Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

As the Chronicle's Lisa Falkenberg noted so vividly in her column Tuesday, trying to sign up for food stamps in Houston these days is a demeaning and dispiriting exercise.

She visited with Houstonians “living the statistics” — in line at a state Health and Human Services Commission office — trying to navigate the tangled web of agency backlogs and errors.

First came Hurricane Ike, then came the recession, resulting in record numbers of Texans — about 2.8 million of us — needing help to feed themselves and their families.

That's an 11 percent increase over last year. More than a third of applications fail to be processed within the required 30 days, and one in six fails or is delayed because of processing errors.

Which is all bad enough, but what is unconscionable — unbelievable, even — is that in the face of such critical need, the state board that could have helped relieve the problem significantly, and put food in the mouths of hungry Texans faster, denied a request for additional staffing to handle the backlog.

The state's Legislative Budget Board, a 10-member body made up of Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, House Speaker Joe Straus and eight House and Senate members, had been requested to authorize the hiring of 656 employees to help break the logjam. They refused. But rest assured. As reported by the Chronicle's Gary Scharrer, “state leaders are working on a plan to ensure that more workers are properly hired.” No urgency there, apparently.

Truth is, state leaders were well aware of the problems facing HHS: They had been building for several years, even before the ravages of Ike and the recession. Legislators had addressed the topic; in August, the head of the agency requested extra workers to reduce caseloads, and that same month a class-action suit was filed to force the state to comply with the 30-day certification requirement.

State Rep. Sylvester Turner, D-Houston, told the Chronicle, “I'm flabbergasted the state is not addressing this crisis situation. So far this year, Texas has missed the deadline in more than 250,000 cases in getting timely food stamp assistance to seniors and families with children.”

The federal government's paying attention, too: Last week, the regional administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, William Ludwig, sent a letter to Texas HHS warning that “corrections must be made” or the state would risk losing federal funding. It gave the state 60 days to provide “a detailed action plan” of both short- and long-term strategies for managing the program.

That's a start, but in another 60 days, thousands more Texans will have added to the backlog. And even if those 656 more workers had been hired, the agency would still have 1,000 fewer staff than 10 years ago, when the program had one million fewer clients.

So what will it take? Where is the urgency? It's not as if food stamps are a drain on the state's resources. The program is 100 percent federally funded, with Texas obliged to provide half of the administration cost.

All that is left is a callous disregard on the part of state leaders for the several million Texans who have fallen on hard times.

In this recession, the scarcest commodity of all turns out to be compassion.