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County rolls out new hotline for veterans services

Maryland Gazette - 6/5/2021

Anne Arundel County has implemented a new phone line for military veterans who need help accessing county resources.

Veterans can call the number, 410-222-3500, and it will be staffed from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday to Friday. Messages left after hours or on weekends will be returned by staff. The line is not intended for emergencies.

The line will be managed by members of the Office of Community Engagement and Constituent Services who will triage calls and direct them to the appropriate department liaison, according to the announcement.

"We need to find ways to make accessing county services straightforward for all of our veterans," County Executive Steuart Pittman said. "Our veterans shouldn't need to call multiple numbers to get basic information - this line will give them a one-stop-shop."

The roughly 60,000 Anne Arundel County veterans and their families are eligible for a range of county services, but there is currently no centralized location for them to call, said Pete Smith, military and veterans liaison for the County Executive.

The phone line will serve both as a channel to those services and others offered by the State of Maryland and the federal government, said Smith, a former county council member hired by the Pittman administration in 2019.

Smith is also a military veteran.

The county announced the phone line a day after Memorial Day.

"As a veteran and current reservist, it makes me proud to see an administration go above and beyond for those who stood the watch," he said.

In the fall, Pittman and the Veterans Affairs Commission stood up the Veterans Service Coordination Center, which placed liaisons into various service departments to help veterans in need. The liaisons from the county's Health and Human Services agencies, Office of Transportation and the Department of Recreation and Parks have been participating in bi-monthly training to launch the service.

The effort to establish a single phone number for veterans services has been a multi-year effort, said John Church, chair of the Veterans Affairs Commission.

Now that it is in place, Church said he hoped the phone number would simplify what can often be a frustrating process.

"The value from my point of view of having a single number - and especially once veterans begin to recognize that it exists - will provide a pretty straightforward, and I hope simple way, for veterans in need of benefits and or services to call a number and get some help from somebody," Church said, "as opposed to having a series of telephone numbers to follow one after the other, which sometimes happens."

The additional benefit of centralizing these calls will be to collect data to better understand how many veterans in the county are seeking help and what services they need, Church said.

The county phone line is separate from an existing veterans crisis hotline run by the U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs that offers confidential 24/7 help to veterans and their family and friends at www.veteranscrisis line.net.

Additional information for county veterans can be found at: www.aacounty.org/boards-and-commissions/veterans- affairs-commission/index.html.