The Washington State Department of Social and Health Services says it will reevaluate the decision to close an E Cherry neighborhood center providing access and information to social programs including food, cash, and medical benefits.
A DSHS spokesperson said DSHS head Jilma Meneses has ordered a pause following community outcry and a CHS report detailing the state’s plans to close the Capitol Hill Community Services Office, the DSHS facility across from Swedish Cherry Hill.
“Over the coming weeks and months, we will look at office-use data and community impacts as well as other customer experience considerations to ensure we have a full picture of the impact of any potential closure at this site,” a DSHS spokesperson tells CHS. “No final decision will be made until the evaluation is complete.”
In the statement, the DSHS apologized for the concern caused by the announced closure. “We regret that we announced this closure prematurely,” the spokesperson said.
The state’s Community Services Offices provide information and access to a wide spectrum of Washington’s social safety net including “Basic Food/Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash assistance and Aged, Blind or Disabled cash assistance as well as Apple Health (Classic Medicaid) eligibility.”
The DSHS has said its lease for the Cherry Hill facility needs to be renewed at that it had “seen a large decline in caseload in this area over the last several years” as people turned to phone and online resources or other area DSHS offices.
The situation was brought to light by community members who have utilized the office. “I’m concerned about a vital resource like the physical location that serves thousands of needful people each month is closing,” Justice Aaron McCartney, vice president of the Sisters of the Mother House of Washington group wrote in a “COMMUNITY CALL TO ACTION” over the closure. “It isn’t like they could easily be served at the Belltown location that already is overworked. Nor the Rainier office which can’t possibly handle all the Capitol Hill DSHS business.”
“We are pausing plans to close the facility in order to conduct a thorough assessment, including studying options other than closure,” a department representative told McCartney in an email including CHS. “No final decision will be made until the evaluation is complete.”
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This is not a retailer. A service like this should never be judged by volume.
Excellent. I just got a letter from DSHS informing me that I had to garnish wages from an employee I had that left 5 years ago to manage another establishment. I called in to explain the situation and the person answering calls basically said that the organization is broken and information doesn’t travel between state agencies very efficiently. They really do such great work.
One big difference between US governments (federal, and larger state and local) and Northern Europe / Japan / Singapore is that although they also have bureaucracies they tend to work better than the ones here.
Source: have lived in those places too.
I wouldn’t say broken, But within DSHS there are different divisions that are often siloed from each other which causes inefficiencies.