WFAE
More than 130 new staff members have been hired by North Carolina s Office of Recovery and Resiliency to help process an overwhelming number of applications for rent and utility assistance through the state s HOPE program.
The hires were made in November and were first reported by the Charlotte Business Journal. The extra staff was needed to help process applications from more than 42,000 households a number that took the program s leaders by surprise. We were expecting a large demand for this program, but getting over 42,000 eligible applications in a three week period was really quite astounding, said Haley Pfeiffer Haynes with the state Office of Recovery and Resiliency. We just needed to make sure that we could process these applications in a timely way that could really serve people.