Hennepin County officials say there’s going to be “a lot of pain” as looming federal funding cuts to programs like SNAP are realized in 2027 — and that they’re striving to ensure that addressing the issue doesn’t mean skyrocketing property taxes for residents.
A March 24 meeting of the county’s Administration, Operations and Budget Committee featured the familiar topic for governments across Minnesota and the rest of the country, with Chief Financial Office Joe Mathews outlining the challenges the county is facing.
Most immediate is the ongoing $8 million cut to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding that the county is receiving from the federal government.
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Hennepin County Commissioner and AOB committee chair Debbie Goettel (District 5) told MinnPost that the county is going to need to “find and solve” for that funding, adding that it’s not a simple matter of moving money around.
Funding for SNAP is “highly restricted” and subject to strict audits – and where it is allowed to come from are property tax revenues, something the county and commissioners are looking to avoid.
“We cannot rely on federal grants anymore, and property taxes can’t continue to go upwards,” Commissioner Angela Conley (District 4) said at the meeting.
And that’s before the next round of SNAP funding impacts expected in 2027 tied to the program’s error rate, which looks at things like overpayments or underpayments of benefits.
Goettel said that rate is partially hampered by the “archaic system” the reporting is under and issues that can crop up with the state’s computers. County estimates in that case are another $20 million hit to the SNAP program.
“We’re not alone in that hurt,” Goettel said. Officials across the country are in a mad dash to drop their error rates through staffing increases or shifts.
Also expected is a $12 million cut in Housing and Urban Development grants used to house the homeless, a policy that the administration proposed and postponed last year, but that the county is expecting to return.
Then there’s the question of what the impact of Medicaid cuts could be. Countywide, Mathews said they weren’t prepared to put out 2027 estimates, though he expected the numbers to be ready by June.
But he could outline the expected financial impact to the Hennepin Healthcare System from 2027-2038: $1.7 billion, largely from declines in direct payments.
“There will be people who can’t get services, and it will mean their lives,” Goettel said. “This is big, important stuff.”
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Goettel said they’re looking at “significantly” trimming the county’s capital budget, delaying projects and – in the case of the city’s human services department – reducing FTEs through attrition instead of layoffs, while also shifting some employees around in an attempt to maintain staffing for safety net programs and create efficiencies in administrating programs like SNAP.
She’s hopeful, she said, for a “windfall in the midterms” that could potentially see Democratic lawmakers able to reverse, or at least slow, some of the issues.
But she also worries that the people most at risk of these cuts may not realize what’s happening, positing someone who works multiple jobs to pay the bills and doesn’t pay much attention to the news.
“They’re trying to stay afloat,” she said.
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