Despite a municipal government-wide hiring freeze enacted by Mayor Adams, the city’s welfare agency can keep filling vacant positions focused on processing food stamps and other public assistance benefits, City Hall officials said Tuesday.
Word of the hiring freeze exemption comes on the heels of the Daily News reporting exclusively Monday that Adams’ administration has this year failed to process thousands of applications for emergency food stamps within a seven-day timeframe required by law. The benefits, commonly known as E-SNAP, have the short processing window because they’re meant for New Yorkers who earn less than $150 per month and are at the highest risk of food insecurity.
In a briefing Tuesday afternoon, deputy mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom blamed the delays on increased E-SNAP demand as well as staff shortages at the Human Resources Administration, which oversees the city’s public assistance programs. To address the staffing gaps, Williams-Isom revealed the HRA isn’t impacted by the hiring freeze Adams placed every city agency under earlier this year due to budgetary concerns.
“This group of people have not been subject to the hiring freeze,” Williams-Isom said at City Hall.
It’s unclear if there are any other categories of municipal jobs exempted from the hiring freeze. Spokespeople for City Hall did not immediately return a request for comment.
Adams instituted the freeze this fall, citing a need to offset hundreds of millions of dollars the city’s spending on sheltering and providing services for tens of thousands of newly-arrived migrants.
“The hiring freeze that we have in place is not because we don’t want to hire,” Adams said at Tuesday’s briefing. “The hiring freeze is because we have a financial problem that is coming from the cause of the asylum seekers and the migrants.”
Due to the processing delays, the Legal Aid Society and other groups asked Monday that Adams’ administration be held in contempt of a 2005 federal court order requiring that E-SNAP benefits be processed within seven days.
Williams-Isom lamented the contempt request. “I’m not sure what more we could be doing at this time,” she said.
Responding to Williams-Isom’s comments, Edward Josephson, a Legal Aid attorney, said in a text: “The city has known about this crisis for well over a year and it’s incumbent on them to immediately rectify the problem.”
In addition to E-SNAP, HRA has also this year failed to process thousands of applications for regular food stamps, known as SNAP, and cash assistance benefits within a 30-day window required by law, as previously reported by The News.
Williams-Isom said she hopes processing rates for all benefit categories will “look very much better” by the spring thanks to ongoing hiring efforts.
