 Hi, my name is Ben Joseph. I'm a retired Vermont Superior Court Judge. This is a program which I interview people about the issues and concerns about the Vermont's legal system. Today I'm very happy to say I've got Jean Murray as a guest, and I'll be interviewing her about what legal ladies doing for people who haven't been able to pay their rent during this COVID mess. This has been going on for quite a while. So Jean, hello. Hello. Hello. And how long have you worked for Legal Aid? I've worked for Vermont Legal Aid since 1998. I've worked on housing cases. I came here from Massachusetts, and I've worked on those. Well, I actually started in law school, but since 1990. Where'd you go to law school? I went to Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. Boston is a fistful of law schools. Yeah, it's quite a few law schools. Did you like going to school in Northeastern? Was it good? Yes, I liked it very much. One of the reasons that I liked it was because while you're in law school, they put it on a quarter system. So you'd be a quarter in school and then a quarter out on co-op. I did all my co-ops for legal services kind of places. So I started working with clients right away, helping them on these kind of issues. I didn't realize that they did. That's a very good idea. That's a very good idea. And so you've worked over 20 years in Legal Aid in Vermont. And is it mostly in housing? Housing has always been a part of my caseload. I've also done a whole number of other kinds of practices, including defensive debt collection. Wow. Well, how many eviction cases do you handle typically in a year in your job? Well, I could say that all eviction cases and housing related cases is one of the biggest kind of cases that the whole of Vermont Legal Aid handles. So we're divided into different units and I work in the poverty law project, but also the elder law project and the VOCA. And we have all sorts of different projects that help people retain their housing. And so Legal Aid, I would say it's about, in terms of caseload, it's about at least a quarter of our work cross-program. So is that hundreds of cases every year? Hundreds of cases, like 600 cases a year. Wow. And what is an eviction case? So when a landlord and attendant make an agreement to rent a place, the tenant has possession. And in Vermont, the law requires that in order for a landlord to get possession back, they need to go to court and get a court order. But before they go to court and get a court order, they have to send a termination of tendency notice. And that notice has to follow certain requirements in the law. So some people get a notice of termination and they call that an eviction. And then once the termination date is ended and the landlord goes to court to get a court order, that court case is called an eviction. And is there a moratorium on eviction actions now in Vermont? Yes, since last year, there's been a moratorium on evictions in Vermont. And the first month of it was essentially because the court closed down and wasn't holding any hearings at all. And then I've done a program about that more than one actually the lack of judicial resources has been a problem across the board. Well, last year with the shutdown, when the court shut down, it took them, they just said, nobody comes to the courthouse, we're not holding hearings, we're going to have to figure this out. And in the meantime, last year, the legislature passed a law that said all evictions are stayed, meaning stopped. They could be filed, but the court couldn't act on them. And that law that was passed by the legislature says right in it, how long is this moratorium going to last? The moratorium is going to last essentially 30 days longer than the governor's declared state of emergency. So every month since last year, the governor has extended the state of emergency, which gives the governor powers to do a number of things. And so to take care of the health of Vermonters. So as long as the state of emergency keeps going, the moratorium will keep going and be 30 days longer than that. So that means that the landlord isn't collecting the rents. So this is a problem for landlords too, isn't it? Well, I mean, there's nothing about the moratorium that says you don't have to pay your rent. The moratorium simply says that the court can't issue an order for you to get out, but everybody always had an obligation to pay their rent. And a lot of people did pay their rent. Last year there was a rent assistance program to help people whose income changed so that they could pay their rent. So that's the tenant side. Tenants were always obligated to pay rent and there was a rent assistance program to help them pay. From the landlord side, even though with COVID funding, a lot of different kinds of businesses got special funding. There was no special funding available for landlords. All landlords could do would be to get the tenants to pay the rent and help them get rent assistance. And they did. The rent assistance program was successful as it was because landlords helped their tenants get rent assistance. So the landlords have been helping the tenants file an application to get rent assistance. There's all the rent assistance last year, and we haven't talked about this year's program yet, but the rent assistance last year and this year. The rent in the program will be paid directly to landlords who give in their information to enable them to get paid. I've seen a lot of stuff in the papers about the federal judges and court actions and all of these eviction cases here are brought in state courts. Is that correct? Right. Eviction is a state matter. Landlord tenant law will vary from state to state. And so in Vermont, I mean, other states may not need a court order to do an eviction, but in Vermont, you definitely need a court order to enforce an eviction. Things in the newspaper about federal courts acting on the Center for Disease Controls moratorium. All that is very interesting. It doesn't apply to Vermont because Vermont has a moratorium of its own. So the CDC moratorium doesn't apply here. Okay. All right. I want, I'm hoping that this show will bring information of people who would need the file for rental assistance. And if they need to do that to you, would you suggest that they should start by talking to the landlord? Well, certainly it's going to work better if landlords and tenants look into the program and understand it together. So right now, the application for the program is online. There's a place for tenants to apply and there's a place for landlords to apply. I'm not exactly sure, but it looks like if landlords apply and put their information in and send in their form so that they can receive a direct deposit payment. And when the tenant applies, the landlord's information will already be in the system and that will help the tenants application go through faster. But obviously it would be important to talk with each other ahead of time to say the landlord saying, well, I'm going to apply for this and I'm going to put in that this is the amount of rent for this apartment and I'm going to put in your name so that you'll be able to match up my information with your information. I've asked that the people at Community TV flash the legal aid information number as part of this tape recording 1-800-889-2047. So someone could call Legal Aid and get information if they wanted to know how they should proceed. Did I get that right? Well, anybody can call Legal Aid 1-800-889-2047 with any kind of legal question that they might have. If people want basic information about this program, we have it on our Legal Aid website, which is vtlawhelp.org. And also there's information about this program on Vermont State Housing Authority's website, which is the sha.org. So I wouldn't in the first instance say I'd like information about the program so I'm going to call up Legal Aid. But if you have tried to access the program and you've run into difficulty and you're having a problem with it, or you've gotten on notice or a letter back from the VRAP program that you don't understand, those are the kinds of folks that we want to have called Legal Aid right now. Okay, all right. I'm always cautious about telling people they should get online and check something out because there's some people who don't have the computer, you know, they don't have access. So I'm glad that we could also start with a phone number. Well, I could say a little bit about who's eligible for the program if that would help. Go ahead. Yeah. So this is a program that is aimed entirely at renters. It's sad to say that it's not aimed at homeowners. There is going to be another program to help homeowners, but it's not up yet. And that won't be through Vermont State Housing Authority. So this is a renters program. So the first qualification is that you're obligated to pay rent in the state of Vermont. And what kind of place that could be any kind of place. It can be a mobile home lot. It can be an apartment. You could be renting a house. You could be renting a room in a motel on a permanent basis. You could be renting, paying rent at a recovery residence. You could be paying rent at a level three care home. And the part of that cost that is rent. You could apply for help with that. So you just obligated to pay rent at a residential dwelling in Vermont is the first qualification. The second qualification is that you have had a hardship financial hardship due to COVID, which almost everybody has. I mean, people have either been receiving unemployment, or they have lost income or their expenses are increased, or they're paying more than 30% of their income for rent. So that's another qualification. The third qualification is that you are at risk of housing instability, which means you could have gotten a termination notice or an eviction paper. You could be behind on your utilities, which would put your housing instability. You could have bad conditions in your home that make the homeless than healthy or safe, or that you're paying more than 30% of your income for rent. So housing instability is not difficult to establish. And then the last criteria is that your income is below 80% of area median income and below 80% of area median income is pretty easy to get to. So for instance, 30% of area median income for a single person household is the same thing as 100% of federal poverty level for people who keep track of that kind of thing for their benefits. People live together with other people and you count the whole household's income and the income, which is 80% of median, there's a chart, you'd be surprised at actually how much income that is. So it's very hard to describe because it could be $45,000 a year. It could be $60,000 a year depending on which county you live in and how many people are in your household. So those are the eligibility qualifications. What we expect is that a lot of people are going to be eligible. And I know that there's quite a few people in the renting population, about half of them that pay more than 30% of their income for rent. So I think people should look into it and see if they meet the income eligibility criteria, because I think quite a few people who want the program will find that they do meet the eligibility criteria. Wow. You know, every day it seems I pick up the paper and there's more information about what's going on with the legislative efforts to try to help people who've been hurt by the play, by the COVID-19 problems. How much money is going to be available this year for the rental assistance program, do you know? Well, this is interesting. So I'm going to do a little bit of history because people might have heard these numbers. A year ago, the funding from the federal government was called the CARES Act, and Vermont got a small state minimum, which turned out to be a significant amount of money, and decided on its own without being told to by the federal government to use some of that for rent assistance. And so we used 25 million of that for rent assistance last year. Was it all paid out? Yes. Wow. Yeah. Good. And there were more people who wanted it. We could have paid out more than 25 million. And we didn't do a whole lot of, I'm surprised to have found out that a number of people didn't even know about the program last year. That's one of the reasons we're doing this show. Right. So this year, at the end of the year, the federal government, as part of its budget bill, sent Vermont $200 million specifically to help renters. Wow. And then in March, under the American Rescue Plan Act, another 152 million was sent to Vermont specifically for renters. So there are, you know, there are ways that the law says some of this is going to be used for administration and some of this is going to be used for services, but that's quite a bit of money. So we're talking now about more than $350 million, I mean. Yes. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. What have there been problems getting this program started? Is there been administrative problems and people making applications? So the Vermont needed to wait for rules from the Treasury Department, from the US Treasury Department about how to use this money. And so it wasn't able to start planning the program and hiring a computer company to make the program effective. It wasn't able to start doing that until March. And so then we've asked this computer company to put up an online application and all the aspects of this program so that they can process things. We asked them to do that on very little notice. And so they did make an application available at the beginning of April. There were a lot of glitches and things that weren't exactly right about the application. So people are able to apply. But right now, the computer company is still working through how to make that efficient and effective. And we expect there to be improvements and changes so that it will all make sense. And now the application processing has not been very speedy. I gather that's an understatement in any event. But your, but the point is, the help will be available. And in the meantime, can, is there a moratorium against eviction actions? The moratorium is currently in effect. And we expect the state of emergency to continue to be in effect, I guess, at past June 15. It is up to the governor as to how long he's going to leave the state of emergency in effect. And then the moratorium will be in effect for 30 days longer than that. And looking at around August 1st, if the governor, the governor's been saying he's going to end the state of emergency. So if he does that, the moratorium will be over around August 1st. The moratorium would end around August 1st, end of July. The end of July, yes. Okay. So that will give people time to, you know, to get an application together to get legal assistance. Yeah. And there are groups, including legal aid and the landlords association and other people who are meeting with the judiciary to figure out exactly. Well, there's not going to be anything exact about it. And everything else in the pandemic, we're all going to have to use patience and understanding. And I know the judiciary is going to do the best job it can to, because that's a very unusual circumstances, stopping court cases for a year and then starting them up again. So hopefully there will be a understandable plan for when that begins to happen again and people are making that plan now. Well, you know, the judiciary is really up against it in terms of trying to get caught up on the backlogs. You know, there hasn't been a jury trial in a year. I mean, it's really going to be very difficult to get caught up. How many jury trials are there in a year, judge? You know, I don't know. I don't know. But you know, there haven't been major criminal cases. I've been delayed for more than a year. You got people waiting in jail for a trial. There are all kinds of things that have been very difficult. I've had some, I've had some personal knowledge of cases in which people have been hurt by the delays, not because anybody in the judiciary wants to, you know, hurt citizens. But the delays access to courts is very important. One of the things that I've learned in the pandemic is that we knew this before, that 75% of all evictions that get filed are filed because of nonpayment of rent. The concept before the pandemic, and I think some people think it's the concept now, is that the only way a landlord has to protect himself and their, and his finances is to do an eviction. And I think if there were money to pay the landlord, we could avoid a lot of eviction. Eviction is destabilizing for the households that go through eviction. Eviction is expensive for the state of Vermont. But at the same time, landlords need to get paid. So one of the delays that has perhaps heard people about the court delays is that landlords, some landlords haven't gotten paid and they haven't, they didn't have a remedy to figure out how to get paid. So that was actually a very good thing in terms of Vermont's health. Keeping people stable in housing was a good thing for their health but landlords need to get paid so they need to pay taxes. I mean, so many landlords only own a few properties. It must be very difficult for them not to get paid. So the thing that is going to help Vermonters, help Vermont landlords, is this rent assistance program. Right. And so we have to have faith that it is going to work. The money is there. We need to have patience and faith that it's going to be a remedy. One of the things we found out last year with the rent assistance program last year is the average grant was about $2,500. But when we needed to settle a court case, it cost about $7,500. In other words, it's much more expensive to have to go to court. And usually that expense falls on the landlord. Because they can try to collect their judgments against tenants, but that just actually costs them more money. So the best thing to do would be to get rent assistance, get the rent paid up, and not go to court. Well, that's that's in everybody's interest, it seems to me. I mean, if someone makes an application and they it's approved, and the money is paid to the landlord, then there's no court action is that right. That would be the result to be hoped for yes. Which doesn't. That's the moment and not talking about when tenants have some problems with their apartments or with their landlords, where repairs are needed, and, and things like that aren't getting done. I mean, all of those remedies in the law still exist. Landlords are supposed to provide a safe and habitable dwelling. And the best way for tenants to get landlords to make necessary repairs is to let them know what is needed in writing. And I know sometimes tenants are reluctant to do that because they think their landlord will get mad. But it is really the best way to get repairs is to let the landlord know and writing what needs to be done, and then have a conversation with them about it and arrange with them. When and how they can get in to get things fixed and and what the level of the repair is going to be it. There are plenty of landlords and tenants who talk with each other. And it is where the landlords and tenants don't talk with each other that there ends up being problems. There's legal aid to help with that is there are times in legal aid will help the conversation between a legal aid client and landlord. I just found out today that by the middle of June, we expect that there is going to be a mediation program up. As long as somebody as long as the tenant household is below 80% of area median income, they will be able to apply for mediation. They will have a lawyer with them, and they will be able to have really skilled mediators we did this a little bit last year, and it worked out really well because mediators know how to help people focus on how to solve the problems and get problems solved to keep it from anybody from going to court. I'm really glad to hear that we're going to have that this year I don't know how long that's going to be for. I think mediation works fine for tenants as long as they have lawyers with them and legal aid will be with the tenants that qualify for this program. Well that's that's really great news that that that should encourage people to contact legal aid and see if they can get help. Wow, quite up yet. Well, you know, but I assume people could call now get information when it will be up and what they'd have to do to get this help is that right. Sure. Oh, all right. Well good. Well, I'm limited to 30 minutes in the show, and I'm almost there. I didn't use to have a limit so I had I was interviewing the judge, who took more than an hour. And I think we probably had lost most of the audience by the time we got to 60 minutes. Jean I want to thank you so much for being here today. And thank you for what you're doing. I really think this is a very important thing that you're doing and I think the judiciary is helping and it's it's going to be saluted. Thank you again. If you ever get the urge to come back on the judge bench show just give me a call. Okay, great. Thank you for having me. Oh, my pleasure. So long now. Thanks for watching. And I hope we'll see you again soon. Bye bye. Bye bye.