Over her 33-year career at the El Paso County Department of Human Services, Karen Logan’s frequent goal has been to keep the doors open and the phones answered, no matter the circumstances.

During the Waldo Canyon fire, that meant relocating the county’s child-protective services overnight after the fire forced an evacuation. As manager, part of Logan’s job was to keep the hotline operational.

“We still had to make sure kids were safe,” she said.

Logan is retiring this month, while programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid are undergoing changes. 

Food insecurity concerns deepen as Colorado DHS, nonprofits brace for SNAP changes

Logan has held many of the human services positions El Paso County employs since the Colorado Springs native started in the department as an income maintenance technician in 1992. She took college courses on her lunch break, and one of her few gaps in employment was to take an unpaid internship while she completed her master’s degree in social work at the University of Denver.

“This was absolutely the place I should have been,” she said. 

She spent years as a child-welfare caseworker, eventually managing the department and its investigative partnerships with law enforcement. She also spent the latter half of her career as the head of the Economic Services Division, which administers SNAP, Medicaid and other benefits.

Over three decades, Logan said that the community of El Paso County and its relationship to the Department of Human Services has evolved, especially when it comes to views on applying for assistance.

“It’s not as stigmatized as it used to be,” she said.

When COVID-19 started spreading, Logan moved the county’s benefit services to a makeshift downstairs lobby, again overnight.

“We didn’t have a choice to tell people they couldn’t come in,” she said.

Many of the programs Logan has administered are drastically altered from when she first started. During her tenure, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in 1996, which instituted some work requirements and time limitations on major benefits. She said that COVID-19, over two decades later, was also a major milestone.

“Families went into a whole different level of need,” Logan said.

According to DHS statistics, food-stamp household recipients went from about 31,000 in 2019 to over 38,000 in 2022.

'We’re really struggling already': Expiration of pandemic SNAP benefits expected to tax food banks

COVID-19 disruptions were partly to blame, Logan said, for some of the ensuing backlogs in the SNAP program. The county’s processing times were some of the slowest in the state when the federal government imposed a corrective action plan on Colorado in 2023.

Logan said that a combination of factors led to the backlog for the county-administered program, including the end of automatic benefits renewals during the pandemic.

“People weren’t used to having to turn in things to us,” she said.

The county’s SNAP program has returned to processing about 95% of applications within the federal time frames.

Colorado Department of Human Services Director Michelle Barnes called cuts and new requirements to SNAP and Medicaid in the latest federal budget bill a “double whammy” last month at a meeting with the Executive Committee of the Legislative Council.

Logan is stepping away from administration, but will continue as an adjunct professor at Colorado State University’s Pueblo campus teaching social work. She said intelligence and compassion were important for the next generation, as are frequent self-check-ins.

“To say it’s never going to bother you is naive, and it’s dangerous,” she said.

Logan is also planning to help develop social-services resources for the UCHealth Parkview Medical Center’s oncology ward in Pueblo.

She said understanding the unique circumstances of clients in difficult situations has been a key part of the job. 

“Life happens to a lot of people, not necessarily because of what they want to do, or what they asked to do, or how they were brought up or anything else,” she said. “Things just happen.”