The board charged with dispensing financial help to local veterans is rewriting its policies in an attempt to allow more veterans to qualify for funds.
Topping the list of goals: expanding housing assistance eligibility to homeowners, providing consistency to student veterans, and shortening the time frame of financial history used to decide whether or not someone is needy enough to access the Clark County Veterans Assistance Fund.
Members of the Veterans Advisory Board are launching a line-by-line review of their policies and procedures manual, looking for places to loosen up the rules.
“I just don’t think we’re reaching enough veterans,” said Board Chair Kelly Jones at a Feb. 14 work session. “We need to focus on the here and now, the veterans that we have in our community now that are struggling.”
Under current rules, local veterans who meet certain standards qualify for funds to go toward approved expenses like rent, utilities, food, transportation and prescription costs. The fund is supported by a county property tax that collects around one cent per $1,000 of assessed value.
In order to qualify, the veteran needs to have been honorably discharged, lived in Washington for at least a year, live in or be moving to Clark County and make no more than 150 percent of household poverty guidelines. For a single person, that would mean an annual income of no more than $18,735 after taxes.
To qualify for rent assistance only, the veteran can be making up to 200 percent of the poverty threshold.
But those requirements are unnecessarily restrictive, Jones argues. For starters, the fund doesn’t offer mortgage assistance and disqualifies homeowners from receiving help with housing costs.
In a follow-up interview with The Columbian, Jones said that just because a veteran was once able to put a down payment on a home doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she isn’t struggling today.
“They can still end up on the street just like someone who’s renting an apartment,” Jones said. “It’s almost like they’re penalized for having a home.”
$17 over limit
David Daly, the board co-chair and Veterans Resource Center Manager at Clark College, said another goal of the policy rewrite is to build more flexibility into the income requirements for college students.
Most months, he said, students enrolled for GI Bill benefits bring in just $17 more than the maximum monthly income amount to qualify for assistance from the county veterans fund. If classes don’t run through the entire month, the federal benefits are reduced accordingly and so the students could qualify under the poverty guidelines.
The inconsistency from month to month causes some whiplash among students, Daly said, and calls for a little more common-sense flexibility.
The third potential policy rewrite also applies to eligibility. In order to determine whether or not somebody’s income is low enough to qualify for county assistance, the last three months of a veteran’s financial history are considered under the current rules.
Different counties operate under different requirements. In King County, home to the state’s largest population of veterans, eligibility is determined by looking at just the last 30 days of income. In Spokane County — more comparable to Clark County in terms of population — fund officers consider the last 90 days.
But during the Feb. 14 work session, board members worried that three months is too long a period of time to accurately reflect a veteran’s situation.
What if a veteran lost a job a month ago, but the three-month average still puts them over the income threshold for assistance? What if a one-time payment, like a tax return, skews their income?
The process just isn’t nimble enough to reflect reality, Jones said, and added that shortening the period of consideration to a month could better provide emergency assistance.
“I think that’s going to catch some people who have been turned away because they’re over income,” she said.
The 90-day rule came up twice in a big way recently: when a technology glitch at the Department of Veterans Affairs delayed federal payments to thousands of veterans enrolled under the GI Bill, and during the government shutdown that withheld wages and benefits from current and former U.S. Coast Guard members for 35 days.
Neither crisis lasted a full three months, Jones pointed out, but nonetheless counted as an emergency to the affected veterans.
Daly said board members are preparing for an as-yet unscheduled retreat to comb through its policies and procedures to make sure none of their proposed changes run afoul of the state law that addresses county veteran assistance.
He’s aiming to complete that process before the board’s March 14 meeting. Then the body can vote whether to bring the revisions before the Clark County Council, who would have to approve any changes.
Calley Hair: 360-735-4558; calley.hair@columbian.com. Twitter: twitter.com/calleynhair
