Colorado lawmakers approved $10 million to head towards the state’s food banks as federal food assistance benefits pause due to the government shutdown.

Democratic Governor Jared Polis announced his request for the money last week. The funding, set in $3.3 million increments over six weeks from the state’s General Fund, will go to the food bank network Feeding Colorado through the Community Food Assistance Grant Program.

The Joint Budget Committee unanimously approved the request on Thursday morning.

“I’m certain that this is a hope shared by this committee, that the federal government will resolve and become the partner to us that it should be, and fund the programs that it is legally required to fund,” said Representative Shannon Bird, a Westminster Democrat.

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The approximately 600,000 low-income Coloradans who typically receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program money from the federal government will not get those benefits in November as the government shutdown persists. People use SNAP benefits to supplement their grocery budgets, and advocates predict that a pause in funding will push hungry people towards food banks for help. The average Colorado household that uses SNAP receives $367 per month, adding up to about $120 million in the state each month.

“It is a sandbag in a flood,” Tom Dermody, a policy analyst with the JBC, told lawmakers. “We don’t have the mechanism to actually step in and provide that (full) funding. We’re also in a budgetary circumstance where we don’t have the scale to actually address the SNAP emergency in any sort of truly meaningful way.”

The money from the state is intended to help Feeding Colorado purchase enough food to meet some of the needs, focusing on communities with high shares of SNAP recipients. Food banks have already started preparing for an influx of visitors starting this weekend.

Attorney General Phil Weiser joined a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the SNAP issue, arguing that federal contingency funds can be used to pay the roughly $8 billion for November benefits across the country.

Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Weld County Republican, questioned why Polis hadn’t declared an emergency on the issue, enabling him to use the state’s emergency disaster fund.

“It’s about the poor planning that’s taking place in this state. This is an emergency disaster and I don’t know why we wouldn’t declare that,” she said. “They could have put a process in place two weeks ago to try to identify how to work through this and make sure that people weren’t going without food.”

Democrats on the committee pushed back on that idea, saying it is risky to use emergency funds when there is a chance of other disasters affecting the state, such as floods, wildfires and other impacts from the federal shutdown.