More Bay Area Counties Join Push to Send Prepaid Grocery Cards Amid Federal SNAP Lapse

Contra Costa County supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to provide millions of dollars in direct funding to more than 65,000 households that rely on federal food assistance, joining similar efforts across the Bay Area as benefits remain in limbo.

Although multiple federal judges ordered the Trump administration on Friday to continue operating the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program despite the lapse in appropriations since Oct. 1, when the federal government shut down, President Trump is still threatening to withhold any funds until the shutdown ends.

Even if payments do go out this month, recipients across the country are expected to receive delayed and incomplete benefit transfers.

Amid the uncertainty, Contra Costa County will allocate up to $21 million to provide debit cards to households on CalFresh, California’s iteration of SNAP, beginning next week.

“The loss of CalFresh benefits threatens the food security of over 110,000 county residents,” said Marla Stuart, the director of East Bay County’s Employment & Human Services Department.

Even if the U.S. Department of Agriculture issues partial SNAP benefits for November, she said, those are not likely to hit recipients’ accounts during the usual window during the first 10 days of the month.

“We do anticipate the best-case scenario at this point, and everything is changing, that we are several weeks away from any kind of distribution, if there is a distribution,” she said.

The cards will initially be loaded with 50% of the total funds, then reloaded with each half of the remaining funding weekly for the following two weeks. It wasn’t clear whether recipients would receive the full dollar amount they usually do through CalFresh, but Contra Costa County households received just over $21 million in electronic benefit transfers in September.

Recipients will be able to pick up the cards at the county’s Employment & Human Services Department (EHSD) buildings in Richmond, Hercules, Pleasant Hill and Antioch every weekday next week between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. The supervisors asked EHSD staff to consider adding weekend hours to the pick-up schedule, though whether they will be able to do so wasn’t determined before the vote.

To help households get through this week, Stuart said the county has already purchased the equivalent of 10,000 food boxes from the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano and begun distributing their contents. She said the food should be enough to serve about 40,000 people for two weeks, and estimated it would likely last through the middle of next week.

The county will load the debit cards using millions of dollars from COVID-19 reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other unallocated money in its general fund set aside for contingencies to pay for the cards.

While all of the supervisors agreed the lapse in CalFresh funding constituted a crisis worth spending this funding on, multiple raised questions about the sustainability of spending such large sums to cover federal shortfalls.

“It’s clear that there’s an urgent need, and we are in a crisis in so many ways,” Supervisor Ken Carlson said. “I also want to be thinking that we’re 10 months into this crisis. We do not know what court order, what action [is coming]; what Congress, what this president will do. I want to be very thoughtful of how we proceed, because we might be here three months from now for a totally different issue.”

Elsewhere across the Bay Area, counties have taken similar steps to support households whose usual electronic benefit transfers aren’t arriving this week.

San Francisco is also providing direct aid, sending $18 million in electronic gift cards to CalFresh recipients. Alameda County, meanwhile, is sending $10 million in emergency funding to local food banks and food assistance programs, and it has raised an additional $1.5 million, partly through philanthropic support, for an emergency food program to support food banks and smaller, community-based organizations.

On Tuesday, Marin County supervisors allocated $800,000 to send prepaid cards to the county’s 15,000 CalFresh recipients. The program will be facilitated through the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, and funding will be issued in $200,000 increments for four weeks.

While local jurisdictions and the state have quickly mobilized to help people continue to put food on the table, how long they’ll be able to do so is unclear.

“This is a Band-Aid,” Contra Costa Supervisor Diane Burgis said. “Are we also working on if this is to continue for another month or two, what we would do? This is four weeks. So what is the next plan after that?”