Two new federally enacted unemployment programs helped cause initial unemployment claims in Montgomery County to increase by 242% in a week.
A main reason for the hike was because the state on Thursday began reporting claims made through the federal programs – Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC). They were both created through a federal stimulus bill and recently took effect.
Montgomery County residents filed 19,192 state and federal initial unemployment claims last week through the state’s new BEACON One-Stop application. The application system launched on April 24, and allows residents to apply for all state and federal unemployment claims.
Until this week, the state has been consistently releasing data on its initial regular unemployment claims, which totaled 11,074 last week – a 97% increase since the week before, when there were 5,615 initial claims.
In Montgomery County, 7,869 claims were filed through PUA and 249 claims were filed through PEUC.
The PUA application is for those who are self-employed, sole-proprietors, independent contractors and gig workers, and those who lack sufficient work history to be eligible for regular unemployment insurance benefits.
The PEUC application is for people who have exhausted their benefits since July 1, 2019.
A total of 58,760 people have filed initial claims in the county since the first week of March. With the PUA and PEUC claims taken into account, 66,878 claims have been filed in that timeframe.
On Thursday morning, the Maryland Department of Labor reported a statewide total of 62,076 initial claims and 47,187 PUA and PEUC claims, bringing the total amount of unemployment claims to 109,263.
On Tuesday, Mike Ricci, a spokesman for Gov. Larry Hogan, posted on Twitter that the Labor Department was reporting zero to minimal wait times on the site on Sunday and Monday, despite a “record volume of traffic.”
On Sunday, the site processed 141,000 weekly claim certifications, after receiving an average of 5,800 weekly requests every hour.
“This is more than double the 65,000 weekly claim certifications that were processed last Sunday, April 26,” Ricci wrote.
The site had multiple problems after it launched, including technical difficulties and glitches. It had to be taken down on April 26 for maintenance on the system and was opened later that evening, but was operating at slower speeds.
During a press conference on Wednesday, Hogan said the site was fixed a week ago.
“I promised at a press conference a week ago that we were going to get it fixed, and we got it fixed within a matter of days,” he said. “So it’s now functioning.”
Briana Adhikusuma can be reached at briana.adhikusuma@moco360.media.
