no later than 30 days after an application is submitted and can take corrective action when counties are out of compliance, but the agency said in an emailed statement that Ramsey County has already taken steps to address its backlog.
“Corrective actions can be implemented in a variety of ways to help reach positive results for the people we serve,” the statement said. “DHS can work with counties to develop and implement corrective actions, and counties can self-impose their own improvements to streamline the application process.”
‘All hands on deck’
In Ramsey County’s case, these improvements have included staffing up FAS and refining the intake process.
“This is an all-hands-on-deck situation,” MatasCastillo said. “We need to change the way we’re doing our work.”
Rather than having a single case worker shepherd each application all the way through the review process, FAS has divided this work between two different types of employees.
Clerical workers now screen applications as they come into the department, sorting them according to whether they are new requests for assistance or recertifications, and weeding out duplicate applications.
Financial workers — who have been trained and certified by DHS — then evaluate the applications to determine their eligibility for benefits, examining supporting documentation and interviewing applicants by phone.
The department also has expanded the hours during which its employees will call applicants for interviews to between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. They may also call on weekends.
FAS has added 13 part-time financial workers with another seven expected to start later this month, according to Ramsey County officials. The staff also includes more than a dozen clerical workers.
MatasCastillo said she anticipates FAS will request funding for additional financial workers in next year’s county budget.
In the meantime, Ali said SNAP and cash assistance applicants can help reduce processing times by submitting all necessary documentation with their applications and being sure to answer the phone when their case worker calls for an interview.
He cautioned residents against resubmitting their application if they don’t hear from their case worker as soon as they expect. This increases the backlog.
Residents waiting for their applications to be processed can access information about their case via the county’s automated phone line at 651-266-3800.
More information about the programs is available on the county’s website, along with a dashboard that tracks the application backlog.
