Local leaders encourage Salinas to protect vulnerable communities in Salem as food assistance cuts loom

Angelo Arredondo Baca remembers benefiting from government food assistance growing up in Salem. With a father who was a full-time farm worker, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, ensured that there was food on the table for him and his siblings.

“I don’t think I would be here if it wasn’t for SNAP,” he said during a Wednesday roundtable with U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, D-Oregon.

Now, he works with immigrant families to improve access to higher education. In his job, he hears concerns from parents who are wary that those same support systems may disappear.

Federal cuts from a Republican-backed budget domestic policy bill passed July 4 are projected to reduce benefits for more than 700,000 people who receive SNAP in Oregon, with most impacts taking effect in the next two years. 

The bill would cut about $425 million per year Oregon receives from the federal government to pay for groceries for low-income families, leaving the state to either make up the difference or cut benefits.

It also changes the formula for deciding how much assistance families get each month. The state Department of Human Services estimated those changes could cut food benefits by 20%. That’s about $160 less per month for a family of three, Oregon Capital Chronicle reported.

The bill also requires eligible adults to prove they’re working, volunteering or attending school at least 80 hours per month to get benefits.

U.S. Census data from 2023 estimated that in Marion County, about 129,000 households received SNAP benefits, including 86,000 working families and 40,000 families with kids under 18. In Polk County, there were about 33,000 households receiving food assistance, almost 9,000 of which were families with kids under 18. 

Wednesday’s roundtable brought together anti-hunger advocates from Salem and a representative from the Oregon Department of Health and Human Services to Salinas’ office to hear concerns about how federal SNAP cuts will impact vulnerable populations in Salem.

Discussion focused on seniors, people experiencing poverty and families with mixed immigration status.

Matt Newell-Ching, a senior policy manager for the Oregon Food Bank, expressed concern about refugees and asylees in Oregon. The federal law ends SNAP eligibility for those groups who are in the U.S. legally but don’t have a green card or permanent legal status. That change won’t be implemented until the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs SNAP, issues new rules.

“These are folks who have documentation. These are refugees, people whose asylum claims have been approved,” Newell-Ching said. Immigrants without legal status are not eligible for SNAP.

Newell-Ching and Ian Dixon-McDonald, the vice president of programs at Marion Polk Food Share, both expressed concerns about being able to provide enough food for those who come to food banks to make ends meet.

“We will see more people. We’ve seen this in the past when we came out of the pandemic, and some of those increases to SNAP went back to normal – we saw a huge spike in people coming to pantries,” Dixon-McDonald said.

Dixon-McDonald said that food share can’t prepare to buy its way out of a food shortage. The agency has already seen a 15% decrease in its food supply following the cancellation of a U.S. Department of Agriculture program in June.

“We’re talking over somewhere around $1.1 to $1.2 million annually to try to make up for the kinds of losses you see in the food supply,” Dixon-McDonald said, adding that it would be “so far out of our reach as a nonprofit” to try to make up.

Evann Walters, the president and CEO of Salem food distribution company Fresh ‘n Local Foods, said that SNAP cuts will also impact school nutrition programs through the loss of direct certification, a system that automatically qualifies children for free school meals if their families receive food assistance.

Without direct certification, some schools will have to return to individual paperwork, which Walters said “definitely reduces overall participation in those programs.”

Walters said that the loss of direct certification threatens Oregon’s successful universal meal programs, which currently serve 90% of the districts that Fresh ‘n Local Foods works with.

She also shared that her employees, many of them Hispanic and with legal status who have been at the company for over 15 years, have expressed deep concern about the climate of fear created by immigration enforcement.

“I don’t even know what to say when they’re asking me, you know, can we lock the doors? What happens at work? You know, I don’t know how to protect people or how to ease their concerns” she said.

Throughout the roundtable, Salinas acknowledged the financial reality that Oregon faces, estimating that the state will struggle to take on the shifted costs from federal cuts to SNAP.

“I don’t think the state’s going to be able to come up with, you know, an additional almost a billion dollars per biennium, because that’s what the cost shift will mean to the states. It’ll just mean people going hungry,” she said.

Salinas said that private conversations with Oregon legislators suggest that policymakers won’t be interested in the tax increases needed to maintain current benefit levels. The state is also facing the prospect of backfilling federal cuts to the state’s Medicaid program, the Oregon Health Plan, and projecting less tax revenue because of changes to the federal tax code.

“I don’t know how you come up with a billion dollars, unless you increase taxes. I don’t think the Legislature is actually thinking about doing some kind of revenue increase for food programs,” she said.

With a state-level solution unlikely, Salinas’ approach, she said, will be to engage in aggressive oversight of the agencies implementing these cuts and encouraging Republican colleagues to go on record about protecting food benefits for children.

She also said that she plans to draft a letter with stakeholders holding federal agencies accountable.

“I will get my other ag committee members to sign on, and we’ll circulate through the House, bipartisan if they wish to,” Salinas said. “How do you expect to keep children free from losing nutrition, those kinds of questions. Now is the time to make sure they’re doing the right thing by at least children, because they’ve said it. How are you going to prove it?”  

Gov. Tina Kotek said that she is prepared to “fight for what Oregon holds dear” in a statement on July 3, after the federal law passed the U.S. House.

“But I won’t pretend that our state budget resources can bear the weight of these cuts. Hard work and difficult decisions lie ahead,” the statement read.

Contact reporter Mirandah Davis-Powell: [email protected].

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