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Thousands of New York City families received an average of $425 in public assistance after city and state officials settled a class action lawsuit that alleged those benefits were wrongfully reduced or stopped at points during an eight-year period, attorneys on the case said Monday.

That relief is ongoing; the settlement reached in the litigation provides a formula for class members who were affected at the time to receive benefits retroactively.

The families involved in the suit were represented by attorneys from the Legal Aid and Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, who brought the litigation nearly 10 years ago against the New York City Human Resources Administration and the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance.

The litigation was brought after thousands of New York City residents received notices over an eight-year period stating that their public assistance benefits were either planned to be reduced or taken away based on their alleged failure to comply with work requirements. Those notices were sent between July 2007 and the end of 2015.

But the attorneys who worked on the case alleged that those notices didn't comply with a change in state law enacted by the Legislature in 2006.

The process of reducing or terminating someone's benefits involves two separate notices. The first informs an individual that they could be sanctioned unless they have a good excuse for noncompliance. The second is sent when the sanction is actually set to be imposed.

After the first notice is sent, individuals have a chance to show they either had good cause for not complying with the requirements, or did not do so willfully. That's done through an administrative hearing.

The Legislature changed the law in 2006 to help individuals prepare for those hearings. The new statute required that the first notice be in plain language, give examples of what would be considered good cause for noncompliance, and say what documents could be used at a hearing to support someone's argument.

The second notice was also required to say, clearly, why someone was being sanctioned and how the violation was found to be either willful or without good cause.

The lawsuit alleged that the city hadn't made those changes to the notices, which put beneficiaries at a disadvantage. The challenge eventually grew into a class action lawsuit, which ended in the settlement.

More than 30,000 members of the class received one-time payments totaling $13.1 million last month, according to Legal Aid.

“Legal Aid represented scores of clients who could have avoided sanctions had they been adequately informed that their inability to comply with employment requirements would be excused,” said Les Helfman, an attorney on the case from Legal Aid. “This settlement provides compensation for the neediest of these clients.”

Noncompliance can mean something as simple as missing one work activity appointment. The notices targeted by the lawsuit were sent after a violation of the city's employment requirements. If someone missed an appointment because their child fell ill, for example, they could have been sanctioned if they didn't know they had an opportunity to say as much.

The litigation has spanned nearly a decade, mostly because of extensive motion practice, Helfman said. They had to move for class certification, for example, and at one point the state moved to pause the case while another related lawsuit was litigated.

They started to make more progress after the Legislature amended the law, again, in 2015 to change the notice requirements. Rather than being required to impose sanctions on someone out of compliance, the law gives more discretion for those individuals to re-engage with the city agency.

“The need for declaratory and injunctive relief … was no longer necessary,” Helfman said. “So, we could then get on to the question of what kind of relief would be provided to the class.”

Aside from the one-time payment to eligible class members, the settlement also requires that the city and state review their records every three months for a period of two years and issue one-time payments to class members who are not in receipt of public assistance at the time of a prior payment, but who are at the time of the review.

Class members will only be eligible to receive a payment under the settlement if they have an open Cash Assistance case and were sanctioned between July 8, 2007, and December 22, 2015, when the new law took effect.

The settlement was initially reached last year, but payments from the city didn't start until last month, according to court documents.

A spokesman for the New York City Law Department declined to comment on the litigation. A request for comment sent to the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance was not immediately returned Monday.

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