Disability and Paid Family Leave applicants are arriving in the dark with folding chairs outside California's Oakland EDD office, waiting hours for a limited number of daily tickets — and the state now concedes the Oakport Street location is running light on staff in the middle of a system overhaul meant to fix the very delays stranding them.

The scene KTVU documented this week — a line of hundreds before opening, a man hobbling up with a broken leg and catheter, applicants months behind on payments — is not a one-off crush but the human cost of a modernization the Employment Development Department is still mid-way through. The agency's own public affairs chief acknowledged the Oakland office is short-staffed as operations transition to a new platform called EDDNext, even as demand for benefits climbs. For Bay Area workers on disability or family leave, the promised fix has become the immediate problem.

People begin gathering outside 7677 Oakport Street, near the Coliseum, while it is still dark. They bring chairs. Signs on the building warn that only a limited number of ticket numbers are handed out each day, so a late arrival can mean being turned away — and coming back tomorrow.

Among those in line Thursday was Patrice Mason, a teacher with a back injury who told KTVU she has gone two months without a payment. She said the online ID.me identity check "doesn't work" for her, and the phones are no better: "Nobody answers. Trying to get anyone to answer the line is impossible," she said, according to the station. Her worry, she added, was less for herself than for people who can't physically get to Oakport at all — her own father among them.

The accounts KTVU gathered are strikingly consistent. Abraham Rodriguez, recovering from a shoulder replacement, said he has been paid roughly half what he is owed while trying to cover a mortgage and car payments: "We need our money on time. We're paying out of pocket, we're behind on bills." Fabiola Mendoza, on disability after a heart attack, told the station she now shows up around 5:30 a.m.; a week earlier, arriving at 6:30 a.m., she said she was number 65 in line. First-time father Trevel Thomas said his food stamps were cut off on the assumption he was collecting EDD checks — checks he says never came. "All I need is a printout showing that I haven't gotten paid," he told the station.

What separates this from a routine bureaucratic backlog is that the state agrees something is wrong — and points to its own transition. According to the EDD, its aging benefits system is being replaced under a modernization program the department brands "EDDNext." The agency's public website prominently flags the effort, alongside warnings that mailed documents are now postmarked when processed rather than when dropped off, and urges applicants to file online because it is "the fastest and most secure way." The department directs in-person disability and Paid Family Leave help to just four offices statewide: Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose and Santa Rosa.

At Oakport, that transition is colliding with thin staffing. "Unfortunately at the Oakport location, there has been a transitioning of operations there, so staffing has been light," Greg Lawson, the EDD's public affairs chief, told KTVU. Lawson said the agency is also seeing more applicants and is trying to catch up: "We're in the process of hiring 300 new employees to deal with that demand."

That hiring, however, does nothing for someone who is behind on rent this month. Applicants describe an online portal that fails to update, a disability line that loops through automated errors before announcing it has hit its maximum number of callers, and a single reliable option left — standing in a pre-dawn line at one of four doors in the state. For the pregnant workers, injured laborers and new parents on Oakport Street, the wait is not abstract. As Mason put it to KTVU, watching a neighbor limp toward the back of the line: she thinks about all the people who can't even get there.