KDKA Investigates: Beaver County landlord says he's still waiting for rental assistance
BEAVER, Pa. (KDKA) - Some landlords in Beaver County want to know where their money is.
Landlords like Eric Fischer helped their tenants apply for Beaver County's Emergency Rental Assistance Program but tell KDKA Investigator Meghan Schiller they're still waiting for checks to arrive in the mail.
"It's a program basically to help the renter and I'm all for it, but then you literally get stuck holding the bag, so to speak," said Fischer.
KDKA reached out to the program's coordinator, Marlene Landrum, for answers on Tuesday.
The bad news, she said, is there's a backlog of applications. The good news is that people in the system are going to get their money and there's enough to go around, according to Landrum.
Fischer reached out to KDKA Tuesday fearful that he'd never see any more money from the assistance program.
"I have to wait. There doesn't seem to be any other recourse," he said.
But he's been waiting since October. He and his tenant applied for the emergency rental assistance program multiple times, but only received one payment. He reached out to KDKA Investigates for help after failing to get an answer over the phone.
"You're always checking your mailbox thinking, 'is today going to be the day?' And it's not and you pick up the phone and try to be as polite as you can be," said Fischer.
KDKA's Meghan Schiller made contact with Landrum, the director of the Community Development Program of Beaver County.
She wants landlords to rest assured, saying the office got inundated with applications and they're working through a substantial backlog. Landrum tells KDKA she just hired another person for the team to clear the backlog. She also tells KDKA there's a little more than a million dollars of funding left. It's enough, she says, to pay out people in the backlog like Fischer.
"It accumulates. We're literally thousands of dollars behind," he said.
Landrum tells KDKA that people should start receiving checks within the next month.
The program has already paid out more than $8 million to more than 4,000 people in need so far. In addition, the program has helped more than 700 people pay utility bills in Beaver County.
