County officials warned federal SNAP/Medicaid proposals could shift costs and workloads to Chaffee County

At a county meeting, the Department of Human Services director briefed commissioners on a set of federal proposals she referred to as the “Triple B” package that would change how SNAP and Medicaid are funded and administered. The director summarized several possible effects: a state share of some SNAP costs, an error-rate based penalty schedule that applies to state averages, expanded work requirements and shorter exemption windows, and changes to long-term care asset waivers.

“25% of our SNAP that gets passed through would then be the state of Colorado's responsibility to cover that cost,” the director said in overviewing one of the proposals. On error rates, the director described a tiered schedule discussed in drafts: lower penalties for counties if state-level error rates are low, but higher shared costs if the state average rises. She warned that because penalties would be calculated at the state level, individual counties could be exposed if other jurisdictions raise the average. “Chaffee County is pretty low. So I don't have concerns about us. But we can't control other counties, and it's based on the state average,” she said.

The director also described administrative consequences: more frequent eligibility checks (moving from once per year to every six months in some drafts), new data-matching duties to flag deceased beneficiaries, and verification of expanded work requirements—actions she said could roughly double related workloads. She told the board the bill includes implementation funding at the federal level (a $100,000,000 national figure was noted in the presentation) but that Colorado's share to stand up systems had been estimated at about $57,000,000. Staff cautioned that the measures were still in flux and that implementation details, effective dates and whether the state will absorb or distribute costs among counties remained unresolved.

Commissioners asked for supporting documents and clarification on calculation methods. One commissioner requested staff circulate the briefing materials; another questioned how state-level averages and allocations would be computed. The county has not adopted any formal policy in response; staff recommended monitoring legislative developments and preparing budget and workload estimates for upcoming county fiscal planning sessions.