Fernel Del Valle was one of the first, but he’s far from the last.
He’s one of 855 Clark County residents who have used up all the unemployment benefits available to them. Unless the U.S. Senate acts, another 6,000 local people will, one at a time, find their unemployment benefits running out soon.
A cement mason, Del Valle has been looking for a job since he was laid off in November 2008. On July 8, his unemployment benefits ran out.
His wife, Samantha, a part-time Kaiser Permanente employee, used to be able to pick up enough hours to essentially work full time. Now those extra hours have evaporated.
They have four sons, one facing open-heart surgery this summer, and they don’t know how they will manage.
“We have no credit card debt, no car payment, very little excess,” Samantha Del Valle said. “But if we lose what little income unemployment gives us, we will go from making ends meet, barely, to no electricity, no phone, no garbage service and possibly no food.”
It’s devastating enough to imagine another 6,000 local families choosing between rent and utilities. But the folks receiving these benefits are not the only ones who will be affected. Clark County residents receive roughly $30 million in unemployment benefits each month.
“That’s money that’s spent locally” at stores, restaurants and other Clark County businesses, said Scott Bailey, Southwest Washington labor economist with the state Employment Security Department. He’s worried that the end of jobless benefits will be one more weight tipping the scale toward a very slow economic recovery.
There’s no easy fix to these problems. Congress voted last summer to extend jobless benefits from the normal 26 weeks to 99 weeks, or nearly two years. That extension has expired, and now the unemployed are back to the smaller safety net.
It would cost $34 billion to renew that extension and allow people like Fernel Del Valle to receive unemployment for a full 99 weeks. The public is growing increasingly frustrated with deficit spending, and that’s making it harder to get this bill through.
Washington’s senators, like all but two Senate Democrats, pushed on June 30 to allow a vote on the proposal, but they were defeated in a filibuster.
“In my view, it could jeopardize the recovery and would add to our already enormous deficit, likely to be around $1.4 trillion for the second year in a row,” said Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, one of the Democrats to back the filibuster. Nebraska’s jobless rate was 4.9 percent in May. Clark County’s was 13.7 percent.
Nelson said he would change his vote if the bill is accompanied by $34 billion in spending cuts elsewhere in government. We’ll soon know if that strategy succeeds. After a brief recess, the Senate reconvenes on Monday.
Samantha Del Valle and her husband will be watching carefully to see what happens.
“I cannot believe that we are the only people on the brink of disaster with our lives in the hands of these senators,” she said. “We don’t know what to do.”
Courtney Sherwood is The Columbian’s business and features editor. Reach her at 360-735-4561 or courtney.sherwood@columbian.com.
