CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- They cannot fit many more people into the St. John's Episcopal Church auditorium, where free breakfast and lunch are available daily to the needy. In recent weeks, volunteers have set up tables on the stage to accommodate crowds now reaching 250 a meal.

Not far from the church, at the West Virginia Health Right free clinic, doctors are tending to so many patients, about 12,000 a year, that plans are under way for a new building, three times the size of the existing one. Patricia H. White, the administrator, said the doctors are likely to see 15,000 patients this year.

Sojourners, a shelter for women and families near the clinic, has been at full capacity, 75 people, for months. "At times, we're overwhelmed," said Margaret Taylor, the director. "But we've got fold-out cots, cribs, even dresser drawers for babies."

These scenes and others around West Virginia reflect what people who provide services to the poor here regard as the unintended consequences of the welfare overhaul, in which the federal government shifted responsibilities to the states and the states imposed time limits for people to find work.

61% caseload reduction

Since West Virginia's system was expanded from nine counties in its first year, 1997, to all 55 last year, West Virginia has achieved an impressive caseload reduction of 61 percent, ranking fifth in the nation. But as one of the poorest states, where unemployment is high and the national economic boom is little more than an echo, West Virginia has performed much better in paring welfare rolls than in helping people find jobs.

In large measure, the state's caseload reduction has been achieved by knocking off the rolls the families of poor disabled children who were receiving Supplemental Security Income, a federal program for people with special medical needs.

And in a system that requires people to find jobs after two years of receiving assistance and sets a five-year lifetime limit on benefits, little more than a third of former welfare recipients have found jobs o well below the national average of about 50 percent, recent studies show.

While the caseload reduction has saved the state money -- $63 million through last year -- it has also left thousands of people who were on public assistance, including many with minimum-wage jobs, to depend on free community services for the barest essentials.

Many advocates say that West Virginia is carrying the cost-cutting ethos of the welfare overhaul too far. Recent federal data showed that West Virginia had proportionately more unspent federal welfare dollars from savings, about 65 percent, than almost all other states.

But as state administrators debate how to spend the savings, people are struggling.

'A lot of devastated people'

"There are families out there in terrible shape, and we don't know how they are surviving," said state Sen. Martha Y. Walker, chairwoman of the Senate's Committee for Health and Human Resources.

And people who provide services here predict that conditions will grow worse as more people lose benefits in the years ahead.

"There are going to be a lot of devastated people out there," said Sandy McGrath, assistant director of Sojourners. "The state jumped in too quickly for people to meet the guidelines without doing the research on how it will affect them. Five years looks good. But then you have circumstances like the job search, arranging child care, finding transportation. How are they supposed to do all that?" White, the clinic administrator, said: "In three to five years, we will be having more women being arrested. The reason is, they are not going to let their kids go hungry. So they'll steal, and we'll build more prisons to house them." Officials at the state Department of Health and Human Resources say the declining number of people receiving welfare benefits proves that the new system is working.

But they concede they were unprepared for the wide discretion they got when the federal government shifted responsibilities to the states to run their own welfare syste Facing no major objections from Gov. Gaston Caperton, the out-going two-term Democrat, from state lawmakers or even from the state's leading service providers, welfare officials said they believed the program they began developing in 1995, West Virginia Works, would work.

But a lack of middle-class jobs, along with a recent court challenge attacking the state decision to count SSI as family income for determining welfare benefits, has prompted state welfare officials to admit they need to re-examine their efforts.

"Our program still needs tinkering," said Jack B. Frazier, commissioner of the Bureau for Children and Families. "Some counties simply don't have the jobs to apply for. The employment base is not there."

To ease the transition off welfare, state officials included several amendments to the new time limits, like allowing recipients just entering the work force to earn income that is not used to determine eligibility for cash assistance and offering a 10 percent increase in welfare benefits to a couple if they are married as an incentive to promote family stability.

But people like White and Taylor argue that officials did too little to ease the sting, underestimating some of West Virginia's indigenous characteristics that work against reform, like rugged terrain that makes transportation a problem, the large number of families who have relied on welfare for generations and the lack of programs that adequately prepare people with virtually no work skills.

Those conditions have contributed to chronic poverty in West Virginia, a state of 1.8 million people. Last year, unemployment in the state was 6.6 percent, the lowest in 20 years but well above the national average of 4.5 percent.

Pub Date: 03/11/99