Three days of legislative hearings on the crisis at the Oregon Employment Department culminated Thursday with emotional testimony from several people who described months of frustration waiting for their jobless benefits.
“I’ve spent hours upon hours on hold. But my situation, just like so many others, is not being resolved,” said Belindy Bonser, a Jackson County resident, who said she had been waiting for benefits since May and had her car repossessed.
“Something has to happen. Someone has to act,” said Bonser, her voice breaking with emotion. “Because this is unacceptable. You guys were elected to represent us and we need you more than any time I’ve ever seen constituents needing their legislators.”
Oregon has paid more than $4 billion in unemployment benefits since the pandemic shutdown began in March, but hundreds of thousands of payments were delayed for weeks or months as the department struggled to cope with an unprecedented flood of claims.
The surge – Oregon’s unemployment spiked to an all-time high of 14.9% in April – overwhelmed the department’s staff and jammed its phone lines, the main way the department communicates with claimants.
“Tens of thousands” of people are still waiting for benefits, according to the department, which says the complexity of the benefits program make it impossible to know just how many haven’t been paid.
Underlying the department’s problems is an obsolete computer system that dates to the 1990s. Beset by a decade of dysfunction, the department didn’t update its technology despite receiving $86 million in federal money in 2009 to fund an upgrade.
This week’s Senate committee hearings, held online because of the pandemic, didn’t dwell on that key issue. Instead, the hearings focused on two long presentations from the employment department on the mechanics of benefits payments and how the pandemic has strained them.
No lawmaker proposed specific reforms, though Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, suggested the state should consider reconstituting the entire employment department in light of this year’s failures.
“If there is one opportunity here,” Hass said, “it’s to take a hard look at whether we’re doing the agency right.”
Only one piece of distinct news emerged during this week’s hearings: the department plans to pay hundreds of millions of chronically delayed “waiting week” benefits to hundreds of thousands of laid-off or furloughed Oregonians in November, eight months after Congress authorized the payments.
Oregon appears to be the only state that hasn’t paid that money, which is for the first week laid-off people claim their benefits. Oregon’s payments have been held up by the state’s antique computers.
Thursday’s public testimony provided an emotional climax to the hearings, with workers waiting for benefits phoning in to the virtual hearing to describe the hardships they are facing.
Single mother Christina Lambert said she applied for jobless benefits in April and didn’t hear anything until June. Ultimately, she said she heard from a claims adjudicator who denied her benefits – then dismissed her efforts to appeal.
“This year I couldn’t afford a birthday gift for my son,” Lambert testified. “If it wasn’t for EBT (food stamps) he probably wouldn’t have had a cake.”
The format of Thursday’s hearing was awkward. Laid-off workers called in to the online hearing and described severe problems with their benefits and confusion about their claims. But there was no opportunity for the employment department or the Senate committee to respond or offer avenues for people to address their issues.
It was like a radio call-in advice show, but without the advice.
After the hearing, though, the department said it contacted some of those who called in to address the problems they described. Interim employment department Director David Gerstenfeld said he felt for the people testifying Thursday.
“The circumstances that individuals are facing, it is heartbreaking,” Gerstenfeld said during his weekly media briefing. “It is a horrible situation. We absolutely recognize that.”
However, Gerstenfeld said that his department’s problems are mostly a result of an unprecedented pandemic -- not the department’s dysfunction.
“We are living through a huge disaster,” Gerstenfeld said. “I do disagree that it’s a disaster caused by the employment department.”
Multiple callers, and those submitting written testimony, said they had relied on legislators to resolve their claims when the employment department said it was unable to do so. Sen Lynn Findley, R-Vale, said that shows “something is wrong” with how the department is operating.
“The agency is experiencing a major collapse in the ability to provide Oregonians the unemployment insurance services they so desperately deserve,” said Findley, who is not a member of the committee holding this week’s hearings, but asked to testify anyway.
Findley blamed “a lack of directional leadership” from the state for the months of failures in the employment department and called for prompt action to change its direction.
“We have a responsibility to stop studying the issue,” Findley said, “and fix the problem as quickly as possible.”
-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |
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