COLUMBUS, Ohio – Claiming that more than one in six Ohio households is facing food insecurity this holiday season, a Northeast Ohio lawmaker is urging Gov. John Kasich to restore access to food assistance benefits for 135,000 unemployed Ohioans.
Current rules governing the food-stamp program require childless adults to work or participate in a job training program to receive the benefits. But states can waive the work requirement, depending on their economic climate, and state Rep. Dan Ramos (D-Lorain) thinks Ohio’s economy justifies asking the federal government to waive the requirement for all of the state’s 88 counties.
“Ten years ago, 29 states were worse off than us in food insecurity. Now only nine states are. We are backsliding, and quite simply the people are the ones paying for it,” Ramos said.
The Kasich administration has filed to receive the waiver in 16 select counties in the coming year, but Ramos says, with high unemployment, a large number of people will be unable to find jobs or training and will find their cupboards bare.
Currently there are only 9,000 slots available in the Work Experience Program and Ramos says the waiver needs to be extended statewide.
Kasich’s office says they didn’t accept the waiver because the state’s unemployment has dropped since 2010 but Ramos says the state’s overall job growth continues to be among the worst in the country, falling below the national average, to 7.5 percent.
While the U.S. unemployment rate in November had fallen 0.8 percent in one year, to 7.0 percent, Ohio’s had climbed from 6.8 percent to 7.4 percent, a 1.4-point swing.