Attention vets: Ohio is looking for you

COLUMBUS — Believe it or not, the state doesn’t know the names or addresses of 99 percent of Ohioans who have served in the armed forces.

Seems hard to believe, particularly for a newspaper reporter unskilled in the mathematical arts, but that’s what the head of a new cabinet-level agency told a lawmaker panel recently.

Bill Hartnett, director of the Ohio Department of Veterans Services, offered testimony before the Senate’s finance committee last week. Most state offices will offer comparable comments before the committee in coming weeks as the Senate considers agencies’ spending plans for the next two fiscal years.

The Department of Veterans Services was established last year “to identify, connect with and advocate for veterans and their families,” Hartnett testified. To do that, it’s initiating contact with veterans and their families and making sure they know about support services available to them.

Lots of veterans

There are a lot of veterans living in the state. According to Hartnett’s testimony, which cited U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs statistics, some 920,000 reside within Ohio’s borders.

Here’s the problem: The federal agency knows who they are and where they live, but privacy laws prevent it from sharing that information with the state office.

“That means that there are almost 1 million men and women veterans in Ohio, and we in the Ohio Department of Veterans Services have the names and addresses of fewer than 10,000 of them,” Hartnett testified.

Here’s a brand new state office waiting to make sure veterans have access to services they’ve earned through service to our country, and it doesn’t even know where Ohio’s veterans live?

The solution: The Ohio Department of Veterans Services will spend part of its time looking for veterans. Hartnett testified that he hopes to have about 450,000 identified before the end of the year.

“They can tell us who they are and where they are when they apply for help from Job and Family Services, when they renew their drivers’ licenses, when they apply for myriad licenses issued by the state for recreation and the practice of certain professions,” he testified. “In other words, they can identify and locate themselves and voluntarily give us the information so that we can get in touch.”

X Marc Kovac is The Vindicator’s statehouse correspondent. E-mail him at mkovac@dixcom.com.