April 21,
2007
TO THE MISSISSIPPI HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES:
I am returning House Bill 1681, "AN ACT MAKING AN
APPROPRIATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF DEFRAYING THE EXPENSES OF THE OFFICE OF THE
ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR FISCAL YEAR 2008" partly approved and partly not
approved pursuant to the authority of Article IV, Section 73 of the Mississippi
Constitution and assign the following reasons for partial veto of this bill:
After full consideration, I am vetoing Section 14 of House
Bill 1681, which appropriates $5.5 million of Temporary Assistance for Needy
Family (TANF) funds to the Attorney General's office for certain programs. Absent this appropriation, those funds would
be appropriated to the Department of Human Services (DHS) for the purpose of
providing valuable social service programs to the poor.
Each year, the federal government provides funds for the
State of Mississippi to provide services to the approximately 22,500
Mississippians on welfare and to help these Mississippians most at risk of
sinking into dependency. The State,
through DHS, uses these funds for essential social service missions such as
monthly assistance payments, help with transportation costs to and from a job,
and our state foster care system. In
addition, since I have been Governor, my Administration has transferred the
maximum amount of TANF funds allowed by the federal government into the child
care subsidy program, resulting in more than 20,000 children of low income
working mothers benefiting from child care.
With this child care assistance, the parents are able to go to work and
avoid welfare.
Recent federal welfare reform legislation requires a
significant increase in the number of TANF recipients who must meet the federal
work participation requirement. If we
do not meet this new standard, the State will receive less TANF money. In Mississippi, to meet this new standard,
we are redeploying our TANF resources to areas such as job training and
transportation subsidies, while maintaining our maximum commitment to child
care assistance. In addition, we plan to expand the Adolescent Offender Program
statewide, to reduce the risk of youth joining the welfare rolls. Such an expansion would also help meet the
objectives of the Department of Justice consent decree by increasing community
based services and thus reducing the number of youth assigned to our training
schools. In anticipation of the new
federal standards, DHS wisely set-aside TANF funds from previous years to fund
these new programs.
Section 14 of House Bill 1681 puts these efforts at risk by
appropriating valuable resources to the Attorney General's office instead of
DHS. In previous years, I have approved
legislation which has diverted $4.5 million of our reoccurring annual allotment
of TANF funds from the federal government away from DHS to the Attorney
General's office. These funds have
benefited Boys and Girls Clubs and the YMCA, which I support. In fact, I am signing into law Section 15 of
House Bill 1681 which provides an additional $1 million for the Boys and Girls
Clubs and the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation.
Section 14 of House Bill 1681 increases the TANF diversion
by another $1 million when DHS faces increased federal mandates. While DHS and I are committed to working
with the Boys and Girls Clubs and the YMCA to maintain their activities through
the TANF program, the state can not afford for additional TANF funds to be
diverted from the core mission of the TANF program.
For these reasons, I urge the members to sustain the partial
veto of House Bill 1681.
Respectfully submitted,
Haley Barbour,
GOVERNOR