Dozens of families across El Paso County will soon be eligible to receive $500 monthly cash payments after county commissioners unanimously agreed to set aside $500,000 to provide financial assistance to households.

Details of the county’s program will be worked out in the months ahead. But it will be a pilot for a so-called guaranteed income program, a strategy that aims to reduce poverty by giving cash monthly to struggling families with no strings attached. The county will provide the payments to 135 households for a year and study the impacts that the extra cash has on each family’s wellbeing. 

The El Paso County Commissioners Court moved forward with its cash assistance plan after some members of El Paso City Council last month pushed the city to adopt a similar program that would have doled out $500 monthly payments to around 80 families for a year. City Council narrowly voted it down, with Mayor Oscar Leeser casting the tie-breaking “no” vote. 

“I thought it was quite unfortunate that the city didn’t think that they needed to do this,” Precinct 2 County Commissioner David Stout told El Paso Matters. “I was very disappointed with that decision. It just leaves the county to try to pick up the slack when it comes to providing for our most vulnerable folks.”

To administer the program, the county will contract with UpTogether, a nonprofit organization that advocates for cash assistance to low-income Americans throughout the country and researches the impacts.

The county and UpTogether will determine eligibility criteria in the months ahead, and the plan is to begin providing payments to families sometime during summer 2024. It’s likely that eligibility will be limited to lower-income residents who live in certain ZIP codes or neighborhoods throughout the county, said Ivanna Neri, senior partnership director with UpTogether.

Giving residents cash with no restrictions on how to spend it “allows people to be able to prioritize what they need,” said Neri, an El Paso native. “There are people who use (monthly payments) to buy groceries, people who use it to pay rent, other people who use it for school supplies, and other people who use it to give a down payment on a car that then allows them to have a better job.”

The program will draw from a pot of money totaling $900,000 after the Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation contributed an extra $400,000 on top of the county’s funding.

To pay for its part of the cash payments, the county is using money from the federal American Rescue Plan Act that President Joe Biden signed in 2021 to help cities and states recover financially from the pandemic. El Paso County received a total of $163 million, and it’s drawing $500,000 from a $4.3 million ARPA-related economic development fund to pay for the program. 

The county “accounted for this request” months ago as it was developing spending plans, and the cash assistance program isn’t pulling money away from any other approved projects or programs, said Jose Landeros, county director of strategic planning.

During the height of the pandemic, the advocacy group El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization worked to help El Pasoans who were living outside the city limits – but within the county – and couldn’t access government aid. EPISO and UpTogether lobbied the El Paso County Commissioners Court to establish a similar assistance program that provided a total of $1.1 million of cash aid. The Hunt Family Foundation provided much of that funding as well.

From November 2020 through February 2021, UpTogether said it provided $500 payments to 1,078 households for a total of $539,000. In 2021, the program provided $2,400 to 245 households over 6 months, for a total of $588,000. 

Recipients of the $2,400 in aid reported to UpTogether that they spent the majority of the cash on basic needs such as food, utilities, rent and to pay down debt. 

For this iteration of the program, residents within El Paso’s city limits will also be eligible to receive payments.

When four City Council representatives and Leeser voted against creating a guaranteed income program in November, they argued the city’s proposed program was too small – targeting assistance to 80 families – to have a major impact. And the opponents of the plan questioned how the city would determine which low-income residents are eligible and which aren’t.

“To say, well, because of COVID, we’re going to pick out 80 families out of the thousands that are below the poverty level, and we’re going to give them $6,000 for one year and then the program’s going to go away, I don’t think that’s a very comprehensive plan,” city Rep. Brian Kennedy said during the November meeting where the item failed. 

After the county commissioners approved the cash assistance program on Monday, Stout acknowledged that it will help just 135 families out of the roughly 180,000 county residents who are experiencing poverty, according to U.S. Census data. Still, he said the county’s funding will receive a good return on investment as families spend their extra cash on local goods and services.

And it’s better to help some people than none at all, he said. 

“When it comes to the eligibility, that’s always going to be a challenge,” Stout said. 

“There’s definitely more need – there’s always more need,” he added. “But that doesn’t mean that we throw projects away just because we can’t fulfill the whole need. Or that we don’t participate in projects just because we aren’t able to do something for everybody.”

Eloiso De Avila, a leader with EPISO, said his group initially sought $200,000 of funding for the cash assistance program, and he was “exhilarated” when the commissioners upped the county’s contribution to $500,000.

Ideally, De Avila said, the county’s new guaranteed income program will further prove the benefits of cash payments on families’ wellbeing so that the city will contribute funding for household assistance in the future.

“This program takes people out of poverty and helps people immensely,” De Avila said. “We hope that, by the county doing this, the city will be inspired to follow suit.”