Epstein asks about timelines and staffing for source of income cases
Epstein asks whether delays are staffing-related or due to unresponsive landlords. Rivera says the team is fully staffed at six members and source of income pre-complaint closures averaged under 30 days, while Kamuf Ward describes the reorganization and new non-attorney investigators.
Yeah, and if you're able to move these quickly, that's great to know what that timeline is for those.
And also, if they're...
aren't are those staffing related issues?
Like, is it they're not moving quick enough because you don't have a staff or you're not moving quickly enough because either you're not the landlord or broker is not responding or for some other reason?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, we are a fully staffed team at six members.
We're able to, on average, I believe our closure rates for pre-complaint interventions, particularly for lawful source of income, was under 30 days,
which is really impressive considering the current caseload of each interventionist who are also doing disability accommodations as well.
Right.
And I just want to add to that because I think part of the kind of genesis of this hearing is talking also about a reorganization of
the agency, which is really to take as many resources as possible and move them into the frontline enforcement part of the agency.
So many of the pieces of cases historically have been handled by attorneys.
I'm an attorney.
Attorneys are wonderful, but they don't need to do every part of a case investigation.
And so we have created a new role within our enforcement team, which are non-attorney investigators, to really help move the processes forward, which I think, you know, we can't say what the timelines are.
This went into effect July 1.
But the goal is...
Faster case processing times at every step so that in all protected categories we are moving cases faster.
Thank you, Chair and Eve and Sam.
Chair Nurse for letting me go out of turn.