More than a year after the state Department of Public Assistance first fell behind with processing food stamps benefits for thousands of Alaskans, the agency is again reporting lengthy delays for new and returning applicants.
As of late last month, about 6,000 Alaskans who had applied for benefits this summer and fall were waiting on critical food aid from the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which in Alaska are processed and distributed by the Alaska Division of Public Assistance.
The new backlog was created as a result of the state directing the majority of its staff and resources to clearing an older, unprecedented backlog in applications from Alaskans who in some cases had been waiting as long as 11 months for their benefits to be disbursed, according to Deb Etheridge, director of the Division of Public Assistance.
Etheridge said the agency was directed in August by visiting officials from the federal Food and Nutrition Service to prioritize the older applications first, even if it meant the newer applications might get neglected.
“Some of those old ones were so old, they really wanted us just to get through those,” she said. “And so we did. We cleared that original backlog, but subsequently we created sort of a newer backlog.”
That new backlog is causing more ripples of need across the state. In Alaska, more than 92,000 people rely on SNAP. About a third are children, and most have incomes below the federal poverty line.
About one in nine households in Wrangell received food stamps in 2022.
The delays come as the state resumes phone or in-person interviews and income verifications that had been waived starting in 2020 as part of the federal public health emergency put into place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re keeping up on those interviews, but it has been quite a shift in how we do our work,” Etheridge said.
Last February, around 14,000 food stamp applications were reported by the state as part of the backlog, according to Nick Feronti, an attorney with the Northern Justice Project. Rural Alaska communities in particular were heavily impacted.
Since then, the director of the Division of Public Assistance was replaced, 10 Alaskans filed a lawsuit alleging that the delays were a violation of federal law, and the state received a stern warning from the federal government.
Etheridge said the department is continuing to do everything it can to help avoid an even larger backlog or longer delays, including hiring more eligibility technicians, but said that training them has taken time, and progress has been slow.
“If there’s anything that we can do, we’ve been doing it. It’s like taking a little water out of the ocean,” she said.
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