Changes to the Montana Emergency Rental Assistance Program

To: Montana Emergency Rental Assistance Participants and Landlords

The Montana Emergency Rental Assistance program (MERA) is Montana’s program to administer this limited federal funding provided by the pandemic-era U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Emergency Rental Assistance program (ERA). The Montana Department of Commerce’s Montana Housing Division administers MERA for the state of Montana. As you know, MERA stopped accepting applications as of March 24, 2023, to work through applications already submitted.

We understand that the application processing time has created challenges for individuals who have applied for these funds and are still waiting for a determination. Therefore, to ensure funding is available for all eligible applications and to speed up the amount of time the application review process is taking, the MERA program is making the following changes to our program and processes:

The MERA program will be prioritizing continued assistance applications beginning June 5, 2023, in the order they were submitted. This will allow us to speed up processing times as these applications have already been through a previous vetting process and will ultimately allow us to process new eligible applications faster.

Once we begin working on new applications, our team will be contacting landlords via a phone call and an email to request an updated ledger. We will allow five business days for landlords to provide this information and if not received, the case will be denied. However, we will no longer require eligible applicants to submit updated income documentation, if income documentation has been provided at the time the application was created. This is also expected to make the application review process faster.

In addition to the process changes, beginning June 5, 2023, the MERA program will pay:

• past due rental arrears;
• one month of forward-facing rent, up to the 18-month maximum,
• rental deposits within the 18-month maximum, up to one month's rent;
• rental late fees, up to $10.00/day, not to exceed $300.00/month;
• past due utility bills, maximum $500 per month per eligible utility; and
• one month forward-facing utility bill, maximum $500 per month per eligible utility.

All other program criteria remain the same.

This will provide all pending, eligible applicants with the opportunity to receive funds that will catch up past due rents and an additional 30 days to plan for future assistance needs. This will be the final payment each applicant will receive from the MERA program as MERA funds will no longer be available once the funds are fully expended.

Thank you for your continued patience, we hope that these changes will result in applicants of the MERA program getting funding much faster and provide a level of funding for all applications currently submitted that encourages a successful transition out of the program.