(The Center Square) – Spokane County is closing the application portal for rental assistance at the end of the month to catch up with a backlog of cases that is expected to drain the final $8 million of available federal funds. Priority will be given to households that have not yet received help with housing and utility costs.
Administrators from the Spokane Neighborhood Action Partners, or SNAP, briefed Commissioners Mary Kuney, Josh Kerns and Al French on Monday about the status of programs.
French asked SNAP officials how long it took to process a rental assistance application and was told the average wait time is two to three months.
“I tell you that’s outstanding,” he said.
SNAP is the nonprofit tasked with reviewing applications from landlords and tenants for federal assistance made available after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
Julie Hone Kamp, chief executive officer of SNAP; Lucy Lepinski, chief operating officer; and Chelsey Dunham, rental assistance specialist, attended the Nov. 28 commission meeting to give a status report of expenditures to date. Guidelines for all assistance programs has been established by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Washington State Department of Commerce.
“It’s a significant amount of funding and it’s a significant amount of work,” summarized Scott Simmons, chief executive officer of the county.
The first batch of funding received by the county came from the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act of $2.2 trillion that was approved by Congress in March 2020. The county allocated $5.1 million from its share of funding to help 2,506 households outside of city limits, according to a video presentation by SNAP.
To qualify, applicants had to have an income at or below 50% of the area median, which is about $47,000 for an individual and $67,000 for a family of four, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Eligible applicants had to be at least one month behind in rent and at risk of becoming homeless, among other requirements.
A second pot of $8.6 million became locally available in February 2021 and was expended to 1,261 households within one year, according to SNAP.
That funding stream through CARES required that applicants have an income at or below 80% of area median income and demonstrate hardship caused by pandemic quarantine or other government mandate. Unsafe or unhealthy living conditions were also taken into consideration.
That income requirement remained the same in subsequent rounds of funding.
The third round of CARES dollars found the county using $10 million to help 1,656 households, according to SNAP.
The county spent $8.9 million from American Rescue Plan funds, the $1.9 trillion package approved by Congress in 2021, to help 1,573 households.
Another $1.1 million in ARP funds was made available in May 2021 to assist 177 households, and $3.8 million more the same year helped 496 households.