Excerpted from The Los Angeles Times
Meanwhile, Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris (D-Laguna Beach) said desperate Californians have “this sense of falling into a black hole” as they continue struggling with a malfunctioning computer system. They can’t get their benefits, spend months in EDD purgatory and can’t get anyone to answer their cries for help.
I felt as if I was falling into a black hole when I watched videos of Petrie-Norris, who chairs the Assembly Accountability and Administrative Review Committee, grilling EDD Director Sharon Hilliard on two occasions midsummer. Petrie-Norris tried in vain to get Hilliard to be specific about the chaos at her agency, where the backlog of claims has reached well over a million at times.
It wasn’t just that Hilliard, who has decided to retire at the end of the year, was evasive. It’s that she displayed no sense of urgency in the midst of a public health and economic emergency. Hilliard seemed unruffled in July when an angry Petrie-Norris noted that while other states have overhauled their services “in a matter of months” in response to COVID-19-related demands, California’s EDD said in 2016 that it would take 11 years to overhaul its system.