Brewer asks about shopping letter expiration and voucher panic
Brewer asks how often shopping letters expire and whether constituent panic reflects a small or large problem. Scott French says the six-month letter is automatically renewed if eligibility continues and DSS wants to understand cases where constituents experience problems.
You've discussed this a lot, and maybe you said it, but the six-month, the expiration of the voucher.
How often does that happen?
Is it just my imagination that people come to our office because it's such a panic moment?
But maybe it's a very small number of people who actually have that experience.
We have a lot of clients who come in with that.
So I just wanted to understand that.
Sure.
And I think we would love further details from you to understand what might be driving that for them.
So the sixth month is for the shopping letter, right?
So it's the sort of presumptive eligibility.
And for, you know, that is automatically renewed as we do sort of back end.
Data tracking to ensure the information looks the same, you're still income eligible, and that letter should be provided to the household.
So if there's confusion or concerns about that that are happening, we would definitely want to talk to you about that.
But as the commissioner said, we'll...
Who's the commissioner?
Often is what you're saying.
And it's very fixable.
It should not, and it is fixable.
So we would want that brought to our attention.
And we'll, as we said, look at if there is a longer period of time than six months that it can be expanded to as well.