More people need Ramsey County's help even as budgets shrink

Monty Martin, who oversees the human services department in Ramsey County, looks at the latest report on family economics and winces.

Foreclosures skyrocketed from 481 in 2004 to 3,027 last year, or 629 percent.

Requests for public assistance jumped from 31,200 to 42,000 during the same time period.

Job hunters' visits to county workforce centers have soared from 48,500 to 84,000, or 42 percent, in the past two years.

They're among the figures recently released by Ramsey County as it attempts to measure the impact of the economic crisis on its residents. Armed with specific numbers, the county hopes to direct federal stimulus spending and other resources to areas most in need.

They're also watching for new signs of the times.

"We're watching to see what social stress means to families," Martin said.

Counties across the state are grappling with how to deal with the flood of families seeking everything from food stamps to housing to health care. Ramsey County, like others, is being hit with a double whammy -- skyrocketing demands for social and medical services and falling revenues to finance them.

Two weeks ago, the county launched a hiring freeze, which came on the tails of a $7 million overall spending cut to its departments.

Meanwhile, the new report shows the extent of the problems now facing residents. It found:

• Ramsey County's January unemployment rate shot over 7 percent, by far the highest since counties began keeping records in 1990.

• Demand for space in homeless shelters is soaring. During the week of Dec. 3, 2008, the county was unable to find emergency shelter for 44 families, 184 children and 67 adults. Those residents needed housing due to evictions, family issues and foreclosures.

"In my career, this is unprecedented," said Ramsey County Manager Julie Kleinschmidt, who has worked with county budgets for more than 20 years. "I've never seen these kind of budget challenges."

"We're working hard to get as much of the economic stimulus [package] to Minnesota, in particular the east metro, to address the things in the report," she added.

Creating and keeping jobs, said Kleinschmidt, is a big priority. That sounds good to folks such as Vivian Fowler, a supervisor at the North St. Paul Workforce Center.

The economic crisis has brought thousands of unemployed workers through the center's doors, Fowler said. That includes a whole new cadre of job hunters, namely older workers who haven't had to find work in decades.

Many of these workers don't have a clue where to start, said Fowler. So there's a growing demand for assistance with the ABCs of job hunting, computer skills and résumé-writing classes, she said. And all that requires money.

There's no apparent revenue source to deal with these expenses for the long haul, he said.

"It's a tough picture," Ortega said. "And if you look ahead, the 2011-2012 budget will be even worse."

That said, Ramsey County is better off than most counties, Ortega said.

"But it's our job to talk about the facts before we can fix them," he said.