MONTICELLO – Based on details of what
was going on last fall, things could not have gotten much worse with Sullivan
County’s Home Energy Assistance Program, with reports of massive
backlogs and long waits to process new applications.
Things are getting better, according to the man brought on board to straighten
out the mess. Deputy Health and Family Services Commissioner William Moon
presented an overview of the problems and a generally optimistic assessment
of where things are now, at Tuesday’s County Legislature Health
and Family Services Committee meeting.
Part of the improvement, Moon said, can be credited to input from a team
from the office that administers the HEAP program in Albany. The team
spent three days recently, in Sullivan County.
“Their perspective is that Sullivan County in many ways has optimized
the HEAP program in the sense that they found no errors, they didn’t
find any cases being denied that shouldn’t have been,” Moon
said. “They didn’t find any mistakes in the work.”
At present, there is no backlog. Moon said they have been current for
about the last 10 days.
There is more to be done, including having adequate and trained staff,
a point of contention with Family Services Commissioner Randy Parker,
who was put on administrative leave last month. That was a point noted
again on Tuesday by union representative Sandy Shaddock, who last month
presented a long litany of problems that were happening in the early days
of the current HEAP season.
Moon said those are issues that are being addressed. Another problem is
the current location, in Liberty, for handling the HEAP program.
“It is a disaster,” he said.
“We really need to get out into the community, especially into
Monticello and other places where the major portion of our HEAP people
are and give them a venue that they can come to instead of having to come
to Liberty and go through the building there. We need to do that as we
reach out into the community. There’s a variety of ways to do that.”
There are other ways of simplifying the process, said Moon, including
letting clients take pictures of needed documents with their phones and
emailing them, instead of having to bring them in person, or find a fax
machine somewhere.
Legislature Chairman Scott Samuelson is pleased with the progress so far.
“I’m both astounded and thrilled to see that in a very short
amount of time that there have been some things that have been identified
to help make this a better system. “I’m really kind of surprised
that it’s taken this long.”
Committee Chairwoman Cindy Kurpil Gieger said it is a problem that should
not be happening in Sullivan County. She said she is also calling for
“aggressive action” to create a county emergency shelter.
