CLEVELAND, Ohio – Most Cuyahoga County SNAP recipients will soon be automatically refunded a portion of their benefits to help them replace food lost during the major storm earlier this month, providing them with relief faster.
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients living in all but three county zip codes will see dollars added to their accounts, based on when they last received benefits.
The only ZIP codes not eligible for the automatic reimbursements are 44017, 44040 and 44149, covering parts of Strongsville, Berea and Gates Mills, which were not as impacted by the storm as the rest of the county.
“The closer their last payment was to the date of the storm, the more benefits will be replaced,” the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services announced in a news release Thursday.
Residents who received benefits:
- Between July 7 and 13 will be credited 15% of their monthly allowance
- Between July 14 and 21 will get 30%
- Between July 22 and 29 will get 45%
- Between July 30 and Aug. 6 will get 60%
Recipients will see those funds automatically deposited into their SNAP accounts by Aug. 30.
But Dan Humphrey, with the county’s Health and Human Services office, assured that around 99% of the 190,000 county residents receiving SNAP benefits will be getting some money, whether they applied for it – as typically required – or not.
“This will give automatic, nearly county-wide relief to every SNAP recipient,” Humphrey said Thursday. “We’re hoping that this mass replacement will take care of the needs of most of the people who were affected by the outage, and then they won’t need to apply, and they won’t need to wait (for funds).”
The reimbursement dollars are meant to allow families to more quickly replace any perishable items, such as meat and dairy, that they may have lost during the Aug. 6 storm, when tornados ripped through Northeast Ohio, leaving large portions of the county without power for anywhere from four hours to several days.
SNAP recipients have always been eligible for such relief following a power outage lasting at least four hours, but they’ve had to apply for it first and sometimes wait over a month for it to arrive.
Following the August storm, however, the county received over 20,000 applications for those reimbursements, the county’s Health and Human Services Director David Merriman said. And so far, the office has only been able to process 2,000 of those requests, he said.
County officials, led by Job and Family Services Director Kevin Gowan, knew residents needed aid sooner, Merriman said. They helped the state apply for a federal waiver from the USDA Food and Nutrition Service that pushes reimbursements to eligible recipients automatically.
The state was awarded the waiver for the first time, Merriman said. It applied to communities in Cuyahoga, Lake and Geauga counties, which all experienced significant power loss following the storm.
“That’s what’s exciting about this. We’re not counting on people, right after a natural disaster, to come ask for help when we know that it was a natural disaster, when we have the data,” Merriman said, crediting Gowan and partnerships with area utility companies for making it possible.
It’s expected that those dollars will cover the food loss most families experienced, Merriman said, but if there was additional waste beyond that amount, recipients still have until Sept. 5 to apply for the balance owed. They will need to fill out a request form and go through the standard review process.
For those who have already applied for aid, requests will continue to be processed to determine whether the automatic funds covered the bill or if additional funds are needed.
The waiver only covers residents already receiving SNAP benefits, Merriman stressed, noting that the county has been hearing from non-recipients who lost food during the storm. Those residents can either apply to start receiving benefits or visit an area food pantry, which the county just awarded dollars to help restock.
This article was originally published by a www.cleveland.com . Read the Original article here. .