South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Conflicts delay federal rent aid
First months of program marked by arguments over errors, high denial rates and finger pointing
Hundreds of past-due renters in Broward County waited weeks and months last year for promised federal rental assistance money as they feared eviction orders that would leave them homeless.
As their applications for assistance languished, county employees sparred with Pasadena, California-based Tetra Tech Recovery Services, a global contractor that County Administrator Bertha Henry hired last spring to review applications, answer phone calls and make eligibility recommendations. The first months of the program were marked by frustrating delays, arguments over application errors, high denial rates, finger pointing — and ultimately a severed contract.
“I never realized what a broken system it was until I needed help,” said Tracey Dacks, a single mom who waited four months for her application to be approved.
Nearly 1,000 emails, obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel from the county, reveal details of the bureaucratic morass that enveloped Broward County’s rollout of its Emergency Rental Assistance Program.
Such problems weren’t unique to Broward County. Many other large cities and counties that received portions of the $25 billion in federal assistance funding approved in December 2020 under former President Trump stumbled as they figured out how to identify tenants who needed it most. Analysts for the National Low Income Housing Coalition said several times that they weren’t surprised that cities, counties and states struggled to implement programs of unprecedented size.
What they had in common were the renters who didn’t want to hear that program coordinators were learning as they went along.
During the first seven months of 2020, an untold number received eviction notices despite federal, state or local moratoriums preventing judges from ordering them to leave. The last eviction moratorium, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, expired on July 31, freeing landlords to evict tenants unable to repay lapsed rent.
Meanwhile, assistance was being distributed slowly in Broward as the county argued with Tetra Tech managers over who deserved help.
Broward and Tetra Tech officials declined last week to discuss their monthslong ordeal.
Hernan Sanchez was evicted from his home while he waited for program officials to decide whether he should be approved for up to nine months of past-due rent.
In an email to County Commissioner Nan Rich, Sanchez said no action was taken on his application for several weeks, even though his landlord submitted documents proving he was behind on his rent.
“Then the sheriff came and blocked the door of the apartment that I had lived in for four years and evacuated me and my wife,” he wrote. “I had to remove everything in 24 hours and put all my furniture in a storage room.”
Dacks applied for help to pay past-due rent on her Plantation apartment on May 25 and didn’t receive funds until Oct. 7, she said in an interview.
She frequently tried to reach caseworkers by phone to inquire about her status, she said. “Call after call, I’d spend three to four hours on hold and then it would hang up.”
She was directed to submit long lists of documents proving that she qualified: “The previous year’s tax return, unemployment documents, a copy of my lease, a past-due statement, my daughter’s Social Security number, my Social Security number, copy of my driver license, a letter from my job confirming I was furloughed, and a letter from my sister confirming she was helping to pay my electric bill,” she said.
After submitting everything she was asked to provide, case workers would suddenly ask for more, she said. “Then they wanted pay stubs, bank statements and W-2 forms,” she said. “You would send everything they asked for and they’d send an email three weeks later saying, ‘Oh, we need these other things.’ ”
What she did not know was that county officials and Tetra Tech employees weren’t sure themselves what to require from applicants.
Confusion reigned
Emails reviewed by the Sun Sentinel reveal that despite not accepting applications until April 23 — weeks later than similar programs in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties — workers running Broward’s program were uncertain about how to review and make decisions about who should qualify for assistance.
One reason was that county administrators decided early last year to require that applicants provide more documentation than U.S. Treasury Department guidelines required in order to prove that they lost income due to the pandemic or were in danger of losing their homes.
Treasury guidelines allowed applicants to verify eligibility by signing statements, or “attestations,” when providing paperwork such as documents from landlords posed a hardship.
The guidelines allowed sending money directly to tenants with uncooperative landlords, but county officials declined initially to allow that option.
They tightened eligibility rules, then-County Mayor Steve Geller said last spring, to reduce the potential for fraud and orders by the federal government to return money awarded mistakenly.
Natalie Beasley, assistant director of the county’s Family Success Administration Division, which oversees the program, wrote to county administrators on June 28 — two months after opening for applications — seeking clarification “as to whether or not they want to assist with relocation expenses such as security deposits, first and last month’s rent, deposits for utilities, etc., using [program] funds.”
Treasury Department guidance, she wrote, allows funding for those expenses.
In a Dec. 1 letter to County Administrator Henry, Jonathan Burgiel, business unit president for Tetra Tech, said the county’s documentation requirements exceeded those of the federal government, increasing the amount of time Tetra Tech’s workers had to spend reviewing applications.
The county, Burgiel wrote, would not accept unemployment benefits as proof of income loss despite their allowance by the Treasury Department. Contrary to Treasury guidelines, the county would not accept applicants’ reporting of a COVID-19 death in their home to verify economic hardship “without additional documentation showing funeral costs and income loss,” Burgiel wrote.
The county’s refusal to accept signed statements from applicants — or “attestations” — to verify economic hardship “caused confusion among both applicants and program staff and resulted in the requirement for significant additional paperwork from applicants.”
Likewise, the county’s refusal to accept attestations to verify that applicants were at risk of eviction and requirement for specific documentation of housing instability “was an additional paperwork burden on the part of applicants that Tetra Tech staff had to request, in many cases multiple times, from applicants.”
At the start of the program, “the county did accept self-attestations” but reversed itself shortly afterward, Burgiel wrote.
Plenty of blame to go around
County employees and Tetra Tech managers blamed one another for the confusion during the program’s early months, the emails show. In phone calls with applicants, Tetra Tech workers blamed county staff members for processing delays, stated an email from program project coordinator Helen Boyer.
Tetra Tech’s Burgiel, meanwhile, wrote in a Sept. 27 email to county officials about his “concerns” about county staff members “calling into question the productivity of my staff.”
Broward officials compiled reports accusing Tetra Tech of working too slowly:
On July 22, county official Lenny Vialpando sent administrators a review of Tetra Tech’s performance over the first three months. It found that only “about 280” applications had been approved so far, 1,800 were denied, and 1,464 applications remained in limbo, awaiting a “quality assurance” review.
By this point, Tetra Tech had submitted an invoice for the first $1 million of its $4.5 million contract amount. Vialpando wrote, “this equates to approximately $3,500 per approved application.”
If the 1,800 denied applications were added to the 280 approved ones, “this still equates to $480 per application fully processed,” Vialpando wrote. “Furthermore, even after the nearly four hours [Tetra Tech] spends [reviewing] each application, [the county’s Human Services Department] is reporting an 81% error rate on these applications.”
Fourteen Tetra Tech workers were reviewing just 27 applications per day — or about two applications per worker, who spent four hours reviewing each application, Vialpando said. He added, the county’s Human Services Department “estimates this is a 20-minute task.”
Broward kept changing policies
Tetra Tech fired back on several occasions, blaming the delays on frequent policy changes by the county:
County officials ordered 99 changes to the program’s policies and procedures and the approval checklist for applicant files, Burgiel wrote in the Dec. 1 letter to Henry. The “high rate of changes” resulted in “a significant amount of Tetra Tech staff time” to update program procedures, checklists and workflows and “retrain staff almost daily through the project,” he wrote.
Often, he said, “the changes were decision reversals that led to confusion by both Tetra Tech and the county staff.”
The frequent policy changes prevented the county from applying “a consistent set of eligibility requirements throughout the program,” he said.
A county auditor’s finding that 81% of applications submitted by Tetra Tech had errors was incorrect, Burgiel said, because the finding was based on a sample of
100 case files that was not statistically viable. Twentyseven of the errors were actually the fault of county staff members, and 18 of the errors were not errors at all, he said.
Most of the remaining errors were due to transcription errors resulting from the county’s insistence that Tetra Tech workers transcribe applicant data from the program’s software portal into a .pdf file format for review by county workers, he said. “This re-entry of data also resulted in a number of minor calculation and transcription errors, resulting in the county to reject a large number of the files.” The rejections could have been avoided if county staff members reviewed applications in the software program, he said.
Over the summer, county staff members began receiving emails from elected officials in Broward who had been contacted by frustrated applicants. At a meeting on Aug. 24, members of the Broward County Commission spoke of their dissatisfaction with the slow pace of payment approvals.
On Oct. 6, with little more than 32% of the county’s
$59 million distributed to applicants, Tetra Tech notified the county that it was nearing $4.5 million in billing time for its work to that point, the maximum allowable under its contract. Did the county want to continue to work together or wind down its partnership, a Tetra Tech official asked.
End of the line
Shortly afterward, County Administrator Henry announced that the contract had been severed by mutual agreement as of Oct. 15.
On Oct. 29, Natalie Beasley posted a news release on the county’s website announcing that processing applications, “previously outsourced,” would be handled by the Family Success Division of the county’s Human Services Department and a “strike team” of knowledgeable and experienced staff members.
Geller, still a county commissioner, said in November that county workers reviewing applications would be less stringent than in the past and qualify more applicants under the Treasury Department’s more flexible guidelines, such as allowing self attestation of income loss and housing instability.
Since Oct. 15, the amount of money distributed increased from $19.6 million paid to 2,378 applicants to $42.5 million paid to 5,335 applicants as of Jan. 21. New and pending applications are continuing to be processed by “a team that works solely on this initiative,” a county statement said.
Tetra Tech, in Burgiel’s Dec. 1 letter, demanded payment of its remaining contracted amount, $3.1 million “which is now past due.”
Under an agreement negotiated on Jan. 5, the county paid Tetra Tech $2.8 million.
County workers will soon have an opportunity to apply the lessons they learned to yet another round of emergency rental assistance funding. After March 31, the county will begin distributing $67.5 million in additional tenant aid approved by Congress last spring as part of the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan.