Cincinnati couple struggling due to stalled unemployment - Spectrum News 1

Posted: 24 Jun 2021 08:37 AM PDT

CINCINNATI, Ohio — When Dante Grissom started making good money as a forklift driver, he began collecting all sorts of fish as a hobby.

What You Need To Know

Kentucky has more than 122,000 unresolved unemployment claims

Dante Grissom was laid off from his job in Northern Kentucky in February

Documentation shows he qualifies for benefits, but funds have not been disbursed

One in-person appointment in Louisville yielded no answers

The company he worked for in Covington laid him off in February, and Grissom hasn't gotten any unemployment benefits, making it tough to keep up with maintenance.

"These are the things I was doing before I lost my job, buying exotic fish and being well into my hobbies, but I can't do that anymore," Grissom said.

Paying bills and keeping up with basic life necessities was a concern for Grissom and his wife, Cassandra.

"I had a great job. I was making great money. My bills were all caught up and now, it's a struggle," he said.

Cassandra also saw her hours cut at work because of the pandemic.

"It's really tough day-to-day in trying to keep ourselves on an even plane even just in our household to where we're not fighting with each other because, you know how it is when there's no money. Everything's ablaze," she said.

Dante is one of the thousands who filed for unemployment benefits in Kentucky and haven't received any benefits.

Documents he shared with Spectrum News 1 show he qualifies for benefits and has no apparent issues with his ID. The unemployment site only tells him his claim is under "fact-finding," a common problem for people who have been waiting for money.

"I'm at the point where I'm starting to think it's a hoax," Grissom said. "I don't even know if it's real at this point."

Dante and Cassandra have been calling the unemployment office for months with no answers. They even drove from their home in Cincinnati to Louisville for an in-person appointment.

"It was drama," Cassandra said. "We expected to have results. We drove two hours there and had to drive two hours back. We expected some results and here we are, almost a month later, and still nothing."

Dante has a new job now and Cassandra is back to full-time, but Dante's job doesn't pay nearly as much as the previous job he had.

"It's frustrating because it feels, again, like I'm working from behind," Dante said. "It feels like I'm moving backwards."

And given what he's experienced with the unemployment system in Kentucky, Grissom isn't sure he's going to come back.

"I wouldn't recommend anyone work in Kentucky right now just for the simple fact that if you lose your job in Kentucky, you're going to be added to a list of thousands of other people, including myself, without any answers," he said. "And you will be in financial trouble."

According to numbers from the Kentucky Labor Cabinet, the state is dealing with 122,578 unresolved unemployment claims, with 56,437 of those being flagged for fraud or identity issues.

'The hedge': Chinese privet

I am a UGA grad and a Bulldawg to the core. I work for the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. My favorite team plays football "Between the Hedges" in Sanford Stadium on Saturdays in the fall and it pains me that the plant that is used as the "the hedge" is one of the most dangerous plants in the South that exists today.

Ligustrum sinense or Chinese privet is the plant that makes up Athens' famous hedges. The plant was introduced from Asia as an ornamental for landscape proposes and has escaped. Chinese privet can destroy native habitat because it is fast growing, large, dense and evergreen, which means it is providing a lot of constant shade. That shade will choke out sunlight needed for other smaller plants to survive.

It grows in full sun or shade, which means it can grow deep into the forest as well as in the wide open. It is drought tolerant but also can handle heavy moisture. This means it does well on a riverbank or in drought conditions in highland areas.

Chinese privet is also a prolific seeder. To add insult to injury, the seed floats. So when a privet seed washes down a drain to a body of water, it floats until it hits land on the bank where it begins to grow. When the banks become full of privet and the seed drop, the water will rise and will move the plant further up the banks as well as downstream.

Control is difficult. Cutting and spraying can be effective. My friends at Silver Bluff Audubon Center and Sanctuary said they have had good success spraying glyphosate with a surfactant in the winter when all the other plants have lost their leaves. But they admit it is going to be a lifelong battle.

Kudzu

Another invasive we are all very familiar with in Georgia is kudzu, which was brought to the U.S. as a novelty plant for the 1876 World's Fair in Philadelphia. It didn't have a lot of use in agriculture, so it was not actively grown. But in 1935, as dust storms damaged the prairies, Congress declared war on soil erosion and enlisted kudzu as a primary weapon. More than 70 million kudzu seedlings were grown in nurseries by the newly created Soil Conservation Service. The SCS offered as much as $8 per acre to anyone willing to plant the vine, which was a decent sum in those days.

By 1945, more than one million acres of kudzu had been planted. And then we learned that this deciduous climbing vine was capable of growing 100 feet. In ideal conditions, it can grow 12 inches a day. The roots can reach depths of 16 feet. Talk about opening a can of worms.

Since kudzu was used for erosion, steep banks were often the ideal place to plant this aggressive vine. Constant mowing is an effective control method in flatter areas but is next to impossible on heavy grade inclines. Cows love kudzu and it is nutritious but like mowing equipment, bovine don't do well on steep banks. Kudzu doesn't strangle plants like the myth says but actually shades everything it covers to death. Besides mowing and cows, spraying kudzu July thru September with multiple applications in multiple years is about the only other effective way to maintain control.

Hydrilla

Introduced to the U.S. from Asia in the 1950s as an aquarium plant, Hydrilla (Hydrilla verticillata) is now taking over our waterways. Hydrilla can grow in lower light conditions than nearly all other aquatic plants allowing it to survive at greater depths. That means hydrilla can grow in water of a few inches to 30 feet. Hydrilla propagates itself by breaking apart into small pieces and will produce a new plant off a section sometimes less than 1 inch long. These small pieces can survive for up to seven years in the water or dry land before sprouting.

Hydrilla is a very aggressive grower, sometimes doubling its biomass every two weeks in summer conditions. This invasive underwater plant crowds out native plant species, impedes irrigation systems and can bring boats to an instant stop. There have also been instances of people getting tangled and drowning in hydrilla's dense mats of vegetation. When the hydrilla gets too dense, it blocks out sunlight causing the water underneath to become low in oxygen, which can result in the death of fish and other plants living below.

Another concern is an algae that grow on hydrilla has been linked to a neurological bird disease called Avian Vacuolar Myelinopathy (AVM) that is killing bald eagles as well as some other waterfowl.

According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees our very large local reservoir on the Savannah River called Thurmond Lake, hydrilla now covers 53% of the 1,200 miles of shoreline and 7% of the total surface of the 71,000-acre lake.

Possible control methods of hydrilla include the introduction of the sterilized triploid grass carp to eat the plants. These carp can eat their body weight in hydrilla daily for their lifespan of about six or seven years. This grass carp method has been very effective in a program to eliminate hydrilla from Lake Murray. The problem with introducing an exotic fish to our waterways is what if the carp prefers eating something besides hydrilla, like our native plants? Chemical controls can be effective when sprayed according to labels but can be almost an impossible task to cover a lake as large as Thurmond Lake.

Stay tuned. I have another couple of segments on invasives coming up in the next few weeks.

Reach Campbell Vaughn, the UGA Agriculture and Natural Resource agent for Richmond County, by e-mailing augusta@uga.edu.

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