Cobb Commissioners Approve Additional Rent Relief Funds

COBB COUNTY, GA — Qualified Cobb County residents will soon be able to apply for additional rental assistance, per a Cobb County Board of Commissioners vote Tuesday.

The Cobb BOC passed a motion in a 4-1 vote Jan. 12 to approve $2 million in emergency funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act to be split between MUST Ministries, the Center for Family Resources and Sweetwater Mission, according to agenda documents.

This agenda item was initially presented by now-Chair Lisa Cupid in September 2020, and the motion was rejected by commissioners Keli Gambrill, JoAnn Birrell and now-retired Bob Ott, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. Ott said he could not support the measure because it did not require that applicants pay a portion of their overdue rent, nor did it provide a way for applicants from getting more money than they need by seeking help from more than one of the nonprofits. Ott then introduced a similar proposal drafted by Gambrill that used a single nonprofit rather than three to administer the funds: Baltimore-based HomeFree USA.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Gambrill voted against the measure again, citing concerns about a “revolving, spiraling door” of people unable to afford paying rent. She also cited ongoing issues with the Cobb HomeSaver program — a county-run program for residents who are behind on their rent or mortgage due to COVID-19, which was launched in July 2020 — in which she said only 200 of 4,000 program applicants have completed the necessary documentation to receive assistance.

“The reason why the HomeSaver program hasn’t been successful is because the people who are participating in the program are not providing the documentation required,” Gambrill said in the meeting. “The documentation required for the new programs are the same as the existing ones in HomeSaver, and it goes back to the individuals not providing the documentation. Until we remove that barrier, we’re not going to be successful at administering funds.”

Commissioners also passed a motion in a 4-1 vote, with Gambrill voting in opposition, toamend four existing memorandums of understanding with Home-Free USA — which administers the funds for the Cobb HomeSaver program — Cobb Public Health and Star-C, a Marietta nonprofit that provides affordable housing residents with wraparound services.

The amendments to the MOUs extend the deadline for those entities to use the CARES Act funding from Dec. 30, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2021, and allows the county manager to reallocate the money among the various housing grants without additional board action.

Several Cobb residents came forward to speak during the public comment portion of the meeting to bring attention to rental assistance issues within the HomeSaver program as well as Star-C. Star-C began offering rent relief in April 2020.

Tracy Miller, a Cobb County resident, said she reached out to the HomeSaver program for assistance and while the people working within the program were helpful, her apartment complex would not accept the funds from HomeSaver because they did not want to complete the forms necessary to do so. Another resident, Denise Stroman, said she had the same issue with her apartment complex, but she was contacting Star-C for assistance.

Commissioners Jerica Richardson and Monique Sheffield said during the meeting that the board would work on identifying the barriers in these programs and see what needs to be done to make sure residents stay in their homes.

“I do think that [this issue] does merit a conversation to explore deeper with a little bit of community outreach to determine: Are there unseen barriers? Whether it be not able to access certain documentation or not having the time or wherewithal to produce that kind of documentation,” Richardson said. “These are just open questions that I think we don’t have the expertise to answer ourselves, but what we do have is the opportunity here to make sure that those funds are available for all of those programs as we move forward.”

Cupid said while these programs and rental assistance options are important, these are short-term fixes for a long-term problem: poverty in Cobb County.

“One of our speakers during public comment today shared that the unfortunate matter is that there is a longer term fix that’s needed because even though we’re talking about evictions, what we’re really talking about is poverty,” Cupid said. “That is directly correlated to the amount of money that people earned. The unfortunate matter is that our country is evolving to a point where no matter how much certain people work — if they don’t get out of a certain wage bracket, they’re always going to have difficulty meeting their needs and they’re always going to depend on programs that are provided through local service providers.”