JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri legislators gave initial approval last week to legislation that would add new restrictions for recipients of state administered welfare programs.

But contrary to past efforts, one bill this year has earned at least mild support from social welfare advocates.

Sponsored by Sen. David Sater, R-Cassville, a bill given first-round approval by the Missouri Senate on Thursday would reduce the lifetime cap on benefits someone could receive from the Missouri’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and would make more stringent the requirements that recipients be engaged in work activity.

Sater’s bill also includes a provision that would restrict Missouri from applying for a waiver to remove the work requirement associated with food stamps.

“Our objective is to get people on the right track, have a good job and working for their family,” Sater said on Friday. “The program is broken.”

Currently, Sater said, the work requirement attached by the federal government to the TANF program is hardly enforced.

“The most important thing of the entire bill,” he said, “is that this says you have to be engaged in a work activity before you can even apply.”

The measure would require a recipient be engaged in 30 hours of “work activity” each week. Under his measure, work activity could be defined as anything from seeking worker training, volunteering in the community, applying for jobs or to being employed.

Under Sater’s proposal, if a recipient was found to not be meeting the work requirement, the recipient would have six weeks to get back into compliance. He then would have benefits cut in half for up to 10 weeks if he fails to do so. Failure to work after another 10 weeks would lead to a person being disqualified from the program.

“We tried to be as strict as we can yet be a little bit more patient,” he said.

Currently, Missouri’s TANF program pays a family of four about $340 a month, or about $85 a week. That has not changed since 1991, when Republican John Ashcroft was the state’s governor, said Jeanette Mott Oxford, executive director of the social welfare advocacy group Empower Missouri.

“That’s part of the problem,” she said. “We haven’t changed our income guidelines since the 1990s and we haven’t changed the benefits, so only the most desperate people are on the program like people with the biggest barriers to employment.”

Because TANF’s rolls are “packed” with people with disabilities or mental illnesses or who are extremely poor and live too far away to afford transportation to potential job sites, Oxford said, simply “threatening a punishment is really naive.”

Oxford initially opposed Sater’s bill, but after a number of changes were made by Sater this week, she said, “I actually kind of want this bill to pass now.”

The bill that passed Thursday looks remarkably different from the bill Sater presented to a Senate committee she addressed in opposition last month. In a Senate dominated by like-minded Republicans, Sater said Senate rules make it necessary for members to compromise.

“Even though there are only nine Democrats, if they’re all together, they can hold the Senate floor for an indefinite period of time” and block debate, Sater said.

When Sater introduced his bill, he sought to reduce the lifetime cap on benefits from five years to two. He said the two-year number was a starting point for negotiations.

Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, on Wednesday said a two-year cap would be too strict. On Wednesday, she introduced an amendment to move the cap up to three years. In private negotiations, Sater said he decided to give her one better – upping the cap to four years in a substitute bill introduced on Thursday.

Another provision in the earlier version of the bill would have cut a family’s benefits for one month if a parent does not meet the work requirement. But Sater compromised with Democrats to scale back those sanctions. Under the new proposal, the Department of Social Services workers would be required to meet with parents found to have violated those obligations before any benefits would be taken away.

The provision of the bill requiring a face-to-face meeting, added to Sater’s bill by Sen. Jill Schupp, D-St. Louis, was what won over Oxford.

“If we could figure out how to get the right contact streams before we sanction people, I actually think it could do a lot of good,” she said.

Sen. David Sater’s bill would need another vote in the Senate before heading to the Missouri House.