Kalamazoo Times

State Rep. Matt Hall (R-Marshall) helped to head an inquiry with the Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA) Director Steve Gray, after citizens have been made to wait months without assistance or responses to their inquiries for aid.

“I think that the reason the public has made it so clear that they want to see these unemployment offices reopened is because there is a communication issue with the department,” Hall said in the YouTube video of the hearing. “We have heard from multiple people, including today, and they just want to hear back from somebody.”

Hall said that for many of these individuals, a 10-hour wait would be preferable to the experience they have had in the past few months, as most have not received any communication from the UIA.

Gray acknowledged that the agency has major flaws in its communication and that there is work to be done in improving the way that citizens are informed of the status of their applications. 

“There's two things that I use to measure whether this is improving or not: the first is the number of weeks it takes to get one of my constituents that calls me an answer. That started out at about two weeks, four weeks -- now we’re at over five weeks,” Hall told the committee. 

Hall said that there are many citizens who have been waiting since before mid-May and that this length of wait time without communication of any kind is a clear sign of a deficiency in the agency. 

“These people were in there before you guys even created the portal,” Hall said in the video. “The people who were there the day I got access to the portal, on May 14, those guys still haven’t even gotten assigned. The second way [to measure improvement] is that the calls and emails I get to my office decline. That hasn’t happened yet.”