Travis County Commissioners Court
November 4, 2008
Item 2
2. Consider and take appropriate action on the repeal of chapter 72, "emergency assistance policies and procedures," and substitution of the new version of that chapter 72. We had this on last week. And I suggested that we delay action for a week to see if -- if we receive comments to the policy posted on the county website. And my note here says that we received two comments in support of the policy. And 0 in opposition. Any additional comments that we need to hear today?
>> no, sir.
>> anybody here on item no. 2?
>> move approval.
>> second.
>> any discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote.
>> we would just be permitted to say thank you to all of the departments that assisted us in preparing these policies for your approval today. The county attorney's office, planning and budget, the auditor, purchasing, all of those offices that support us? What we do for our constituents. We certainly appreciate that. But most importantly we appreciate the staff of the family support services division, who are on the front lines with your constituents every day and who made recommendations that translated into these policy changes and really see this as a benefit to the people that we serve in our community. So -- so I thank them and I also thank you for -- for supporting us and making these much needed policy changes. Thank you.
>> sure. Again, I thank you and your staff. But I also would like to -- y'all have done a great job on this. The constituents, of course, will -- are the benefits of such a change in this policy. However, if you will, for me, could you let me see what the impact will be maybe after the first quarter of implementation to see, you know, the first -- if you could let me see something on a quarterly basis as far as what -- the number of persons that are taking advantage of it, but all of these other kind of things that go along with that. It would be really good to see that.
>> we will be happy to do that and actually our implementation dead line calls for these policies to go into effect January 1st. So we will be hastily training staff over these next couple of months, changing our computer system to reflect the new policy and eligibility standards and so -- so about -- about April, may, we should have some early data on the impact.
>> and for those folks who didn't listen to last week's voting session, can you tell the viewing public what this actually is going to do?
>> well, just briefly I can say that we have removed some of the -- some of the barriers that I think cause us to have a bottleneck in our system when it comes to applying for services such as the requirement that our rent and mortgage requests and our utility requests be past due. So effective in January if your request includes a bill that is within 14 days of the due date, we will be able to -- to talk to you about your eligibility and make a decision, whereby people had to wait until their bills were past due before they could bring them to us. So those are the biggest changes. But he have also aligned our eligibility with our partners such as the Texas department of housing an community affairs. Not only does that streamline what our constituents have to bring and provide to us, but it also helps our staff in not having to have sort of a just a whole menu of different eligibility guidelines that they have to -- to adhere. The new policies will be up on our website for an extended period of time for people to be able to look and see the impact. But I think those are the most significant changes that our constituents will experience some benefit from.
>> thank you very much.
>> okay. Thank you.
>> thank you.
>> thanks.
>> thank you all very much.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, November 4, 2008 1:38 PM