Financial relief has arrived, with issues

To The Eagle:

In our few forays into the Greater Cathlamet Metropolitan Area during Covid Incarceration, we’ve been heartened to see the town proceeding with pleasant equanimity highlighted by cheerful professionalism by our grocery store and drug store. However, there is a disaster in progress just across the river. Usually, Oregon provides us with political comic relief, having a bureaucracy more clumsy and a governor even more incompetent than our own, but this has more tragic potential.

Federal financial relief has finally arrived, but is being delivered via state unemployment systems and other branches of the welfare bureaucracy. In Oregon it instantly overloaded both the bureaucracy and its computer system, which stalled out, held claims for a few days and then dumped them, telling people to reapply. It even dumped people already established on unemployment. Re-application must be by phone rather than online, so needless to say, the phone system went into meltdown, and callers are greeted with a 24/7 busy signal. Thousands of ordinary citizens are trapped with nowhere to turn.

So, if you have friends in Oregon, you might want to reach out to them to make sure they’re not ensnared in this snafu.

Howard Brawn

Puget Island