Months after a Manhattan Federal Court judge ordered the Adams administration to rectify the delayed delivery of food stamps and cash assistance to poor New Yorkers, Mayor Adams announced Monday his team has substantially eliminated those backlogs.
In July, Manhattan Federal Judge Jennifer Rearden ruled the administration needed to speed up processing of cash assistance and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program claims, commonly known as SNAP benefits, in response to a class action lawsuit filed months earlier. Under her ruling, all backlogged applications have to be cleared within the legally prescribed 30-day time frame by the end of March.
So far, that goal hasn’t been met completely, but, according to Monday’s announcement from the mayor’s office, 90% of backlogged SNAP cases and 97% of overdue cash assistance cases have been addressed.
“Our administration has nearly eliminated the cash assistance and SNAP backlogs — processing more than 50,000 applications and building on our work to ensure vulnerable New Yorkers can get the support they need,” Adams said in a written statement.
The more than yearlong saga over delayed benefit payments came into the public eye in January 2023 when four New Yorkers with outstanding benefit claims sued the city over the delays. The suit, which was later granted class action status, ultimately led to Rearden ruling the city needed to act quickly.
Under federal and state law, the city is required to process claims with 30 days of them being filed.
The Legal Aid Society, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case, said Monday they “are very pleased that the Adams administration was able to correct the egregious backlog of applications filed by low-income New Yorkers for these lifesaving benefits.”
“Going forward, we will continue to hold the city accountable for any processing delays that adversely impact our clients,” the society said in a written statement. “We await further details from the city on how the backlog was reduced to ensure that any eligible household received the benefits entitled to them by the law.”
The press release put out by Adams’ office Monday noted that as of last Thursday, 411 SNAP applications and 1,154 cases of cash assistance are “pending ontime processing.” Whether all of those pending claims will be processed by Judge Rearden’s March 31 deadline remains to be seen.
But city Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park seemed confident they would be when speaking Monday with the Daily News.
“We are not only on track, but ahead of schedule, so I’m feeling very good about where we are right now,” she said.
To chip away at the backlog, Wasow Park said, the city hired nearly 1,000 additional social services workers to help address claims — an exception to a broad hiring freeze the mayor put into place in the light of low revenue projections and the increased costs associated with more than 150,000 migrants flowing into the city over the past two years.
“Hiring was a big piece of it,” she said. “As we brought them on, we really invested in training, making sure people were able to step in and start doing the work as quickly as possible.”
The news Monday should help to address recent statistics that have not reflected well on the administration. Those numbers, which came out as part of the Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report in January, showed that the “application timeliness rate” on SNAP claims had hit about 40% in the 2023 fiscal year compared with about 92% in 2021. The same measure was even worse when it came to cash assistance — in 2023, it stood at about 29% for those claims, compared with 95% in 2021.
During a budget hearing Monday morning, Jacques Jiha, Adams’ budget director, said the main reason the administration is struggling with benefits processing is because poverty rates in the city are worsening, increasing the number of residents who need food stamps and cash assistance.
“We have a growing number of poor people,” he said.
Jiha touted the administration’s strides in clearing the backlog as well, but he was not warmly received by at least one lawmaker in the City Council.
“It doesn’t negate the fact that these applications were taking forever to get processed,” said City Councilwoman Diana Ayala (D-Bronx, Manhattan), who is chairwoman of the General Welfare Committee.
