A combination of eviction restrictions and new tenant assistance efforts have held back a wave of pandemic-related evictions in Montgomery County, Maryland, according to data shared with the county council Tuesday morning.

Montgomery County Sheriff Darren Popkin told county lawmakers during a briefing that his office executed 254 evictions during the 2021 fiscal year that ended June 30 — a 73% decline over the prior fiscal year, when sheriff deputies carried out 938 evictions.

“We are not experiencing a surge. I know that was a very big concern for everyone, [but] the numbers just are not showing it,” Popkin said.

The sheriff, whose office is responsible for executing evictions, attributes the drop not only to eviction restrictions on the state and federal level, but also to what he called a “robust” effort by law enforcement and county government to prevent evictions before they take place.

“There’s a lot of proactive work that is being done throughout the state, throughout the county, to make sure we keep this away from any sort of surge,” Popkin said.

Since mid-July, the sheriff’s office has been sharing data every week with Montgomery County’s Department of Health and Human Services about households scheduled to be removed from their homes, according to Amanda Harris, chief of homelessness prevention services for the health agency. DHHS — which oversees the county’s COVID-19 rental assistance program — combs the data for individuals who have filed for rent assistance, and expedites those households’ applications so they can receive help in time.

The agency sends rent relief information to anyone on the eviction list who has not applied for aid, Harris says. Their names are also shared with partner nonprofits, who go door to door, offering to help residents apply for funds.

“When we started this process, only about 20% of households with an eviction notice had applied [for aid]. At this point, the rate is closer to 50%,” Harris writes in an email. “We are able to process applications for households with a scheduled eviction in a matter of days.”

Montgomery County has distributed $27.5 million in federally funded rent assistance since May, according to the health department. The vast majority of people who have received assistance self-identity as Black (53%) or Hispanic (30%), and nearly half live in areas the county considers “high need,” including east county, Gaithersburg, and Germantown.

Instead of distributing rental assistance on a first-come, first-served basis, the county prioritizes aid for applicants based on where they live and whether they’ve been unemployed for 90 days or more, in addition to their eviction risk.

To date, the average rent assistance payment has been roughly $10,000. Most applicants are seeking between five and six months’ back rent, according to DHHS.

Landlords in Montgomery County filed nearly 30,000 eviction cases in 2021, according to the sheriff’s office. Fewer than 10% of them led to an actual eviction. Those that did take place had been deemed “emergencies” by the court, meaning they weren’t related to nonpayment of rent.

But thousands of Montgomery County residents are still waiting for the county to process their applications for rent assistance, suggesting the threat of eviction is still real for many households. Of the more than 8,900 relief applications the health department has received since April, 31% of them have not been processed, 15% are currently assigned and under review, and 9% have been denied, county data show.