Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. lauded staff at the departments of Finance and Human Services for sending out checks to more than 10,000 households across the territory amid a pause in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits caused by a shutdown of the federal government, which began last month.
“You worked through the nights — literally through the night and weekend,” he said during a Government House press briefing Monday. “We had people up until 2:30 in the morning trying to get these checks out so our friends, our neighbors and our families would not go without.”
Bryan said the U.S. Virgin Islands was one of only five states, plus the District of Columbia, to use local funds to cover the shortfall in assistance for lower-income households.
Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., have continued to spar over elements of a federal spending bill, and the federal government entered its 34th day of an ongoing shutdown Monday, which effectively halted federal assistance programs like SNAP. The V.I. Human Services Department urged local food stamp recipients to “plan ahead, budget carefully, and conserve current benefits during this uncertain period.” Bryan announced two weeks ago that his administration would tap into the government’s “rainy day” fund to provide SNAP recipients with assistance for the first half of November, and the 36th Legislature approved an emergency $2.77 million appropriation last week.
At least 25 states sued the Trump administration over the funding freeze, and on Monday the administration told a federal judge from the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts that it will use $4.6 billion from the program’s contingency funds to cover SNAP households for half of November. Bryan said during Monday’s briefing that he hoped the federal assistance would come through.
“We got a lot of people out here working hard and still getting food stamps,” he said. “Maybe they have a bunch of kids, maybe their husband or their wife left them, and maybe they have somebody sick in their family that’s draining their finances. Maybe they’re old and they can’t work. I mean it’s like … we have this vision in our heads that it’s only people who live in the projects that don’t do nothing that get food stamps. If you take a drive through any of our housing communities in the day, there’s no cars. Those are working people. People live in public housing in the Virgin Islands, for the most part, because the rent is treacherous and they have families — so we’re doing our best to help and address everybody we can during this time.”
Bryan said checks were sent out to 10,603 households, benefiting approximately 29,000 people in the territory.
St. Croix Source
Local news
