Feds to pay some Connecticut unemployed an extra $300 a week

Staff reports

Some unemployed Connecticut residents will soon receive an extra $300 per week in federal pandemic benefits, a partial, shortterm restoration of the $600 a week the federal government paid until the end of July.

The benefits may only last four or five weeks, however, and payments are limited to people already receiving state unemployment of at least $100 a week.

This latest cache, the Lost Wages Assistance Program, totaling $44 billion, was made available by President Donald Trump earlier this month after the Senate was unable to produce a compromise to the HEROES Act, passed by the U.S. House of Representatives.

That plan would have extended the $600 federal unemployment payments into 2021.

FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor approved Connecticut for a FEMA grant Monday — after more than half of all states have previously gained approval.

Connecticut’s Department of Labor estimated that it will start to distribute the $300 per week payments — on top of the average state unemployment benefit of $269 per week — in mid-September.

“Now they’ve got to get their guidance in place so the DOL, our Department of Labor, can react,” Gov. Ned Lamont said Tuesday at an event in Danbury. “It will probably take another two or three weeks, but we’re all on it.”

Connecticut’s unemployment rate is officially listed at 10.2 percent based on household surveys but because of quirks in the way the data is collected, those surveys understate the number of people out of work and the actual rate is much higher.

In the week of July 26, the last week for final numbers, 248,171 state residents, or 13 percent of the workforce, collected benefits, according to labor department data. That was down from a peak of 308,532 in the last week of April.

It’s unclear how many of the people currently receiving benefits are getting at least $100 a week, making them eligible for the $300 weekly federal bonus while it lasts.

The federal payments are retroactive to the beginning of August, when the $600 federal payments ran out. That could mean that few if any newly unemployed people would receive the federal money.

As for longer-term benefits for people chronically out of work in the pandemic, “I cannot predict what the U.S. Senate is going to do,” Lamont said Tuesday. “The House of Representatives

put a bill on the table, boy, was it 100 days ago now or something?”

FEMA said it will work with Lamont to implement a system to make this funding available to Connecticut residents. But the continuing high levels of unemployment have not pushed Congress toward a deal on a long-term extension of federal unemployment benefits.

Republicans have supported continuing unemployment benefits but with a lower payment than $600 per week. They raise concerns — which were also shared by Lamont — that the benefit could make it hard for employers to hire back workers who make more on unemployment than from their wages.

Most Democrats insist that the benefit should remain $600 per week for longer.

Reporting by Kaitlyn Krasselt, Jim Shay, Ken Dixon and Alex Soule