April 21,
2007
TO THE MISSISSIPPI HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES:
I am returning House Bill 1689, “AN ACT MAKING AN
APPROPRIATION TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HUMAN SERVICES; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES,
FOR THE 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 9 of House
Bill 1689, which diverts $5.5 million of Temporary Assistance for Needy Family
(TANF) funds away from the Department of Human Services (DHS) to the Attorney
General’s office. Absent this
appropriation to the Attorney General’s office, those funds would be appropriated
to 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 9 of House Bill 1689 puts these efforts at risk by
diverting valuable resources away from 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 9 of House Bill 1689 increases this 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
support from 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 1689.
Respectfully Submitted,
Haley Barbour,
GOVERNOR