By KRWG News
Texas – A top regional federal food stamps official says Texas should appoint one official to fix eliminating food stamp application backlogs and high error rates.
William Ludwig is a Dallas-based regional administrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service. He tells the Austin American-Statesman that the recession is hurting food-stamp programs in all states, but he's unaware of any state having as much trouble as Texas.
He blames the state's food-stamp program woes to a "whole series of missteps, mismanagement over the last four years." That started with thousands of state workers being fired as part of a privatization effort.
In Texas, about 41 percent of the food-stamp applications in September weren't processed by the federal deadline of 30 days for regular applications and seven days for emergency applications.
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Information from: Austin American-Statesman, http://www.statesman.com
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.