The Wake County Board of Commissioners spent much of its Monday night meeting discussing the impacts of the federal government shutdown.
"We have a lot of county staff here who are the experts," said Ben Canada, chief of staff in the county manager's office, before launching into a presentation.
The county gets about $100 million a year from Washington. Much of that money goes into administering the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program (SNAP) and the Women Infants and Children nutrition program (WIC). About 82,000 residents are enrolled in SNAP and 20,000 in WIC.
The status of these programs, Canada said, was in flux as North Carolina and other states filed lawsuits to compel the Trump administration into using reserve funds to continue paying benefits. Just before the Monday night meeting, county officials learned they would have the funds to continue offering WIC payments through the end of November. A previous estimate said Wake County would exhaust its WIC funding around Nov. 15.
Also on Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it would disburse SNAP benefits using a reserve fund in response to a court ruling. However, beneficiaries would only receive about half of their usual monthly payments.
In addition to SNAP and WIC recipients, Canada said Wake County is home to about 6,300 federal government employees. Many are furloughed from their jobs or working without pay.
"We do have some military presence here in the Triangle," Canada said. "I was reminded of this over the weekend. My next-door neighbor is full-time National Guard. He's not getting paid."
Commissioners then heard from the county's nutrition program and leaders of several local food pantries. Sydney Mierop, manager of the county's food security program, said pantries are dealing with their own loss of federal funding due to earlier spending cuts.
"I've heard from several of our partners that they're not getting as much protein in their food bank boxes or pickups, because there's cuts at the federal level," she said.
The lack of protein donations is a serious program, according to Mike Berger of the Tri-Area Ministry Food Pantry. It comes as his organization is seeing an increase in families in need of food, on top of the federal cuts and the shutdown.
"We have more families coming, and we have less food available, so we've got a couple of choices," he told commissioners. "One, we could reduce the amount of food that each family gets, which isn't a great option. The other option that we have is to limit access and start telling people that they can't get food. We pride ourselves in the 30-some-odd years that we've been here, never turning someone away."
While food donations are appreciated, Mierop said cash may be the best option for people who want to support food pantries.
"Many of those pantries need money, and a lot of them have ways to donate online, pick a pantry and funnel all your money to one in that region."
Wake County has posted a link to its Food Finder on the county home page. It includes a map of food pantries and information on soup kitchens and other hot meal options.
