Washington County Veterans Affairs staff presented a request to the Washington County Supervisors to update the requirements for assistance.  

Supervisors heard from Veterans Affairs Director Carrie Rich who presented the quarterly report and the request, “While it looks like not a lot of people come in for county assistance, three applications isn’t a lot, I think it’s important that you guys know that according to the state, for the month of March, 397 veterans or their families received some kind of compensation from the federal VA. So, there is a substantial amount of veterans in the community getting federal compensation pension, nursing home assistance, and whatever other federal benefits that they can qualify for. So I think we are doing a very good job with getting veterans hooked up federally, so where they don’t necessarily need county assistance. So what we are proposing to do is increase our percentage in order to help those veterans that are coming in for county assistance. Right now we have 125% of poverty, we are using as our guidelines for income. I think that is $1600 a month for one person. They can’t go over $1600 a month of income in order to receive assistance, so we are proposing to bump that up to 200% of poverty guidelines increase in order to gain assistance.” 

The request was tabled due to a date error on the resolution, and will be brought back to the Supervisors next week for approval.