More than $700,000 in eviction prevention funds will be made available in Grays Harbor County in the form of reimbursable federal CARES Act funding to help people who have fallen behind on rent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

County Commissioners Tuesday approved an application confirming that the county wishes to receive the funds through the Department of Commerce, the first step to implementing the assistance to the community. Grays Harbor Public Health is putting together plans to distribute the relief as equitably and quickly as possible.

Cassie Lentz, county Healthy Places Manager, is the program manager for the funds. She said the county’s application will be submitted to Commerce, which manages the federal funds, and she and her staff are formalizing a process to administer the resource.

The county qualified for $825,085 in assistance. An additional $93,468 will be coming directly to Coastal Community Action Program, earmarked to serve youth and young adults in danger of eviction. After allowable administrative and operations fees for the county and community partners, that leaves approximately $713,835 for rental assistance. “The vast majority of the funds will be spent directly on rental assistance payments,” said Lentz.

To help expedite the process, Grays Harbor Public Health and Social Services is actively recruiting and hiring a temporary position specifically for the administration of the program, said Lentz, including outreach, communication, documentation and billing.

Public Health is putting together a list of community partners, like the Coastal Community Action Program and the Northwest Justice Project, churches, schools and other organizations that can help identify people in need of assistance and guide them through the process, once established, to apply for relief.

Public Health doesn’t typically offer direct assistance, but other community partners do. “We’re trying to identify partners in the community who are already interacting (with those in need) to help identify the need,” said Lentz. These existing agencies would help residents fill out applications and then those partners would send the applications to Public Health for verification and processing.

While the process for applications is still being finalized, Lentz urged renters and landlords to look at the Public Health website, healthygh.org, and its Facebook page, for updates on when more information about how to get help will be made available.

The requests for funding “will be driven by the tenants because they are the ones who have the potentially unmet needs, but landlords could bring this to the tenant as a resource,” said Lentz. The landlord would have to sign the application attesting rent is owed for the payment to be processed, so “it will require a partnership on some level,” said Lentz.

Gov. Jay Inslee’s extension of the evictions moratorium “is a little bit of a double edged sword,” said Lentz. “We know some renters are struggling in the community, and the Aug. 1 deadline would have been a stressful situation in already stressful times. But landlords are a business too.” She said the evictions prevention funds provide a resource to help tenants stay current on their rent while allowing landlords to collect their rent.

Like most grants, these funds are specific to eviction prevention rental assistance “to ensure that tenants can pay rent when they have experienced hardships related to COVID-19 and landlords can get their rent,” said Lentz.

Unlike some grants, the eligibility and documentation process for this particular grant is “uncharacteristically simplistic,” said Lentz. “In times of emergency like this the federal government and state has recognized our goal is to get the resources into the community as quickly as possible and remove all barriers, real or perceived. I’m pleased to see the eligibility criteria is fairly broad in who might qualify in this moment in time. Rather than trying to screen people out, they are trying to screen people in.”

Commerce Director Lisa Brown said in a statement earlier this week, “We are targeting limited resources as quickly and equitably as possible, to those with the greatest needs.”

“One of the driving factors of this resource is an opportunity to prioritize households that have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and the economic fallout and ensure it’s distributed equitably,” said Lentz. “One of the requirements of this grant, and we’re beholden to it, is that the assistance as closely as possible aligns to the percentages of sub-populations of people in poverty.”

As an example, in Grays Harbor County, 25% of the of the population under the federal poverty level identifies as Hispanic, or of Latino origin, so one could expect approximately 25% of the funds to be distributed to Hispanic families.