Opinion: Healthcare and Food Benefits are at Risk in Rural California. Will the Governor and Legislature Act?

This is opinion piece was submitted by the California State Association of Counties. Do you have an opinion to share? Find our guidelines here.

During the federal government shutdown last fall, Shasta County’s food bank saw something alarming.

Requests for emergency food boxes increased fivefold. Local school-based food pantries doubled their supplies and still had bare shelves within weeks. Families who had never needed help before suddenly found themselves scrambling to put food on the table.

Then the community stepped in.

The local community foundation started the Shasta Critical Response Fund and raised over $10,000 in two weeks. One single mother living in low-income housing started coordinating families in her apartment complex to cook meals together. Families pitched in what they could. Meals were prepared in a community room and shared among neighbors trying to stay afloat.

That is what rural communities do. We help each other when times get hard.

But local charity cannot replace a functioning safety net.

That is the reality California counties are facing under H.R. 1.

Many Americans support efforts to rein in federal spending and restore fiscal discipline. But regardless of where you stand politically on H.R. 1, the consequences are now landing on counties.

And in rural California, the fallout will be severe.

More than one in three residents in our counties rely on Medi-Cal, and poverty rates far exceed the state average. 

The need for health care, behavioral health treatment, and food assistance will not disappear because federal funding drops. The burden simply shifts downstream to counties — forcing cuts to emergency rooms, food banks, sheriff’s deputies and already-overwhelmed local systems.

H.R. 1 represents one of the largest structural shifts to California’s safety net in decades. Counties statewide could face up to $9.5 billion annually in new costs and lost funding tied to Medi-Cal, CalFresh, providing indigent care health care services, public hospital financing, and behavioral health services.

At the same time, H.R. 1 requires our counties to process more eligibility reviews, verify more paperwork, implement new work requirements, and absorb a far larger share of the cost.

In Shasta County alone, these changes could require adding 12 new staff positions and increase county administrative costs by at least $1.2 million per year just for CalFresh administration. Meanwhile, our social services department is already borrowing $10 million from the county General Fund to remain operational.

Trinity County’s budget for the current fiscal year was balanced only after painful trims. Many departments are staffed below the levels needed to deliver services in the manner our residents deserve. Nonprofit groups have stepped in to help fund shortfalls in non-mandated services from our library system and animal shelter. Funding available for road maintenance and repair covers only a small portion of the work that needs to be done.

If the state walks away from the impacts on counties from H.R. 1, the next round of cuts will not be at the margins. 

That’s why county leaders throughout California, from all political backgrounds, are calling on the state to work with us.

We’re proposing a responsible multi-year partnership with the state: $1.1 billion in the upcoming budget and $2.5 billion the following year in state funding to stabilize California’s safety net and prevent broader system failures.

But the Governor’s May Revision does not meaningfully acknowledge the scale of H.R. 1’s impacts on counties or local communities. That must change before the final state budget is negotiated.

To our North State Senators and Assembly members — including those who, like many of our constituents, hold a healthy skepticism about state spending — we put it plainly. This is not new spending for new programs. This is keeping rural emergency rooms open, keeping deputies on patrol, and keeping our most vulnerable neighbors from becoming someone else’s far more expensive problem in a hospital corridor. Letting these federal cuts cascade into county collapse is the most expensive choice the state can make.

Counties are not asking the state to shoulder this burden alone. But the Governor and Legislature cannot pretend these costs disappeared simply because Washington shifted them elsewhere.

They did not disappear.

They moved.

So, the question now is clear: Will the Governor and Legislature work with counties to manage this responsibly? Or will they hang our communities out to dry?

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