MIDLAND, Texas — The Permian Basin Regional Planning Commission is giving West Texans a big break.
If you qualify for their program, you can get up to six months of your mortgage payments covered, either past or future payments.
"Or anytime in between. If they're two months behind we can cover the May and June, we pay the current month of July if they continue to qualify we can pay August, September and then up to October," Todd Mistrot, regional services director said.
So why is it needed here?
"Currently we have 5 counties that are considered economically distressed," Mistrot said.
That means Dawson, Howard, Pecos, Upton and Winkler are all struggling and have higher poverty rates than normal.
"Being in the oil and gas industry and that's the main industry out here, not only was the region hit with COVID, it was also hit with the negative numbers in oil and gas prices," Mistrot said.
What's the catch? Just a bit of paperwork.
"They provide income documentation to us, they provide their mortgage statement, they do an application and then they also sign a release of information. On the mortgage side is we verify that the mortgage lender is in good status and the mortgage lender will verify yes, this is the correct information, this is how much the payments are, this is how much they're behind and so we document that also," Mistrot said.
If help is needed, then help is on the way.
"We will do everything we can to assist them and like I said we work with a lot of non profits and other resources so even if they don't qualify with us we may be able to get them over to somebody that can help," Mistrot said.
Click here to learn more about the program.