Well, in this context, “incompetence” is the charitable interpretation. The alternative is that the responsible Scott administration officials are deliberately biffing the emergency housing effort and obfuscating slash lying to try to cover it up. Fortunately, they’re pretty bad at obfuscation, too.

Actually, there’s a third thesis, and my money’s on this one: The administration has so thoroughly starved AHS of needed resources that its staff can’t possibly handle the workload, and its leadership is tap dancing around the inconvenient truth.

Let’s go back to last week’s appalling performance before the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee, where AHS leaders presented their first mandatory report on the disposition of motel voucher recipients. For those just joining us, the last-minute budget compromise reached in late June continued the voucher program for most recipients, set some stringent conditions for those receiving vouchers, and mandated that AHS report once a month on progress toward ending the program and providing alternative housing for all recipients.

The report was an embarrassment, starting with a rundown of the 174 recipients who left the program in July. Of those 174, a mere 34 had found apartments to live in. (There was no breakdown on how many were helped by AHS in finding new housing and how many managed the trick on their own.) That’s less than 20% of those no longer in motels. The vast majority — 113 in all, a staggering 65% — left the program for destinations unknown because they had failed to renew their benefits, a process that appears to be devilishly difficult.

AHS Secretary Jenney Samuelson told the committee that “we had not been able to make contact with” those 113 despite multifaceted efforts. But a very different story was told by advocates for the unhoused.

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