March 15, 2005

BILLS TO REDUCE CHILD POVERTY ADVANCE

Representative Mary Mushinsky, Representative Michael Cardin, Representative Jack Thompson, Senator Edward Meyer, and Senator Mary Ann Handley expressed their support for House Bill 5482 and Senate Bill 897, Acts Implementing the Recommendations of the Child Poverty Council, at a press conference held today at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford prior to the bills’ approval by the Select Committee on Children. In addition to the legislators, Liz Brown, of the Commission on Children, spoke for the commission’s support of the legislation. The goal of the legislation is to implement the first year of a ten-year plan to lift 50% of the state’s children who are currently living in poverty, out of poverty. The legislators are targeting both the approximately 90,000 children living at the 100% of federal poverty level and the 150,000 children living at the 200% of poverty, the “working poor.” The goal requires 12,000 Connecticut children be removed from poverty each year. This is the first year of legislation to implement the recommendations of the Child Poverty Council.

All of the representatives and senators emphasized that 1 out of 4 Connecticut children live in poverty, which not only hurts the children, but also the state. In 2003, 88,600 Connecticut children lived in poverty. According to the 2000 Census, 25% of Connecticut’s children did not have a full-time, year-round employed parent. In the 2000 Census, seven towns had a poverty rate about 23%, with our State’s Capital, Hartford, leading with 41%.

Children living in poverty leads to loss of future productivity to the state. Representative Mushinsky stated “each year that a child spends in a poverty results in a cost of $11,800 in lost future productivity over his or her working life. Since 88,600 of Connecticut’s children live in poverty, the Connecticut labor force is projected to lose over $1 billion in future productive capacity for every year that this number of Connecticut children live in poverty.”

One of the main objectives of this first year of the 10-year plan is to access untapped federal funds to implement the recommendations of the poverty council. The legislation will initiate an outreach project to aggressively promote families to claim the federal earned income tax credit for working poor. Representative Mushinsky noted, “Thirty percent of Connecticut’s eligible families fail to collect versus 20% nationally. An increase of claims could help 67,000 Connecticut families to gain an average payment of $1,500 in federal tax credits. The bill includes $100,000 to fund the outreach with a potential gain of $100.5 million in federal dollars.” There are also available federal funds for child nutrition through school breakfast programs.

The legislation will also fund more job training with a state match to the federal funds that are available for education towards job training. The cost will be $18 million, including time limit extensions for the Temporary Family Assistance Program to allow parents to complete the job-training period. In addition to providing more funding for job training, the legislation will require agencies dealing with poverty clients to identify barriers to higher wage employment, in an effort to link them to the appropriate services to remove that barrier.

Liz Brown from the Commission on Children expressed her gratitude to the Select Committee on Children for taking the lead on organizing the Poverty Council as well as writing the legislation to implement the Poverty Council’s recommendations. She noted that Connecticut is the first state in the nation to take an aggressive approach to lift children out of poverty.