Source: Burlington FreePress, November 21, by Nancy Remsen.

“When Brenda Barsalou saw her aunt’s monthly fuel payments jump by $50 a month this fall, she persuaded her 86-year-old relative to seek financial assistance for the first time.

The application was daunting enough at 18 pages, Barsalou said, but not nearly as frustrating as what followed. She spent hours on hold trying to make a required contact for her aunt with a state interviewer. She couldn’t get through before the deadline for the interview passed.

Barsalou and her aunt — and many other Vermonters — got snagged in the bumpy rollout of a modernization initiative at the Department for Children and Families that at its worst saddled some clients with estimated telephone wait times of hundreds of minutes.

Using electronic technology and centralized management, the department’s $3 million modernization project is intended to improve service to Vermonters who are seeking financial assistance with food, fuel and health care. It would eliminate the need for many trips to regional offices by allowing automated telephone inquiries, telephone interviews and Internet applications.

For a host of reasons — glitches in software, delays in system development, shrunken staffing and an avalanche of applications — this modernization effort so far has created almost as many problems as it has solved…”

Full Story:  State gives Vermonters seeking aid waiting times exceeding 1,000 minutes.

PDF of Story: State gives Vermonters seeking aid waiting times exceeding 1,000 minutes.