El Paso County’s plan to give $500 per month to some low-income families starting this summer appears to be on hold while the Texas Supreme Court decides whether a similar cash assistance program in Harris County violates the Texas Constitution.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton earlier this year sued to block a so-called guaranteed income program in Harris County, home to Houston. That case is now in front of the Texas Supreme Court, which paused the rollout of payments to Harris County participants in mid-June.
El Paso County commissioners in December 2023 voted to set aside $500,000 – along with an extra $400,000 contribution from the Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation – to fund a pilot program here. The plan was to provide $500 monthly payments to 135 families in El Paso for a year, and study the impacts that the extra cash has on each family’s well-being.
Guaranteed income programs aim to reduce poverty by giving cash monthly to struggling families with no strings attached, an idea that has become in vogue for philanthropists and policymakers over the last decade.
The expectation when El Paso County Commissioners Court approved the program last December was that the county shortly after would hire the nonprofit organization UpTogether to administer the payments beginning this summer.
“El Paso continues to work on the agreement with UpTogether and is paying close attention to pending litigation surrounding these programs,” Laura Gallegos, a spokeswoman for El Paso County, said in an email. “Unfortunately, we are not able to share much more right now.”
Likewise, UpTogether said it couldn’t provide an update and didn’t respond to questions about whether the organization has set eligibility criteria for the cash payments or otherwise progressed toward rolling out a guaranteed income program in El Paso County.
“We can only say that we’re still working to finalize details on a guaranteed income pilot with the county and philanthropic funders,” said Rachel Barnhart, director of media relations for UpTogether, who referred questions to El Paso County. “We hope to have more news to share soon.”
The Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment about the status of its $400,000 donation to the program.
In Paxton’s suit against Harris County, the Texas Attorney General’s Office said the state’s constitution bans “most grants of public funds to private individuals.” The cash payments represent an “impermissible gift” to certain people, and the lottery system Harris County used to select who would receive payments violates Texas’ equal protection laws, according to the attorney general’s lawsuit.
“Harris County’s guaranteed income scheme is a clear and flagrant violation of the Texas Constitution,” Paxton said in a statement last month after the Texas Supreme Court halted payments in Harris County while it reviews the case.
The Texas Attorney General’s Office didn’t respond to a request for comment about the case or El Paso County’s proposed program.
In a statement last month defending the guaranteed income program, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said the state’s constitutional rule barring gifts using public funds are meant to stop “cronyism and gratuitous gifts of tax dollars. They aren’t intended to stop governments from providing public benefits.”
In the court’s most recent ruling June 14, Texas Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Blacklock reasoned that “a very small percentage of Harris County citizens will temporarily be denied receipt of the disputed payments if a stay is granted. But if those payments would have been illegal, then the temporary denial of them is not a harm that can tip the scales in the County’s favor.”
“Requiring the government to follow the law benefits everyone,” Blacklock wrote. “Whether Harris County’s proposal would actually violate the Texas Constitution remains an open question at this early stage of the litigation.”
Cash assistance programs not all new
Direct cash assistance programs are far from new – over 100 cities have implemented some kind of pilot program in recent years, including in other Texas cities such as Austin and San Antonio. Austin’s city council in April agreed to spend $1.3 million to fund another year of cash payments to low-income residents.
When Austin city leaders decided to reboot the cash assistance program for another year, the city’s legal department decided Austin could proceed without facing a suit from Paxton because Austin is a home-rule city – and not a county – and has more rights to administer the program, according to KUT, a public radio station in Austin.
To pay for its part of the cash program, El Paso County said it would use funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act that President Joe Biden signed in 2021 to help cities and states recover financially from the pandemic. El Paso County received $163 million and planned to draw $500,000 from a $4.3 million ARPA-related economic development fund to pay for the program.
The El Paso County Commissioners Court moved forward with the cash assistance plan late last year after some members of the El Paso City Council last October pushed for a program similar to the county’s that would have doled out $500 monthly payments to around 80 El Paso households for a year. The City Council shot down the program after Mayor Oscar Leeser cast a tie-breaking “no” vote.
The impetus for guaranteed income in El Paso stems from the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when the advocacy group El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization worked to help El Pasoans who were living outside the city limits – but within the county – and couldn’t access government aid.
EPISO and UpTogether lobbied the El Paso County Commissioners Court to establish an assistance program that provided $1.1 million of cash aid in 2020 and 2021. The Hunt Family Foundation provided much of that funding as well.
From November 2020 through February 2021, UpTogether has said it provided $500 payments to 1,078 households in El Paso County for a total of $539,000. In 2021, the program provided $2,400 to 245 households over six months, totaling $588,000.
A spokeswoman for EPISO didn’t respond to a request for comment about the delay in El Paso County’s guaranteed income program.
Do cash assistance programs work?
Numerous recent studies have attempted to gauge the effect that no-strings-attached cash payments have on the participants of pilot programs around the United States who receive them. The results are mixed.
The nonprofit OpenResearch this week published a three-year study of 1,000 participants in Illinois and Central Texas who received $1,000 a month in guaranteed income payments.
The study showed participants spent more on basic needs such as food, transportation and rent, and it benefited participants’ ability to budget and plan for the future. There was little effect on participants’ physical health versus a control group that got $50 per month, and the participants who got $1,000 per month worked slightly fewer hours on average.
In San Antonio, UpTogether conducted a guaranteed income pilot from December 2020 to January 2023 that provided $1,900 up front followed by quarterly payments of $400.
In that study, people who received the cash payments said they felt less worried and stressed out because they could better cover expenses, were able to spend more time with loved ones and had greater housing stability. Still, the participants “continue to experience significant hardship, including financially,” according to the study.
Another researcher at the University of Denver led a recent yearlong study that examined the results of a guaranteed income pilot that provided cash payments to 820 unhoused people in Denver.
Daniel Brisson, director of the university’s Center on Housing and Homelessness Research, and his team split participants up into three groups: the first received payments of $1,000 per month, the second got a lump sum payment of $6,500 the first month and $500 per month after that, and the final group received $50 each month.
By the end of the yearlong study, almost half of participants were housed and the first two groups saw an increase in employment. But among the three groups, there wasn’t much difference in participants’ outcomes, like their health and food security, or the amount of stress and anxiety participants said they felt. The group that got $50 monthly reported similar outcomes as the people who received $12,000 over a year.
“We did not find it to be a slam dunk,” Brisson said in an interview.
“This result surprised us. We expected to find that cash mattered – that $1,000 or a lump sum mattered more than $50. And we did not find that overwhelmingly,” he said. “We found that for a few things, but we did not find it overwhelmingly.”
The study suggested participants got a benefit from connecting with support staff that helped conduct the study, as well as from phone plans. It was a brief study, Brisson said, but one thing he concluded was that he wouldn’t recommend lump sum payments in future guaranteed income programs. Some participants initially weren’t sure what to do with the money, he said.
“We’ve done interviews with participants and showed them our findings, and one of the things they say is ‘Yeah, 12 months isn’t really going to do it,’” Brisson said. “And $1,000 a month, while it might seem like a lot, doesn’t really solve everything.”
Brisson said he doesn’t think guaranteed income is a bad idea, and doesn’t discourage people from working. But it will take more research to better understand who benefits the most from no-strings-attached monthly payments, and why, he said.
“The question I’m interested in is: ‘So who does (guaranteed income) work for? And who does it work best for? And for which outcomes? And for whom maybe does it not work as well?’” Brisson said. “We need to understand more.”
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