Most Wednesdays, Elizabeth Blakeney is late for work for her shift at Berlin’s Hilltop Inn. She said she feels bad for the coworkers who sometimes have to cover for her, although her tardiness is out of her control.
Blakeney also lives at the Hilltop with her husband as part of a special emergency housing program for people experiencing homelessness, and six times a month the couple must recertify the state voucher that subsidizes their stay. To do so, Blakeney makes the trek to the Department for Children and Families’ offices in Barre, which is difficult because she doesn’t have a car, and bus service is unreliable. And once there, she must wait, often for hours on end, to be seen.
“I can be there for four or five hours,” she said.
Thanks to Blakeney’s partial disability benefits, she and her husband were among some 2,000 individuals included in a special pandemic-era cohort of unhoused individuals entitled to shelter through April — at least in theory. But the program extension came with new requirements, and in July alone, the only month for which data is yet available, over 100 households left the program simply because they failed to renew their benefits, about triple the figure that actually found permanent housing.
It’s possible that some of the people who didn’t renew did find housing and never reported it to the state. And officials have told lawmakers that they’re doing everything they can to get in touch with program participants, and that being booted from the program might prompt people to submit the necessary paperwork to re-enroll.
“As individuals lose their benefits, that sometimes entices them to reach out to the state,” Agency of Human Services Secretary Jenney Samuelson told lawmakers in July.
But this belies the reality on the ground, where both motel residents and the service providers who work with them report that people are desperately trying to maintain their benefits in the face of extraordinary and unpredictable administrative burdens.
There are only two ways for people to renew their benefits: in person, which Blakeney prefers because she believes it’s more reliable, or over the phone. Wait time data for phone calls provided by the Department for Children and Families for four weeks this summer show that people seeking to renew their vouchers were on hold for an average of just under two hours to three hours.
But service providers and motel residents alike say the state’s data doesn’t fully capture the severity of the problem.
One Hilltop resident, Charles Jenkins, who also works at the inn doing maintenance work, showed a reporter the call log on his phone in a recent attempt to reach DCF’s economic services division. It was for 6 hours, 29 minutes, and 12 seconds.
Jenkins said he waited as patiently as he could, finishing his shift while remaining on hold. But it was difficult and frustrating, particularly since he had to vigilantly keep recharging his phone to make sure he didn’t get disconnected — and sent to the back of the queue.
“It’s stressful, especially when you have another individual you know relying on you,” said Jenkins, who cares for his disabled brother, who lives with him at the Hilltop. He noted that in earlier iterations of the program, he’d recertified monthly — a process that eventually became biweekly, and now, for a reason he couldn’t explain, weekly. “It’s a nightmare,” he said.
An hour south down the highway, Katie Edwards, a service coordinator at the Upper Valley Haven in Hartford, echoed Jenkins verbatim, calling recertification “a nightmare.” She guessed the state’s data must not take into account how often people are disconnected and must start all over again from the back of the queue. There’s a callback system, added Edwards, who helps people navigate the process, but she hasn’t seen it work.
People often start the recertification process days out from their renewal date, she said, and as each day passes and they fail to get through, they begin to panic as they consider being forced to pay out of pocket or, if they have no money, simply leave.
“I can’t even describe that level of stress,” she said. And the process is even more difficult for those who must renew their vouchers more than once a month. The law says that participants must renew every 28 days, but many have to do so more frequently, either because the hotel wants to house them on a trial basis, or because the state wants to re-calculate how much they will owe toward their stay with every paycheck.
Ironically, the system makes things particularly difficult for those who work. Blakeney is paid every other Friday, and her husband is paid every Wednesday. With each paycheck, the state requires a new recertification, which Blakeney treks over to Barre to complete.
State officials say they’re doing this to make sure that people who participate pay 30% of their income toward their stay — a pre-pandemic rule reintroduced by lawmakers this July. But Blakeney said she’s had to pay more, because when delays or complications hold up her voucher, it’s on her to pay the difference — or plead for patience from the hotel.
Carolyn Bower, the hotel project manager for the Good Samaritan Haven, a shelter network in central Vermont, is typically posted at the Hilltop. Because one older resident has dementia, Bower is tasked with calling the state on his behalf, and as of last week she estimated that she’d probably called four or five times hoping to get through to a state worker in August. She typically has to hang up after about two hours, Bower said, because the man can’t handle waiting so long and usually retires to his room to sleep. The hotel had been allowing him to stay for free for nearly a month, she said, taking it on faith that the state would eventually recertify him.
Bower predicted that he eventually would get his voucher. But such an arduous process, particularly for people who have preexisting trauma and mental health problems, is “playing with their heads,” she said. “It’s just not fair.”
Edwards, the Upper Valley service worker, also says the process is deeply confusing. Because people are told verbally when they need to renew, and because the state has changed the schedule for when people need to recertify, people often don’t know when they’re due. And for someone like Edwards, who is attempting to get people into more stable housing, the process is particularly maddening because it feels so counter-productive. She recalled taking a woman to the DCF offices one recent Friday, only to be told that the woman would need to return on Monday, since her voucher wasn’t expiring until then.
“It really is a waste of my efforts to get people into permanent housing, to spend probably like half of my month just dealing with recertification,” Edwards said.
Rebecca Plummer, a staff attorney at Vermont Legal Aid, said the nonprofit law firm is hearing from service providers that people are being kicked out of the program simply because they can’t make it through the recertification process. And she argued that despite new rules imposed by the Legislature, the state could do more to simplify the process.
“People are falling through the cracks,” she wrote in an email to VTDigger. “The statute is not specific; it requires that participants are ‘engaging in monthly eligibility reassessments.’ Given the Department’s inability to affirmatively recertify each household in the program, there is no reason they can’t suspend this requirement or convert it to an opt-out rather than an opt-in requirement.”
Miranda Gray, the deputy commissioner of DCF’s economic services division, acknowledged that wait times are long and a concern. But she nevertheless expressed confidence that no one was losing their benefits if they were putting in a good-faith effort to renew their benefits, and said the state was doing its own outreach.
If someone hasn’t renewed in time but wait times have been high, “we are giving them extra time to get in touch with us, and for us to call them.”
“But that means I also need people to answer their phones when economic services is calling,” she said. Gray also pointed to the callback option, which she said the state had put in place in response to wait times — but she expressed surprise when a reporter told her that motel residents and caseworkers frequently complain the function is unreliable.
“I have not heard that,” she said.
She also expressed frustration at the notion that the state’s process for recertification could be impeding someone’s search for housing, calling it “a bit extreme.”
“I mean, I just think that there is a shortage of housing as well,” she said. As for the decision to ask people to recertify with every paycheck, Gray argued it was what the state needed to do to comply with the requirement to make people pay their share, as dictated by the state’s new law.
Asked about the older Hilltop Inn resident who reportedly hadn’t had a valid voucher for weeks, Gray offered that perhaps the problem was that his caseworker hadn’t raised the problem with the state.
“If we’ve outreached multiple times and didn’t get anything and then the hotel continues to house someone — we don’t know that until it is brought to our attention,” she said.
But pressed about how the caseworker was expected to do this — given that reaching the state was precisely the problem — Gray replied that, on some days, wait times were quite short.
“I can tell you yesterday we had no wait time,” she said. Besides, Gray added, caseworkers should know that they can also raise concerns about a particular motel resident directly with DCF’s local field directors.
Gray has also pointed to the Agency of Human Services’s fair hearing process as one more way individuals can get back their benefits if they’ve lost them.
But the fair hearing process does not offer those who attempt to reinstate their benefits a particularly equal playing field. While the state can call upon a lawyer in the Attorney General’s office to assist them, the former voucher recipient has no guaranteed representation. (They can reach out to outside entities, like Vermont Legal Services, for help, but they don’t necessarily get it.)
And homeless individuals who ask for a fair hearing still lose their benefits while they wait for their appeal to be heard — which means that people might be left to figure out how to build their case while living outside. (For a period of time, the state was allowing people to stay in motels pending their hearing, but they’ve done away with that practice, arguing it was merely a pandemic-era measure.)
Asked whether the program is set up in a way that works for the people it was intended to serve, Gray would only say that the state was doing what it was told to do by lawmakers.
“The program is set up as it was set forth in Act 81 is what I will say,” she said.
