Enna owner Shannon Bates, left, and Onion River Outdoors owner Jen Roberts speak at a press conference asking the state to provide funding, guidance and planning to respond to Montpelier’s devastating floods. Photo by Erin Petenko/VTDigger
” data-image-caption=”
Enna owner Shannon Bates, left, and Onion River Outdoors owner Jen Roberts speak at a press conference asking the state to provide funding, guidance and planning to respond to Montpelier’s devastating floods. Photo by Erin Petenko/VTDigger
” data-medium-file=”https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-300×225.jpg” data-large-file=”https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-1200×900.jpg?crop=1″ decoding=”async” width=”1200″ height=”900″ src=”https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-1200×900.jpg?crop=1″ alt class=”wp-image-552183″ srcset=”https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-1200×900.jpg?crop=1 1200w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-300×225.jpg 300w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-125×94.jpg 125w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-768×576.jpg 768w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-1536×1152.jpg 1536w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-2048×1536.jpg 2048w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-800×600.jpg?crop=1 800w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-600×450.jpg?crop=1 600w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-400×300.jpg?crop=1 400w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-200×150.jpg?crop=1 200w, https://vtdigger.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/20230721_100716-1568×1176.jpg 1568w” sizes=”(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px”>
To date, none of the 123 Vermont business owners and independent contractors who have applied for disaster unemployment compensation as a result of the July floods have received a penny of it, Cameron Wood, the state’s unemployment insurance director, told VTDigger.
“We are a little behind schedule of where we had anticipated being and where we would have liked to have been,” Wood said. “We would have liked to have been processing payments a few weeks ago.”
Disaster unemployment assistance is available to Vermonters whose employment was affected by the disaster but who are not eligible for regular unemployment assistance. It’s limited to the nine counties that fall under the federal government’s disaster declaration.
Shannon Bates, owner of Enna, a restaurant in Montpelier that flooded on July 10, is among the business owners who has yet to see any payments.
Bates said she called the Vermont Department of Labor and wrote multiple emails before finally getting in touch with someone who said they were taking care of her case. She was told she would just have to call in every week and make a report, and that the department would be in touch. Bates never heard back, she said, despite leaving two voice messages with the woman who said she would handle the case.
This week, Bates said, she learned she was not in the system. She left another voicemail and received an email with a photocopy of a letter she never received informing her that her application had been denied because she had not provided the required information.
“But they didn’t ask for anything,” Bates said. “This whole process is very stressful. None of us have gotten anything.”
With a number of businesses still weeks away from reopening, Bates said the unemployment assistance is important for many owners.
“Our town is a ghost town,” Bates said. “We really need help.”
Wood blamed the delay on lack of support from the U.S. Department of Labor and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He said the Vermont Department of Labor requested funding to hire a private contractor to build an online application, but the federal agencies said they would not reimburse such an expenditure. That meant the state labor department had to develop the application entirely in-house.
Wood said his department is working with the Vermont Agency of Digital Services to enable the filing of claims for disaster unemployment assistance. The department has been taking initial claims for more than a month, he added.
After the floods, people were initially able to apply on a website, but that website was taken down after Vermont Department of Labor employees detected “a significant amount of fraudulent claims,” Wood said. Since then, all applications must be done on the phone. If people go to file a claim online, they are met with a message that asks them to contact the call center.
Applicants must first apply for regular unemployment and indicate that they lost their job because of the flooding. If the person filing is not a full-time employee, but is instead a business owner or independent contractor, the application is moved to disaster unemployment assistance.
Staff take the initial application and ask the applicant to provide documentation to determine their benefit level. The maximum benefit is $750 a week, Wood said. Applicants have 21 days to provide the documentation.
“I haven’t received a dime,” said Vince Muraco, owner of the Hippie Chickpea, a restaurant that was on Elm Street in Montpelier until the flood hit. The restaurant was wiped out, and he will not be able to rebuild in that space, he said.
Muraco said he was told by a person handling his disaster unemployment assistance claim that he needed to go to a website to make weekly claims, but the website only takes weekly claims for regular unemployment assistance, for which he has already been denied.
This week, Wood said, the Department of Labor and the Agency of Digital Services finished developing the weekly claims process for disaster unemployment assistance, and has begun telling people how much they will be collecting. Agents have also reached out to applicants to file their weekly claims, he said.
Wood expects the first payments to be processed next week.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Labor announced Friday that it was extending the deadline for Vermonters to apply for disaster unemployment assistance until Sep. 29.
Adblock test (Why?)
#Vermont #business #received #disaster #unemployment #assistance #date #VTDigger