Moon: “… we’ve gotten new people …”
MONTICELLO – It’s not even summer yet, but Sullivan County officials are looking back and planning ahead, to avoid the mess with last winter’s Home Energy Assistance Program. The county was left with a pile of HEAP applications that were not processed in a timely manner.
William Moon came out of retirement to serve as Division of Health and Family Services Deputy Commissioner, with a key task of straightening things out with HEAP.
“Want to make sure that our planning encompasses the full year, and that has to rest with personnel because in the last couple of cycles, we’ve gotten new people who needed to be trained from the ground up,” Moon told the County Legislature’s Health and Family Services Committee on Thursday.
Moon said making sure people handling HEAP this year know what they are doing is half the job. Another big part is making the system user-friendly.
That includes having places to go to apply, other than the crowded social services building outside Liberty.
“We want to have places in Liberty and Monticello and probably in some outposts in other areas of the county that’s noticed, where people can go and start and initiate the HEAP process.”
There are an estimated 3,200 HEAP eligible households in the county.
Moon said making this, in essence, a one-stop-shopping process for all of them is the goal.
