• A total of $6 billion in additional mandatory child care funding over the next five years. We know how hard you have worked over the years to attain progress towards much needed child care funding and we were very pleased to learn that this additional funding has been found! We imagine it may take effort to ensure that none of this money is lost on the Floor or in conference, and we offer our full support to help you prevent that from occurring.
• $20 million annually in mandatory funding for state Responsible Fatherhood demonstrations and $30 million annually for national demonstrations. We encourage the Senate to ensure that this funding goes to programs of proven effectiveness.
• Incorporation of the Smith-Jeffords proposal to allow people with disabilities, including those with substance abuse problems, to have their participation in rehabilitative services count beyond six months. We understand that this extension requires concurrent, part-time participation in work activities, but this provision is a welcome step in a positive direction to assist this population.
• Refugee and humanitarian immigrant eligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for two more years (to nine) after they enter the United States.
• Flat funding for the basic TANF block grant. While the same level of funding since 1997 amounts to annual reductions due to inflation, we are well aware of budgetary constraints and other priorities that might have resulted in out-right cuts.
• Programs to reduce rules that act as disincentives to two-parent families in means-tested assistance programs are eligible to compete for funding appropriated for Promotion of Family Formation and Healthy Marriage. You will recall that UREAP raised this issue in 2002 and requested your help to provide a mechanism to address this problem. We are pleased to see it in this year's PRIDE Act and thank you for your work to that end.
• Marriage Promotion funding applicants must consult with domestic violence organizations and ensure that their programs include specific safeguards against increasing the risk of victims.
• Extended funding for Supplemental Grants. As you know, as a high growth state, Utah receives and relies on funding from this provision.
• A set of tribal improvement grants are established and funding appropriated to help Indian Tribes operating their own TANF programs to strengthen infrastructure, receive technical assistance, and build reservation economies and Tribes are made eligible for Employment Bonus Achievement Awards and Contingency Fund denied them in the current law. UREAP has worked with leaders in Utah's Indian community to correct a long list of omissions and oversights in the 1996 welfare law with regard to Indian Country. These changes are most welcome.
• Carryover TANF funds can be spent on any benefit or service authorized under TANF law, not just on cash assistance.
• Families can be excluded from participation rate calculations during their first month of enrollment.
• The Caseload Reduction Credit is replaced by an Employment Credit. UREAP applauds a change that encourages states to help people get somewhere, rather than to simply get them off welfare. This approach is vastly preferable to the approach taken in the HR 240, the House bill to reauthorize the welfare law. Providing partial and extra credit is appropriate.
• Seven new countable activities are added and the current nine activities countable as "direct work" are maintained. UREAP considers expanding countable activities as one of our highest priorities for welfare reform reauthorization. This is particularly essential as state participation rates increase. Utah is just one of many states that will have difficulty meeting participation rates. We are concerned that a negative byproduct will be loss of Utah's long-standing commitment to matching people's participation with what will offer real help towards work preparation and child and family well-being. However, adding important activities to the list of countable activities is a positive step. We urge you and your colleagues to resist any attempt to scale back the list as the bill is on the Floor or in conference. The House action in this regard is destructive.
• Self-sufficiency plans are required for all families. As you know, Utah has followed this practice for years, but even here, we expect to see an improvement in the collection of valuable information and a better understanding of what services and supports may be available to, and needed by, families. We thank you again for your efforts since 2002 to ensure that child well-being is a focal point.
• A "transitional compliance" provision for teen parents. Utah has worked with a large group of other organizations to provide a better approach to helping teen parents get connected to supports and come into compliance with education or training and living arrangement requirements in the law.
• The State Maintenance of Effort requirement in the current law is maintained.
• Penalty Relief is provided to states making a good faith effort to comply with rising participation rates. It is our experience with the Utah Department of Workforce Services that everyone works hard to serve families and comply with congressional requirements. Withdrawing funding for punitive reasons simply puts states farther behind in their efforts and appears to us to doom them to perpetual failure.
• The definition of  "assistance" is modified to exclude child care and transportation assistance.
• $25 million annually is authorized for grants for low-income car ownership. We commend the Senate Finance Committee on understanding that real help is needed to address the enormous barriers presented by unreliable and, in rural areas, non-existent transportation options.
• $200 million annually is authorized for Business Links (to improve wages by improving job skills) and Transitional Jobs (combining subsidized, time-limited, wage-paying supported work in the public or nonprofit sectors with skills development and barrier removal activities) programs. We look to this provision to put in motion some important, creative resources to help people become more employable.
• Vastly improved child support provisions are included in the bill. Among other provisions, UREAP supports changes in the assignment of child support rights and rules relating to pre-assistance arrearages that ensure that more of the child support collected goes to children. Increased child support collection mechanisms are also welcome.
• The 2005 PRIDE bill does not follow the lead of the House bill in requiring full-family sanctions. Utah and other states should have the ability to determine how they work with individual families with participation problems. Utah-specific research has shown that hard work is needed by both the administering agency and families to resolve some kinds of difficulty. The House approach would force Utah to act against everything it has learned about troubled families confronting participation barriers.
• Likewise, the PRIDE bill does not allow states to propose sweeping, cross-program Superwaivers. We know there is pressure for this type of mechanism that shifts regulatory power even farther into the Administrative branch and reduces accountability, but we urge you and your fellow Senators to resist such measures.

• We support increasing countable months of education and training from 12 to 24 months. Current law allows 12 months of vocational education and training to be counted for purposes of work requirements, half of what Utah law allows. As we understand it, the PRIDE bill adds another 3 months in every 24 under some circumstances, as well as a component entitled "Parents As Scholars." UREAP supports three additional months and PAS, in concept, but we do not believe these changes will serve Utah's needs for an extension of countable months of education and training from 12 to 24 months. We hope that you will support, or even sponsor, action to amend the bill to that effect. Our reasons are as follows: 1) An extension in the number of countable months of education and training from 12 in the current law to 24 would directly mirror what has been in Utah statute since 1996 . The Department of Workforce Services is strongly supportive of a 24 month provision in federal law. With increases in participation rates on the horizon and rising caseloads, future policy and practice will need to ensure that parents are engaged almost exclusively in countable activities. Without this amendment, DWS will need to deny parents' requests for training that will take longer than 12 months, even though the Utah statute allows it. 2) The Utah Legislature has historically resisted facilitating post-secondary education for welfare recipients and is therefore unlikely to adopt the option for a "Parents as Scholars" type of program. On the other hand, as noted just above, vocational education and training have been supported. 3) Even if a Parents as Scholars program were adopted, the 10 percent cap on participants in longer term training would force a restriction on our current, positive practices. As we have noted earlier, 24 months of vocational education and training for jobs in demand has been a focus in Utah and has brought good results, particularly for placing people in health-related fields.
• We support less restrictive language pertinent to counting caretaking as a work activity for TANF parents with a child or other dependent with a disability. Under the PRIDE bill, parents caring for a child or dependent with a physical or mental impairment can be counted as engaging in work activities if the state determines that substantial continuous care is needed only if the parent is deemed the "only reasonable provider of that care" We urge you to confer with members of your Advisory Committee in Utah to obtain their feedback and counsel on this provision before it becomes law.
• We support even greater efforts to address the overwhelming challenges facing TANF parents living in Indian Country in highly constricted job markets. As written in the PRIDE Act, months on assistance will be disregarded for adults living in Indian country with a jobless rate of 40 percent, instead of 50 percent in the current law. However, finding a job with a 40 percent unemployment rate is still extremely difficult. Moreover, the bill does not in any way address the problem on "checkerboard" reservations like Utah's Uintah-Ouray Reservation, where reservation boundaries, and therefore unemployment rate computations, encompass the entire resident population, despite clear evidence that Indians suffer far greater joblessness than their non-Indian neighbors.
• We support the addition of a provision to allow states to extend basic assistance to vulnerable legal immigrant populations. Utah has continued to provide financial and employment assistance to legal immigrants after 1996 by using all state dollars. This has been done for a number of reasons, one of which is a belief that leaving immigrant families out when they need help will only cost our society more in the long term. There is a great human potential to be realized to the extent that all of our residents are able to meet their basic needs and become productive. We believe a positive change to the 1996 Welfare Reform Law would be to allow states to expend TANF dollars to provide assistance to legal immigrants, making it possible for Utah to devote more of its MOE dollars to other needed services. We support changes to the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) law that would extend the number of years elderly legal immigrants may be eligible beyond five in the law. We also favor allowing state options to expend SCHIP and Medicaid monies on children and pregnant legal immigrants. You have opposed the latter provision in the past, but we ask you to reconsider. 
• We support an amendment that would allow states to use Family promotion funding for programs that include efforts to reduce the economic stress on families. We favor legislative encouragement of healthy marriages, support for teen pregnancy prevention efforts, and approaches that acknowledge the difficult reality of harmful marriages--including those involving domestic violence. The PRIDE bill shows encouraging sensitivity to these issues. However, research shows that economic stress is a frequent source of marital discord. We believe that states should be allowed to expend family promotion funding in ways that alleviate family poverty or help families meet basic needs.
• We believe that increasing hours of participation beyond the current law is counterproductive and harmful to children and ask you to consider working to maintain the provision in current law. UREAP has consistently asserted that increasing the hours that TANF parents must engage in work activities each week to count towards state participation rates is counterproductive and may well act against the well-being of children in a variety of ways. The 1996 law set this at 30 hours. We are alarmed at the persistent efforts of the Bush Administration and in the House to increase hours to 40 and, although 34 hours, as specified in the PRIDE bill, is certainly a preferable number, we will again urge that required hours be left as in the current law. In February 10, 2005 testimony before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Ways and Means, Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution and formerly staff to both that Committee and the Bush Administration took that same approach. He counseled that increasing hours beyond the current law, a highly controversial effort that makes agreement on welfare reform reauthorization legislation among both parties and Chambers difficult, is unlikely to have a positive effect and will substantially increase state costs. We urge the Senate to send a clear message against higher required hours provisions than the PRIDE bill.
  
• We are greatly concerned to see a trend in legislation in both the House and the Senate that forces states to push TANF parents into activities that are "countable," rather than those that make sense for individual families. By raising state participation rates and increasing hours of participation, states must put the needs of families behind avoiding sanctions. The House bill promises much more harm in this regard than the PRIDE bill, but even so, for example, if, as in PRIDE, "qualified" activities can count for only three months in any 24-month period and only after the parent has satisfied the "direct work" hourly requirement, vulnerable families with hope of recovery from barriers through effective intervention will be lost. We urge consideration of some type of case-by-case flexibility, at least.
• We appreciate an increase in funding for the Social Services Block Grant, but ask your support for full restoration. The PRIDE bill adds $1 billion for the Social Services Block Grant over the next five years. However, this increase provides only $300,000 per year in additional funding. $1.5 billion per year is needed to restore previous cuts.

We appreciate your time to consider these points and our requests and will be happy to provide further information you may find helpful.

Sincerely,

Shirley Weathers and Bill Walsh, Staff

for Utah Reauthorization Project members: