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Sponsors of 1997 reform measures judge results Sunday, Jul 15, 2007 By John Lyon Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - Ten years ago, Arkansans were being told to expect big things from the work of that year's legislative session. Aside from income tax reductions that amounted to the first general tax cut the state's history, laws passed during the 1997 session would provide health care insurance to tens of thousands of previously uninsured children, move at least 50 percent of the state's welfare recipients into the work force and cut in half the time inmates spend on death row before being executed, lawmakers and state officials predicted. A decade later, observers say those reforms have had varying degrees of success. ARKIDS FIRST Receiving highest marks is the ARKids First program, created by Act 407 of 1997, which provides basic insurance coverage for children of families whose income is within 200 percent of the federal poverty level, about $40,000 for a family of four. In June 1998, ARKids First provided coverage to 26,414 children. Now, more than 77,000 Arkansas children are enrolled, according the state Department of Human Services, which administers the program. The number of uninsured children in the state has dropped from nearly 150,000 to about 70,200 since the program went into effect, said Rich Huddleston, executive director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, which first conceived the program. "I think without question ARKids First has been one of the most successful, and arguably the most successful, initiative targeted at children and families that we have seen in decades," Huddleston said. "As a result of that initiative, Arkansas' uninsured rate of kids has been cut by more than half, and we've been one of the national leaders over the last 10 years in cutting our ranks of uninsured kids," he said. Then-Gov. Mike Huckabee championed the program, and the lead sponsor of the legislation was then-state senator and current Gov. Mike Beebe. "We've really done some good things with ARKids First," Beebe said Friday, adding that the state now is seeking to help low-income adults obtain health insurance though the ARHealthNet program, which provides health insurance subsidies to small businesses. Huckabee, now a Republican presidential hopeful, said in a 2005 speech the program has become "an example to the rest of the country." WELFARE REFORM Also reaching a 10-year milestone this year is Act 1058 of 1997, the state welfare reform law that replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, or AFDC, with the Transitional Employment Assistance program, or TEA. Created in response to federal mandates, the law imposed a two-year lifetime cap on cash benefits but also created job training, child care, transportation assistance and other services to help people make the transition from welfare to work. In June 1997, AFDC provided cash assistance to 14,907 adults and 39,051 children, according to DHS. In June of this year, TEA provided assistance to 3,930 adults and 12,500 children. Meanwhile, funding for the program, about one-fourth of which is provided by the state and the rest by the federal government, has increased. The state spent $49 million on AFDC in fiscal year 1997 and $82 million on TEA in fiscal year 2006, the agency said. "We're spending more money on the program than we did in '97, but we're spending it differently," DHS spokeswoman Julie Munsell said. She explained that $46 million of AFDC's 1997 budget was used to provide cash assistance, but only $14 million of TEA's 2006 budget was used for that purpose. Most of the rest went to services designed to help people acquire and hold jobs. Former legislator Jay Bradford, now director of the Division of Behavioral Health Services at DHS, was a state senator in 1997 and lead sponsor of Act 1058. "We led the nation in a lot of statistics as far as getting people to work or to educational programs, rather than just languishing on the welfare system" in the first few years after the law went into effect, Bradford said in a recent interview. "A lot of other states have now caught up with us, but we were at the forefront of that movement." Bradford said the program is still being tweaked, but "for government work, it's pretty successful." Huddleston said he was not ready to declare the program a success. "Quite frankly, I think the jury is still out on that. It's a debatable issue whether or not our TEA program has really substantially improved the lives of our poorest at-risk families," he said. Though welfare rolls have unquestionably shrunk, "many poor families have not achieved self-sufficiency and remain in poverty," Huddleston said. DEATH PENALTY ACT The Legislature also sought to shorten the appeals process for death row inmates by passing Act 925 of 1997. The measure was designed to ensure that inmates appealing death sentences received adequate representation, a step that was encouraged by the federal Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. At a news conference in February 1997, then-Attorney General Winston Bryant said inmates facing a death sentence in Arkansas spent an average of 10 years and two months on death row. Passing the bill that would become Act 925 could cut that time in half, he predicted. Bryant, now a lawyer in private practice, did not return calls to his office seeking comment for this story, but former state Sen. Tom Kennedy, lead sponsor of the legislation, said he had not seen statistics but he doubted the law achieve its objective. "My subjective impression would be that it probably hasn't had that great of an impact," said Kennedy, now a vice president of Entergy Arkansas. Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley said he has not seen a change in inmates' time on death row. "I still tell people it's going to take 10 to 15 years, depending on how aggressively and vigorously the defendant who gets the death penalty pursues (appealing) it," Jegley said. However, Little Rock lawyer Jeff Rosenzweig said the legislation did make a difference. Rosenzweig, who has represented inmates on death row, said the law led to the creation of a procedural rule, which he helped draft, concerning adequate representation. He said he believes the rule has shortened the appeals process to some extent, but the biggest change it produced is that death row inmates now have access to lawyers. Prior to Act 925, "you had to find a lawyer who was willing to do it for free. Now people actually have lawyers," he said. |
