During Kim Evans’ tenure, the department faced criticism from state lawmakers, the federal government and advocacy organizations over its administration of public benefits
BY: CLARA BATES
Missouri Independent
The head of the Missouri agency that for years has struggled to administer public benefit programs like food assistance and Medicaid announced her retirement on Friday afternoon, effective immediately.
Kim Evans had served as director of the Family Support Division within the Missouri Department of Social Services since 2020. She spent over two decades working for the department, including as a program eligibility specialist, manager and deputy director.
“(The Department of Social Services) is grateful for her service and wishes her the best in the next chapter,” Baylee Watts, the department’s spokeswoman, said in an email.
The interim director will be Mandi Adams, who is currently one of the division’s deputy directors.
Evans’ departure last week is the latest in a series of leadership changes underway at Missouri’s embattled social services agency since Gov. Mike Kehoe was elected in November. A new department director, Jessica Bax, began in January, and a new director for the child welfare division, Sara Smith, was named last week.
During Evans’ tenure, the department faced criticism from state lawmakers, the federal government and advocacy organizations over its administration of public benefits — which affect the lives of millions of Missourians.
A federal judge last year ruled Missourians were illegally denied food aid by the state due to hours-long call center wait times for participants to receive a required interview.
Those delays — which leadership has largely blamed on call center staffing issues — translate to families struggling to feed their young children while rearranging their days to wait on hold, Missourians with disabilities who can’t understand the application forms being unable to get help and some subsisting on little food while using up prepaid phone minutes on hold.
“While call wait times fluctuate and have shown some improvement, the record demonstrates too little progress,” the judge in that case, U.S. District Court Judge M. Douglas Harpool, wrote last year. “Consequently, Missourians who suffer food insecurity have been forced to either go hungry or seek alternative sources of food when their applications are denied.”
The state has been required to submit monthly reports as part of the lawsuit. The average wait time for the interview line for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, was 45 minutes in January, the most recent monthly data states.
The average wait time for the general call line, which handles all other inquiries — for programs including Medicaid, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and non-interview related SNAP queries — was just under one hour in January.
That case is still ongoing, and the parties are in mediation.
The department in its budget request to the state legislature asked for $11 million to hire 220 new staff in the Family Support Division to help ensure the agency complies with federal and state rules on timely processing, and “maintains a reasonable wait time in the call centers,” the budget request stated. The governor recommended only 55 new positions.
Asked about the call center issues in a Senate appropriations committee hearing last month, Bax was candid about the ongoing problems, stating that over 10,000 applications for SNAP were rejected solely due to failure to interview in January.
Bax told the committee the agency is looking at “overall efficiencies” including trying to get a shortened and condensed SNAP interview approved, and specializing some of the call center staff.
“So that is where the plan is: to really kind of take back those specialized teams and then have an ability to condense that interview so that we can free up the phone lines,” Bax said.
Democratic state Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern of Kansas City said she continues to hear from constituents about their issues accessing aid to which they’re entitled.
“This is one of the things that I continue to have very grave concerns about,” Nurrenbern said at last months’s appropriations committee hearing. “How long people are waiting online for essential services, and hear a lot of frustration from constituents reaching out and saying, ‘I’ve been waiting online all day and nobody’s getting back to us.’
“So I really hope that this is something that this committee can put some emphasis on and making sure that we are being as efficient as possible with these services,” she added.
Bax replied that she “could not agree more.”
Bax’s testimony differed from prior testimony of Evans, who typically downplayed issues with wait times to legislators. At one hearing in late 2023, Evans told lawmakers she was “excited” the wait time was only a few minutes the morning of a hearing, though records obtained by The Independent would later show the average that month was actually over an hour.
There have also been years-long problems with Medicaid application processing, leading to issues like pregnant Missourians going without prenatal care.
Last summer, the federal Medicaid agency announced it was intervening to help bring the state back into compliance with timely processing.
Bax said last month, regarding some Medicaid cases, “we’re about three months behind on the applications.”
According to data for January, the average time to process Medicaid applications for aged, blind and disabled applications was 107 days. The federal limit is 90 days for those applications. The average for the other category of Medicaid applications was 29 days, climbing in recent months but still below the 45-day standard. Bax also said last month the department is looking at using contractors to help with annual Medicaid renewals.
