Excerpted from the San Francisco Chronicle
By Carolyn Said
Appearing by phone at an Assembly Budget Subcommittee hearing on Thursday, Hilliard gave long lead times for other EDD reforms. The agency will take until late September to work through its current backlog. It will take until mid-October to create a system to route callers to agents depending on what they need. It will take until late September to implement a digital uploading system for claimants’ documents, which now must be mailed or faxed.
“My concern is that all these timelines seem totally out of step with the urgency of the moment we are in,” Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris, D-Laguna Beach (Orange County), said at the hearing.
Phone calls are the most visible issue. Hilliard on Thursday said that EDD eventually will merge its two call centers to provide coverage from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week, but will not begin that process until mid-October after the call-routing system is implemented. Meanwhile, the call center that can directly address claim issues is open only four hours a day, Monday to Friday.
That means claimants like Jennifer Dohn of Oakland could continue to experience what she described as akin to “the dumbest ‘Twilight Zone’ episode.”
After being laid off from two restaurant server jobs in March, it took Dohn six weeks to receive benefits.