2023-10-03 16:57:23
With a need for additional food still high in South Dakota, cars queue up to wait their turn to receive groceries at a Feeding South Dakota mobile food bank in Rapid City. (Bart Pfankuch/South Dakota News Watch)
South Dakotans who rely on food stamps missed out on $100 million for groceries because the state declared an end to the COVID-19 emergency while federal funding was still available, according to an analysis prepared by the state Legislative Research Council and obtained by News Watch.
Gov. Kristi Noem decided in July 2021 that South Dakota had recovered enough from the pandemic and ended the formal emergency far earlier than most other states. That prevented the state from taking the estimated $103 million in additional emergency funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) available until March 2023.
The estimate is likely low because emergency allotment totals rose as more people qualified for SNAP benefits in early 2021, the LRC analysis said.
Thirty-two other states took the funding until the program ended. South Dakota was one of the first states to end its state of emergency and stop taking the money for food to low-income residents, people with disabilities and families with children.
According to amounts from the final month South Dakota took the emergency funding, about 34,600 households lost out on an average of $150 per month over those 19 months.
Critics of Noem’s decision — including a South Dakota lawmaker, grocer and food stamp recipient — said it prevented low-income families and individuals from buying more food during the lingering months of the pandemic. It also denied grocery retailers millions of dollars in revenue, they said.
But Noem’s communications director, Ian Fury, said the governor concluded the state economy had “fully recovered” from the pandemic and that a state of emergency was no longer needed.
The unemployment rate had fallen to pre-pandemic levels, the tourism industry had rebounded and “our COVID peak was long in the rearview mirror,” he wrote in an email to News Watch.
“This spending was not necessary to combat the COVID-19 pandemic,” Fury wrote.
That explanation, however, doesn’t sit well with Michelle Alexander, 63, of Rapid City, who lives on a fixed income that includes monthly SNAP benefits.
Alexander said added SNAP benefits were needed well after July 2021.
Feeding South Dakota, a leading state food charity, estimates that about 25,000 South Dakota children currently don’t get enough to eat. The organization saw a 20% increase in families visiting its mobile distribution sites from June 2022 to July 2023.
Alexander said she suffers from joint problems in her knees that made it impossible to work her regular job in retail. She needs surgery but cannot afford a $625 test for a possible allergy to metals that has so far prevented her from getting knee surgery.
Alexander said she received about a $40-a-month bump in her monthly SNAP benefit during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing her food stamp allowance to $281 a month. When the emergency allotments ended in August 2021, her monthly benefit fell to about $240, she said.
“That extra $40 could buy me a couple 5-pound chubs of ground beef to survive on,” she said.
News Watch has previously reported on how South Dakota returned $80 million of federal pandemic rental assistance and didn’t apply for $7.5 million in 2022 and 2023 for low-income children during summer.
Fury also pointed out that Noem was the only governor in the country to reject an offer from the Trump Administration for extended unemployment benefits for state residents in August 2020.
“Governor Noem absolutely believes that the federal government’s wasteful spending, much of it at the behest of President Biden, is the single largest cause of the inflation crisis that our nation finds itself in,” Fury wrote in his email.
But the SNAP money represents a fraction of the federal largesse sent to South Dakota before, during and since the COVID-19 pandemic.
News Watch earlier reported that from March 2020 to January 2023, the state government received about $4.2 billion in pandemic emergency funding. Another $9.6 billion in federal aid was provided to local governments, health care facilities, educational institutions, businesses and individuals in the state.
Furthermore, South Dakota took in $121.8 billion in federal funding from fiscal years 2008-2022, receiving $9.3 billion over the past 12 months alone, according to USAspending.gov.
State Sen. Reynold Nesiba, D-Sioux Falls, said Noem’s decision to reject the federal SNAP funds removed a small but critical revenue stream to low-income families and grocers during tough times caused by COVID and inflation.
“It’s also a real problem for those of us who care about hungry people,” Nesiba said.
Nesiba said the move is an indicator that Noem is out of touch with the needs of South Dakotans living on the margins.
“I think partly the governor is not spending 50 hours a week being governor because she is distracted and focused on lifting her national profile,” Nesiba said.
Howard “Howdy” Hobernicht has spent 50 years in the grocery business and has owned the small Newmart Grocery in downtown Newell since 1999.
Hobernicht, 70, said he supports Noem’s decision to stop taking the emergency payments before the federal program ended.
“On the surface, it seems bad that we didn’t take it, but I think there’s plenty of resources available without it,” Hobernicht said. “I don’t want people to become dependent on it.”
Annie Orth, the owner and manager of Merkel’s Foods, a third-generation family-run grocery store in Mobridge, is more troubled by Noem’s decision.
Orth said her business relies in large part on customers who use food stamps, including locals and residents from the nearby Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
Orth said the emergency boost in SNAP benefits helped both her store and low-income families make it through financial hard times during the pandemic.
“That’s very foolish because it will never not be needed,” she said. “Whether it was for the pandemic or right now, $300 of groceries is not the same as it was five years ago.”
“It doesn’t make sense because if there’s money available, you take it. You help the community and you help the state,” she said. “I don’t know that they (state government leaders) get to see how things are in small communities or on reservations.”
— This article was produced by South Dakota News Watch, a non-profit journalism organization located online at sdnewswatch.org.
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