With the announcement of the Georgia Hurricane Helene Block Grant Program, we sat down with Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Tyler Harper to learn how applications for recovery dollars will be processed.
Commissioner Harper said, “The way we’re going to work this is obviously the application period will be open for six weeks. Once we close that application period, we’ll know at that time who all the applicants are. Our team, even during the application period, will begin the process of verifying those losses. We brought on a number of contractors to help us with this program and help us work through those applications. Almost all of them are retired USDA FSA employees that are very familiar with farm disaster programs, which will help us speed that process up.”
“But they’ll work through those applications, and that ensures that we’re able to do this the fairest way possible, that we’re able to maximize the amount of money that’s going out to all our producers across the impacted region. And so we hope within a couple of weeks after the application period is closed, we’ll be able to start to distribute those checks and those funds out to those producers very quickly. So we’re going to be working through this as fast as we can,” said Commissioner Harper.
“I’m encouraging our team to make it a priority, but that’s also the reason we had a pretty tight window on our application period also. And while we’ve been trying to promote this as much as possible and build out those info sheets so folks know what they’ll need once that application goes live so we can move this on and along as quickly as possible,” said Commissioner Harper.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.