ALC-Hospital, Medicaid, & Developmental Disabilities Study Subcommittee
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Speaker 1
0:00
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good afternoon everybody and welcome to our subcommittee on, this
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:47
Services Reform Subcommittee.
So we're glad to have everybody here. And what we have here with
us today is we, in order to look at what other states are doing or have done, so we can kind of figure out where we want to go on our reform package, is to talk to some other folks from other states. So Utah, some almost 30 years ago, was the first and probably only state in the United States to be able to come up with this conversion and bring the social services and workforce development programs together
in a system rather than individual programs. So we have invited Greg Paris and Liz Carver to come and speak to us today, and they're on Zoom up here, and we welcome you both to the meeting. There are a number of us here, and we're all anxious
to hear what you have to say about Utah. Go ahead. Are they on? We can't hear them.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
3:05
Hello? Can you try unmuting your mic? We cannot hear you. Is there a spot on your screen to unmute? I'm unmuted. It looks like he's unmuted. We're working on
it here in just a minute. we'll get you while we're waiting I'm going to recognize Lainey Phillips
out in the audience today she is shattering go ahead stand for us Lainey she's shattering representative Cameron Cooper 11th grader from BB who's interested in politics and political discourse. Welcome to have her here with us today, Lainey. Thank you for being here today, and good luck on your future. Thanks, Lainey. Are we
Speaker 13
4:00
on yet? Liz, can you say something so we
Senator Jane English
Unverified
4:03
can see if we can hear you?
Yeah. Yes. Gosh. How about Greg? Hello? Oh,
Speaker 26
4:12
hey. All right. We're in sync. welcome aboard welcome to arkansas thank you for having us uh just final sound
Speaker 28
4:19
check you can hear me yes great well thank you for having us the first thing we'd want to kick off we just
Speaker 30
4:27
want to make sure do you have a a hard copy or a virtual copy on your screens we we want to start
Speaker 31
4:37
off with a very quick overview of our department we we'd sent ahead of time a document that we have called An
Speaker 32
4:43
Overview of Services. I think we've got that.
Speaker 30
4:47
We have a hard copy. Okay, well, we'll speak from
Speaker 31
4:50
that. Perfect. We'll speak from that very briefly, and then we've kind of prepared a few topics, but please, at any point, just interrupt. Let's take this where you want to go to make it most helpful for you. As
Speaker 30
5:02
the senator said, our department was formed, officially launched July 1, 1997, so we are, what, 28 years and almost three months old,
and Liz and I have been here essentially from the very beginning so we've seen some very good things and some things that I think we we probably classified we
Speaker 31
5:17
didn't get it right the first time but we just keep trying so if you're telling me that you have a hard copy the front create the front
Speaker 30
5:26
side of that document list some basic tenants we call them cornerstones by which we operate you can see them in the upper left we are everything we do is through the lens of an employment focus that's part of the integration that exists here when you apply for I mean we start with our URL jobs.utah.gov when
you come into one of our brick and mortar structures our American job centers they are employment focused when you are pursuing what we would call we call it temporary assistance any of our supportive service programs the the TANF program Medicaid SNAP there is a an employment focus when you bring when you're bringing in verifications to to maintain eligibility for these programs. You're greeted by an employment counselor who screens and asks if there are employment assistance opportunities available to you. So on the very front page of there,
you can see we even lead when we talk about our overview of services with our workforce development division or our workforce development overview. We have more than 30 employment centers statewide that are certified, that go through the certification process with our workforce board. We can dive into that if you so desire. We have some standalone sites that only house our vocational rehabilitation program that joined us. Over time, we have, where available, we have folded our vocational rehabilitation into our, what we call employment centers here, AJCs, so that we don't have standalone sites that are not able to be certified or affiliate sites.
We have a strong connection to our employers, both virtually and with local contacts on the ground throughout the state. Just on the back side of the page, you can see that we've highlighted some of our public-facing divisions or public-facing access points. Before I dive into those, I think it goes without saying, all of this is supported with centralized, not necessarily brick-and-mortar centralized, but centralized what we call backbone support. whether it's our fiscal or finance division, our facilities, information security, our legal team, our contracts team.
But on the backside, we have, what do we have? Eight listed divisions, our eligibility services division. That was our first foray into taking what had been individualized work being performed under one umbrella of workforce services. but it was, there was still some sovereignty and
Speaker 31
7:55
we rolled into a statewide system, a statewide telephone system, a statewide imaging
Speaker 30
8:01
system, a statewide computer system for the first time in
2009. So we, you know, it's about halfway through our tenure. And that was a good example of some lessons learned that we can pass along. And if you're going to be building a structure or a foundation from the ground up. We had some recruitment, some internal recruitment where we learned some lessons about just the significance or how significant a role the leaders play in the whole, your whole organizational structure. Our housing and community development division was in another entity and it joined us in 2012. And then the final thing I would say is
on the left side of that page there, you can see the Utah State Office of Rehabilitation joined us by legislative fiat in 2016. This is the division that houses our deaf and blind services, our vocational rehabilitation program,
Speaker 31
8:56
and our disability determination services. The one thing I would say about vocational
Speaker 30
9:03
rehabilitation, it was considered for inclusion at day one when we formed in 1990. The legislation began in 1996. We officially flipped our switch
on July 197. And again, some lessons learned, there wasn't a political will at the time for vocational rehabilitation. And so that's kind of one of the talking points that Liz and I like to use when we talk about what is needed, obviously political will. And that is a great example of it wasn't there at the time. And so we didn't force something. The state of Utah did not force something it wasn't ready for. We were already undertaking the formation of five agencies coming together to blend at the time what was commonly referred to as welfare, work and welfare programs.
So that's just kind of high level overview of what we have under our umbrella. If I translated that, we have all the SNAP, the child care, Medicaid, BLS programs, unemployment insurance. That's a pretty snazzy win. That brings wage data with us. Wage data is like a golden nugget. It allows us to do a lot of research internally on our own programs and those we serve. We have a housing and community development division, which is a lot of outward contracting for services in communities. I would say that
at the height of the recession, just our supportive service programs, we don't have a way to quantify the impact of community-based assistance. If I give a million-dollar grant to a community to put in roads and infrastructure so the community can grow. What I'm about to tell you doesn't even include something like that. At the height of COVID, we had about one out of a little over four, four and a half Utahns were flowing through our system through these various divisions here. I think a recent checklist and I just looked into it was a little over one out of
nine. So we still believe we have a very large footprint of job seekers, of families, of children that flow through one or more of our what we would call computer-based, case-managed, or self-directed programs. Liz, anything you want to add before we kind of jump into the next
Speaker 31
11:11
set of questions? No, I think not. Okay. I think we'd start
Speaker 30
11:23
off with, I met with some federal officials this week, and again, they use the language one door,
and I apologize. I just, let me get that out of my system. We don't speak in one door language. We never have in the 28 years, three months we've been alive. That's a great marketing campaign. We appreciate the free marketing that's been bestowed upon us across the nation, but we don't, there are wrong doors. We have a few, so we don't necessarily utilize the language one door. Our goal is to put the citizens of Utah in the center of what we do and then figure out how to eliminate barriers to our services.
And there are barriers because we can do a lot at a local level, but the federal programs don't always play well with one another. But the reason we can do what we do, Liz, if you want to talk about our, I think
Speaker 27
12:13
everyone knows it, but just so we have a stable platform, will you talk
Speaker 40
12:19
about the one board, the single service delivery area concept? Yeah, so Utah is a single area state. We were grandfathered
Speaker 41
12:25
into that, meaning we got lucky. We were doing that prior to switches in law, and we got lucky to be grandfathered into that.
So we only have one board here. We don't have
Senator Jane English
Unverified
12:37
local boards. We have one board. Liz, can I just ask you maybe kind of go back just a little bit because not everybody in the room
knows that you're talking about workforce investment boards. So if you just kind of just go back to how you ended up
Speaker 40
12:56
as a single entity, but sort of what that structure is. Yeah, so workforce boards, under Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, you are asked to have or required to have workforce development boards.
You have to have a state workforce development board, and then if you have local areas, you have to have local area workforce boards. And so states get an opportunity to say what those local areas look like, but they do have to have local areas and there has to be some sort of logic behind that. Utah doesn't have local areas. That's a little bit different than most states. Most states, there are a few states across the nation that got lucky. They got grandfathered into an old law that allowed you to have just a single area for
your whole state instead of different local areas. And so what a workforce board is, is that it's compiled of employer and community partners. And they come together and then they help direct the services that your entity provides. They help look at your policies. They help look at the needs of the workforce in that area and then sort of help direct how those go. And they direct funding.
They have at least WEOLA funding, Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act funding for adult dislocated worker and youth funding. They're able to direct those funds among many other responsibilities. And so in Utah, we don't have local area boards. We have one board across the state. The Department of Workforce Services does not contract out to local entities or counties.
All of that, all of those services are run through the Department of Workforce Services. So our staff are located in those offices that Greg mentioned across the state. They're all governed by one state workforce development board under the Department of Workforce Services. So basically, we go through the procurement process of doing a sole source. We follow our state procurement rules, and we do a sole source with the Department of Workforce Services.
Our state workforce board works with our purchasing department for the state. They do a sole source to allow the Department of Workforce Services to provide these services across the state. Part of the reason that we are able
Speaker 44
15:31
to do a sole source is because we do cover a large geographic
Speaker 40
15:37
area with very few offices relatively to that large geographic area. And then we also have all of the services under one umbrella, like Greg mentioned.
So if you come into an office and you're seeking connection to the services that we offer on that piece of paper you have, you're able to get connected to those services through those offices under that sole source that we have to provide the services. So it is a little bit different. We have one board, which we have about 20 employers on from across the state. And those employers, we do a lot of, it is a large board because they do take on all of the responsibilities of local boards.
And so we do a lot of that work in
Speaker 44
16:25
committees because it's just too big of a board to do all the work together. So we do the work in
Speaker 40
16:33
committees and report out to the full board. So when we say single area state, that just means that we don't have, again, we don't have any contracts. We don't contract it out to local areas. Everything is sort of governed from the top down. And when I say that, what I mean is that our admin services, they're all connected.
So I do have assistant directors that are in different areas across the state that are based on industry clusters and commuter patterns. And those service area directors and I meet regularly to talk about where it makes sense to streamline services and where it makes sense to do things a little differently. Typically, when you walk into our offices, you're going to get a similar look and feel, but there will be slight differences. For example, we have a couple of one-person offices.
The feel there is going to be a little bit different because of the traffic patterns that are coming in, and you've got one person that's delivering all those services or connecting to those services so they it's it's in general it's streamlined and and similar but in some of the rural areas there might be a little bit of a different feel even though if all the services are the same that the way that we're going to provide them will be very similar
are there any questions sorry i should ask if there's questions because a single area of state
Speaker 54
18:08
might be a little different. If there are no follow-up questions, we will
Senator Jane English
Unverified
18:12
kind of spin off that. So let me ask this question. So then when you are, I think you're going to hit on the Medicaid eligibility and food stamps and so on and so forth. But so I think under WIOA right now, they have all those partners that you have to have that people do MOUs with.
And so you don't have that. They're just under one umbrella. We do have an
Speaker 56
18:41
MOU, but some of the partners, for example, we have most of the partners.
Speaker 41
18:46
There are partners we don't have under our umbrella. One of those would be like Job Corps. Job Corps is required, or it's not a required partner. It's one of the partners that you have to have an
Speaker 40
19:00
MOU with. And so they're a part of our, so we do have an MOU, but we're, it's not, probably not as an, it's got everyone under it, but we have the majority. We have the lion's share. So maybe not as many signatures as would be on other MOUs. How about that?
Senator Jane English
Unverified
19:18
Okay. And sometimes in some of those cases, from a financial standpoint, it becomes more difficult for local areas, which you don't have because you have that single state. yeah
Speaker 41
19:33
so we just do that mou at the top and then um there are there are we do have some partners in there like um the the indian american affairs uh adult education um even though voc rehab is
Speaker 40
19:49
under our umbrella the department of labor makes us have them sign it as well in addition to all the other partners but they they belong to us
Senator Jane English
Unverified
20:01
still too so this may get ahead of you but then how do you coordinate your employment activities with adult education how how do you align them or do you i froze for a
Speaker 41
20:13
second there's something of sorry will you state your question again about adult
Senator Jane English
Unverified
20:20
ed beg your pardon ask your question yeah i was thinking about adult education as a person
And how do you align them then with your employment building, helping people build their resume?
Are they included as your partner every day? Yeah, so we
Speaker 40
20:41
in two of our buildings now. But for the most part, they just do referrals. We have offices where they'll come in one or two days a week. But a lot of adult ed is referrals.
Adult ed is under education, and education does not report to the executive branch in the state of Utah. I forgot that.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
21:07
That's right. Yeah. Strange. Yes. Okay. So go ahead. So, Senator, you brought up
Speaker 52
21:13
two topics. We can go left or right. You pick, because we'll address
Speaker 30
21:17
them both. Would you like us to talk briefly about kind of
Speaker 31
21:21
the flow that a customer experiences, or do you want us to talk briefly about some of the funding or funding?
Senator Jane English
Unverified
21:29
No, let's talk about the customer experience and thinking about so if we can kind of relate it to what happens to folks when they come in and they're going to be employed, but they may
need food stamps or they may need, but that's not a long-term solution. It's a
Speaker 27
21:48
short-term solution. So, thank you. That's exactly what we're
Speaker 31
21:51
about. I use the phrase up front, if you put the customer, the client, the participant, whatever verbiage your state
Speaker 30
22:02
uses to address those that you serve in the center, and then you subordinate everything you do around it, your operations, your policy decisions, your technology investments, it kind of takes a while to train your brain because sometimes people will say,
Speaker 31
22:17
well I can't do that or policy says this we we've we've had we've fought those fights within ourselves uh throughout the years but ultimately the goal is to remove barriers to to help people change the trajectory of their life not everyone's going to be successful not everyone is a magnanimous step in one
Speaker 30
22:37
direction or another it's just sometimes it's just a little bit to the left or right other times it is a complete 180 improvement and so when to use the the build
upon kind of the description that you started with if somebody were and we're going to start with mediated service brick and mortar services we can pivot back to some of the online opportunities if you'd like but if if i apply if i walk into a brick and mortar structure the first thing that will happen is you're greeted by almost like a triage concept somebody will ask you what brings you win today. We will screen for veteran services. So we make sure that we can get those individuals down a slightly different pathway. We have specialized grant funding
with veterans and specialized resources available to assist veterans. Somebody mentions I'm hungry. I need assistance with food. I need career and education assistance. I know this isn't going to make sense. Our model just kind of takes over. We can get you to a computer to apply for benefits if you are feeling tech savvy and have access to these resources, even on your handheld device. A lot of the application opportunities, you can apply for benefits online. Not every benefit requires a participation between the applicant and an employment counselor.
Let me hit pause there. Our eligibility services are not geographic based. It's a call center model. So wherever you live in the state, you are not being assisted for your food stamps or your medical by someone in the geographic vicinity. But our case management services at this time, we have not centralized and deployed a virtual or mass deployed a telework or virtual opportunity for case management services. So if I come into the building and I apply online for SNAP, the technology takes over, your SNAP application gets processed, but if there are work requirements or if I apply for financial assistance and there are participation requirements, you will be connected to a career coach and we call them employment counselors or career coaches right there in your office.
So that one-on-one mediation can begin, that relationship development can begin. All of your activity to complete and then maintain eligibility for those supportive benefits is done online or via telephone, or in some cases, you're just taking pictures and sending text messages or emails to get the verifications submitted to keep your case going. So back to my original story, somebody walks in, they apply, or they say they need assistance with a particular benefit. it. When I say our model takes over, it depends on what they're looking for. If it's solely down
the employment path, we'll take them down the career and education resources. If it's solely, at least initially, down a temporary resource path, we have an opportunity for that to take place. If it's a combination, we'll make sure we prioritize. That's where I was going with the triage concept. Liz, how do you want to add on to
Speaker 40
25:45
that? I think it's just, I would mention that it's not uncommon for there to be employers hiring in the lobbies. So as people are coming in, they're seeing employers, they're getting connected to employment, or at least seeing,
hey, I'm going into an employment center. It's not just temporary assistance. And then I think our staff are good. It's not also not uncommon for like a SNAP ENT person to be referred to Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. It's not uncommon for the counselor to say, yes, you might be here today for SNAP benefits and we have all these other things. We understand you're looking for food. We're going to help you get food. We're going to help you get, you know, get your immediate need met. And don't forget about us. We have all these other things we can
offer you. And so it's, it's, I think one of the things that, that we like about our centers and that we pride ourselves on is that we're really are combining that, that concept of work and employment, even, even the language we use. They are employment centers. When you come to apply for benefits, you're coming to an employment center. Kind of building
Speaker 30
26:53
on that technology, we are, and Senator, I apologize, you've heard a lot of this come out of my mouth. We're very blessed here. We have a, we have a, we've had a very long, healthy period of strong
economic conditions, diversified economy, balanced budgets, like we, very low unemployment rate, high labor force participation. So that creates a unique set of challenges with respect to serving employers and assisting job seekers and connecting with the right employer. We have invested in technology from day one. Like right now, unemployment insurance, our unemployment insurance division has regularly won what is affectionately called the triple crown around the nation for
medium-sized states now. And in large part, it's attributed to technology. We make sure we have the opportunity to serve people through a mediated manner, because many of our federal programs require the opportunity, if I want to meet with someone, if I want to use paper, pencil. But quite frankly, that's very much the anomaly here. The vast majority of our services initiate online or maintained online. Our staff assist people in our employment centers to apply
for and maintain and search for work online. The state of Utah has invested heavily, not workforce services, but the state of Utah as a whole has invested heavily to ensure that we have technology embedded in our K-12 education, that hardware is available, that broadband is available, even in our rural portions of the state. So building upon that, workforce services, is it since its inception has had its technology be of high primacy. We have four main computer
programs, three of them built in-house. One of them we inherited the vocational rehabilitation program, which our state uses a vendor program that I believe it's 37 states and territories also use. So were we building from the ground up, we would not have a three in-house and one vendor program. And the reason for that is all our systems are linked. If you're talking to an eligibility worker and you report an address change and they make a change in their computer system, it can talk to our unemployment insurance division computer system and then our case
management system, which also houses our job board, for example. And it also talks, we've built interfaces so it can speak to our vocational rehabilitation program. That's a customer benefit. That's an elimination of a barrier. It reduces errors. It also is a customer-friendly benefit where they don't have to tell the same story to three or four different people, but an added benefit to that is the ability for us to be more accurate and more timely in all of the federal reporting. You manage a lot of federal programs, and I don't want to wind Liz up here,
but the hundreds and hundreds of elements that are needed at participant levels for some of our programs is just very overwhelming. So to make sure that we have optimal computer systems to even help with our federal reporting is fantastic. That comes with a cost, obviously. We have more so over the years evolved into, we're not a big bang agency. We don't build a system, let it die as we're building the next system. We've built up systems and now we just maintain them. So it's
continual investment so our systems don't hit end of life they don't hit dying decaying they're just they're they're maintained they're reinvested in every year our eligibility our unemployment insurance and our case management system if the platform on which it's built is becoming on end of life we're far enough ahead of that that we're rebuilding our our system fund open source technology where we can, and working with vendors to mitigate licensure costs where we can. But
technology is a very, very big component of what
Speaker 81
30:52
we do. It has been since our inception. Liz, anything else you want to
Speaker 56
30:58
add about technology? I think wherever we can, we try to build federal
Speaker 40
31:02
requirements into the computer system so that our staff don't have to, we try to make it easy for them to get it right. We don't want our staff to have to figure out all the differences between programs we want them to focus on the customer and so um our staff in general don't
we don't we talk about current education we don't talk about what's funding that like we do talk about what's funding that when we have to but in general we don't talk about oh this is a TANF customer or this is a wheel customer this is snap customer this is a customer we're helping them with education services we're helping them find a job we're helping them with supportive services to be successful at that job. That's where we want the focus to be. And so we try to build our computer systems to deal with as much of the policy and the federal requirements as possible.
Speaker 31
31:54
Liz, I like your example of the Wagner-Pizer. Do you want to use that one? Our staff don't enroll
Speaker 40
32:04
in, the system does it. I'm sorry, Wagner-Pizer, is that what you're saying? Yeah. So a lot of states enroll customers in Wagner-Peyser. We don't do that. The system knows based on the services that we're providing if a person is a Wagner-Peyser customer. And so that's an example of where we have just built it in behind the scenes to take the guesswork away from our staff.
Speaker 30
32:29
you know, it's like every good thing you have to build in a protection. Data privacy requires least privileged access for all of your staff. So we make sure that our staff never have to leave their native system. If you're an eligibility worker, you work in the eligibility system. And if there are things you need to know that are going on in other systems, we fill interfaces. So you will never log out of your system to log into another one. It will feed the relevant or applicable or helpful fields. And so that's another mechanism for us to coordinate internally amongst ourselves statewide.
I know we're starting to get low on time. just want to add a couple of things here on money. As I said, Liz and I make similar presentations like this with many individuals across the nation, and I would be remiss if I didn't say this statement because I believe it to be true. Workforce Services stands today because we have the best financial shop in the business. It is the most complicated budget in the state of Utah, and that, quite frankly, is because of our own doing, because of the programs underneath our umbrella. The $2 billion budget is not like the most astronomical in terms of dollars, but the
complexity involved in the depending on how you want to analyze it 50 to 100 different funding streams that all have federal requirements or state requirements in terms of fiscal reporting every payor wants to be the payor of last resort so you can imagine the complication when we say we have an integrated model we don't want our staff to think about money we pour money in a blender we hit puree they do their business but on the back end unfortunately our financial staff have to deconstruct the puree and turn it back into every penny at a time. So having a top-notch
financial team is, it's not a luxury, it's a necessity. I don't know that, I don't know how we would survive were we not to have that. That's just not a place to, it's just not a place you can afford to scrimp and save. Back to our formation of our department and each of these divisions that you had on your page, you know, I told you they came at different times, right? We talked about them coming at different times. Back in 2009, our first foray into forming a statewide division, even under the common umbrella of workforce services, after we had been alive for, what,
15, 16 years, we decided to form a singular statewide division, one leadership structure. This is a little painful, but we believe in it, and we will continue to do it anytime it's relevant. We had what we called a phased recruitment. We knew what the model, we actually had the foresight of being alive for 15 years as a department. So we knew what this new division needed to look like, how to access services, deploy services and serve, support one another, the coworkers, but also serve the citizens of
the state of Utah. And as a result, we went through, again, phased recruitment. And that means we recruited for one leadership level at a time. Anybody could apply from anywhere in our department. It wasn't just we tapped the existing people in the existing roles. Everybody had to reapply for positions that they wanted. And when the dust settled top to bottom, that eligibility division remains our largest division in the department right now. It's approximately 40-ish percent of our department.
They were a little bit bigger then. Technologies allowed them to streamline and downsize. But then when we went through this phased recruitment, people holding positions of leadership in some cases did not retain the job they were in, the level they were in, or a leadership position at all. And that just goes to the notion that whatever model you're building, your leadership can make it be successful or they can crush it. And I'm not talking about whoever's named on the top of a letterhead. I'm talking about everybody from your supervisor to your office managers to regional managers,
you know, whatever verbiage you're using to signify leadership. Everyone's got to be on board. And you have an opportunity if you're forming something from the ground up, if you don't have the right leaders, as much as I also mentioned our finance team, having the proper leadership personnel is paramount to success. Liz and I just had a quick test. We presented to our legislative committee or one of our legislative committees last week, and we were talking about challenges.
And one of the things we left with was the notion that, you know, we're viewed as the employment arm for the state of Utah or one of the employment arms, I guess you would say. Within state government, we are the employment arm. But sometimes there's a failure to recognize we too are an employer. We have 2,000 employees. Approximately two-thirds, a little under two-thirds of those employees live in what we call an urban corridor. Two-thirds of our staff live in a 120-mile radius,
but the other third of the staff take up the rest of the land mass of our state in what we would call rural Utah. Why am I telling you that? Because, well, as an employer, recruitment and retention challenges exist. Our model has nothing to do with recruitment and retention. Our staff don't come or go because we are a one-door model. So we have
Speaker 28
37:43
to have the right culture, the right leaders. We have to have compensation that is competitive with the local communities. We have
Speaker 30
37:51
to have the, I don't know, the employee offerings that attract individuals with a three, you know,
low to mid 3% unemployment rate that we've sustained for many years now. We've been very fortunate in that, but that also creates challenges with recruitment and retention. So as an employer ourselves, we do run into some challenges in geographic pockets. So we believe in this model because if there are large challenges, such as a COVID event, or there's large turnover activities in one geographic area, we have the ability through this blended model to pick up staff
and temporarily shift them to other geographies, other programs, while we're trying to figure out how to absorb or redistribute resources and or recruit resources. So the organized model has, while the challenges exist externally to us, we believe our model does help us administratively.
Speaker 28
38:46
It does help us with responsivity. Liz, any final thoughts you'd like to add, please? No, I think you got it.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
38:59
Is there any questions for us? Yeah, I think we have
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
39:06
a question here. Representative Crawford. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for sharing
Utah's experience. A couple of questions, and I'm going to go back because I've had questions for a little bit. So you only have one workforce board. That would be considered your state workforce board. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct.
Alright. And then when you began to talk about how you operate, and you said brick and mortar, I was trying to follow that. As far as the triage experience, you screen for a vet and then you send them to the places they need to go. The other is that you said, we will send you to a computer, if I heard that right, I guess within your office. But then you also said that we'll send you to a career ed track.
So you have computers you send people to to fill out for, let me guess, the hungry, the housing, all of that. And then if they want, you send them to a computer. And then if they want help for career, then you would send them to a different area in the same building. is that correct? It could be in this, I mean,
Speaker 56
40:30
it could be sending them to someone else. It could just be
Speaker 40
40:35
the same staff person. In some of our smaller offices, it's just the same person,
the same person's helping them with all of those things. In some of our larger offices where we can, where we have a larger volume of customers, we might, it might be, let me walk you over to my co-worker you know jan over here and and let her tell you more
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
41:02
about this career and education service okay uh and then all of your computer systems talk to each other when you make one change like you'd said in an address then it goes to every service provider i'm going to call them
OK. I wish Arkansas did that. So and you also said that you guys maintained and reinvested in the system that you have, computer system. how much is that do you know what a line item to continue to keep at the top because you said you're also doing the federal requirements so that your staff don't have to deal with that
with paper it's just in front of them when they open up the program is
Speaker 31
41:56
that correct yeah yes our our technology investment i don't know
Speaker 98
42:01
that i line item it in terms of a technology investment Our state's technology staff are housed
Speaker 30
42:09
in a standalone technology department, and then they are outstationed to affiliate with each of the executive branch agencies. So we have in our main administrative office in downtown Salt Lake City, we have a department of technology staff who manage a workforce services issued budget.
And within that budget, and I'm speaking kind of high level here, we allocate money very, very meticulously because of, you know, every payer wants to be the last resort. But in general, we allocate money through three
Speaker 28
42:48
kind of lenses. Federal or legislative mandates is a bucket. Keeping the systems
Speaker 30
42:55
alive and open and active is a bucket. And then we have a third bucket, which is kind of our self-imposed, self-desired enhancements.
And unfortunately, those first two buckets tend to absorb our money, even though we have designs on doing things, bells and whistles or enhancements. It's a little bit of a challenge to get to those because those first two buckets take up
Speaker 28
43:19
a lot of personnel experiences. So we have a budget that they start
Speaker 30
43:28
with every year. Now, throughout the year, if grants are available, say one of our federal programs offers an opportunity, like right now, the big thing is artificial intelligence.
I can tell you that we're not, we're still tiptoeing around artificial intelligence, how or if or if and how. It's not because we don't want to, it's
Speaker 28
43:50
that we just, our state as a whole has not helped guide exactly where and how they want each of our agencies to invest. We believe that there's some opportunities with call centers to perhaps use some AI type of chat box for standardized
Speaker 30
44:04
questions, but we're not quite there yet. But were we to go there, that might be today in an enhancement bucket, but when we decide that is something that we're going to commit to, it gets prioritized differently.
Speaker 28
44:17
And if we don't have enough funding internally or grants aren't available, that could be something that we would prioritize, discuss with our governor's office, and perhaps elevate it to be a request through our governor's office and our legislature. Okay.
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
44:33
One more, please. Okay. I had a constituent who had sent me this,
so I'm going to read it and hope I get it right. All right. In Arkansas, we have 10 regional workforce boards. You guys have one.
How does that impact access to regional services or brick-and-mortar access for participants who need services? I'm going to continue to read that. Is the administrative cost savings of the one board model worth the tradeoff from having dedicated regional boards? What are some of the challenges that would come with the transition from the 10 regional boards to one?
Speaker 40
45:26
up, I will. Well, I could, I mean, I could take a stab at, I think we believe that our model allows us to serve customers better because we're, we've got a lot of services that are under one roof. And so, and, and like Greg was mentioning, when we need to move resources, we're able to pivot and move resources. An example of that is recently we had a service area who was not able, they were, they were losing staff, they were along the law such front, they were unable to be able to keep up with the workload of processing workforce innovation and opportunity act applications.
And we met together and one of our rural areas said, hey, I've got a staff person who can help out. And they started processing those applications to help with the workload that was happening in the urban area. In that instance, we believe that our customer service was actually better because instead of being kind, we actually were able to keep up with the workload by shifting it because we could do that very quickly and very easily. Another example is that when we need to shift money from one service area or one area of our state to another, we're able to just shift it.
We don't have to go through a local board. We can just work with our state board and we just shift the money. It's that simple. And it happens in less than 24 hours. So I think for us, we feel like that having all of these things under one umbrella, having a single area state, having a single board actually allows us to pivot quicker and to be able to adjust to the needs of customers. I will also tell you that our offices that are across the state, they still are responsible to know the resources in their area.
Just because we have a single board doesn't take away the responsibilities to know that in Blanding, there's a drive-by food bank and it happens once a month. Where in Salt Lake, we know there's several food banks and where they are and where we can refer people to. So it doesn't take away those responsibilities to know that and to be engaged in the community and to be working with community partners. All it does is allows us to sort of streamline our services. And I don't know, Greg, if you want to take a stab at kind of like sort of, I don't know that we ever had to really shift away from local
Speaker 41
47:46
boards, but I don't know if you want to take a stab at that.
Speaker 31
47:51
One thing I'd say is the, one of the things that Liz and I always leave you with, so we're going
Speaker 30
48:02
to maybe leave it, we're going to say it now and then just pretend we said it at the end is our final part of the statement. We don't ever encourage anybody to try to replicate Utah. We encourage you to get the flexibility to create your own model. Our model works for us because our population has grown over the years. When we started, we were pretty firmly entrenched as a small state, and now we're no longer
considered small. Through population growth, in-migration, we're very medium now. So our needs have changed. Our geography has changed. Our infrastructure has changed. Just so I want to be clear, I'm not suggesting anybody should be Utah. They should be pursuing and fighting to get that waiver. So you can create a one board, five board, or two board, or whatever works for you. The pure mathematics of the constituents question, this is, I guess, what I would say.
If I had 10 boards and each board had, this is such a made-up example, I'll probably butcher it. If each board had one lawyer, one communication specialist, and one senior financial accountant, and you decided to have a single board managing all that, I don't know that you can have one person do it for the entirety of the state, but the logic would be instead of having 10 lawyers, 10 communication specialists, and what did I say, 10 accountants, you could
manage the same workload with, I'll make about 50% of it, 60, 70% of those staff, the remaining resources could be turned back over or reinvested in yourself into whether it be technology, whether it be personnel, additional brick and mortar structures, opportunities for greater self-directed or online services. So the lowering of the administrative expenses, unless you're planning to return funding to either your state legislature or the federal government or you're
already let's say you're you're blowing past the money that's available to you and you have to get down and live within a budget having fewer admin expenses and you know i'm i'm known to say the two things that cost money in my life right now are bricks and bodies and i've got to reduce one of those those are the two things we play with and so we don't have a large geographic brick footprint across our state. We are embedded in 29 counties. We do have a brick and mortar structure in 26 of our 29 counties, but we have heavily invested in self-directed opportunities
so that we can allow those who don't need brick and mortar to do for themselves. Quite frankly, that is part of the reason why we are still available to do what we do today, because we can't absorb continued increases in admin costs our rent has gone up funding has stayed flat our cost of gasoline vehicles post-it notes you can't tell I'm sitting in the dark so is Liz we're doing our part to keep electricity costs down you know whatever we can do to help with overhead
expenditures so in my mind just the the logic of
Speaker 28
51:08
a consolidated model and that's kind of one of the first steps you know when i when i talked about political will the your your with your
Speaker 30
51:18
model when you're done if you still have 10 people you've just kind of rearranged and reorganized you haven't necessarily and that's perhaps your first phase i don't know that you're coming out of the gate going from 10 to 2 but if you're coming out of the gate 10 but your structure looks different
and then you should have a plan um or i encourage you to have my excuse me nothing intended to be directed, I encourage you to have a plan of how you absorb vacancies, how your attrition works, because the goal was to end up in a consolidated model such as ours with less administration is needed to run a statewide model while still granting, this is my word for it, the sovereignty of the local areas to live within the structure of statewide leadership and some sovereignty of
local localized nuances and that really is a science and an art that it's hard to communicate it's kind of a you know it when you see it and feel it i hope that helps just a little bit it does thank
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
52:25
you very much thank you let's see representative bentley thank you chairman uh thank you all so much for being here today we have lots of questions but the one thing i want to ask how are you staying connected with your employers out there so i know it's really important for us to make sure that, you know, we are actually training people for the jobs that are open.
So what do you guys do to stay connected to
Speaker 41
52:44
the employers in your state? We do have business service reps like most
Speaker 40
52:49
states. We call them Workforce Development Specialists here. We have them throughout the state. We also have our managers over our centers are connected to the community and to employers. Same with our service area directors. And so that's a really big thing that we expect. And, you know, especially our leadership is in connection not only with employers,
Speaker 111
53:11
but also local elected officials and community partners. So, great. Thank you so much for that. I'm
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
53:17
trying to think of the other quick question that I had. So how did, I guess what I wanted,
how was the population of Utah? about three four three five billion
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
53:35
you guys have 29 29 counties and 29 brick and mortar so when those people go oh that's what i so when in your brick and mortar
does that cover medical as well as um employment employment opportunities in our
Speaker 30
53:50
state another department owns the policy they're the quote-unquote supreme agency with centers for Medicaid, CMS, Centers for Medicaid Services, but they've contracted with us to do the eligibility determination because years ago, I didn't list that on the sheet that you have in front of you, but we used to have a separate eligibility for Medicaid and then everything else. And the citizens are bouncing back and forth because you're adding medical and dropping food stamps
from month to month. And it was just a kind of funky model. It wasn't the best service. So we were able to take over the entirety of the eligibility determination process for medical child care what we call financial which could be like a primarily a tana funded or tana funding source snap we have unemployment insurance one of the things i would build upon liz and i just actually answered this question last week in a legislative presentation when you said how are we connected to employers everything liz said and then again one of my little add-ons that i think
is unique for our department we have the
Speaker 79
54:50
bureau of labor statistics group our what we call our workforce research and analysis division it's on the back lower right
Speaker 30
54:58
on the back side of your your sheet there so that division the funding that comes from DOL that division also has economists and they produce a great deal of fantastic labor market information so we are always relying on data trying to blend scientific data DOL data lags a bit but we're blending scientific data with on the ground information in our local communities so that we can we can
train people in occupations that are in demand or provide training resource opportunities for those in their local areas for occupations that are in demand at a from a local perspective because we know that salt lake we know northern utah southern utah and central utah absolutely have different economic needs they have different industry bases tourism hospitality in one area oil and gas at another and manufacturing in another so they're looking and needing they're looking for different job seeker skills and credentials and the training
institutions the educational institutions who as Liz said are not part of the executive branch they too have to remain connected to the employer so we piggyback a lot with um it's a three-legged barstool if you will education employer industry led and then
Speaker 79
56:12
our our contribution that's great so on your
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
56:16
so the employees in your 29 counties so those people there they're cross-trained to be able to cover all of these areas correct everything you've got listed here with from
child care to snap to financial medical training and all of that correct yeah
Speaker 40
56:40
that and then the details especially for those eligibility programs are governed through a phone system, statewide phone system or online chat. So if someone started getting into detailed questions about Medicaid, they'd have to contact someone on the phone or on chat. But high level, our staff can sit down and help them fill out an
application that can answer high level questions, help them image documents that are needed to determine eligibility. Kind of how we have it is we have a front facing, you know, people coming in our office they have to know our staff have to know enough to know how high level how to help so they know they're they're sort of a jack of all trades some of our what we call them connection staff when you come into a center they greet you they're a jack of all trades they know a little bit about everything um and so but but if you want to get into details then they'll they'll
connect you to a person that's going to be able to
Speaker 81
57:40
get in the weeds great thank you i will tell
Speaker 30
57:43
you, in one of our iterations, you know, we talked about things that didn't always go right. First five or so years, we had the notion of a super worker, you would train one human being to know and do everything. And you can imagine that did quite last very long, because it's really hard for human beings to absorb the complexity of what we do. And I mean, it sounds great on paper. And if we could simplify federal programs, or, you know, let it be just a singular pill that you take,
we would be, we will have solved the complexity of all things workforce development. But unfortunately, specialization makes sense where you can go faster, achieve efficiency, you can provide better service. As Liz said, our front end folks triage a great deal. They can refer to the specialized folks, eligibility services division. They accept applications, determine eligibility for Medicaid. Our brick and mortar staff who triage people will have nothing to do with the actual eligibility determination
and recertification. Just one real quick thing. Other than taking verifications and helping those get submitted and then also talking to that person who's bringing in the verifications about employment opportunities because we are a workforce entity.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
58:57
Great. So can someone in Utah get all this online without even going to a brick and mortar? Can they access everything at home on a computer
Speaker 31
59:07
online? For eligibility, you never have to leave.
If you can get your verifications together or we
Speaker 30
59:14
can find them ourselves doing it on your behalf through electronic interfaces. However, if the program that you're applying for
Speaker 31
59:21
requires interaction with what we call an employment counselor or career
Speaker 28
59:27
coach, that requires that interaction. You will have to go in to facilitate that relationship development. Okay,
Senator Jane English
Unverified
59:35
thank you. So are you all a Medicaid expansion state or not?
Did you do the Medicaid expansion where you have the more than just the basic
Speaker 79
59:55
Medicaid? We do have some Medicaid programs, yes. said, I think as you and I talked, we had work requirements set up
Speaker 30
1:00:09
presidential status, and then we no longer needed those, but we are ready for re-institution.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:00:15
So how are you handling those work requirements for SNAP and for Medicaid? And I'm not sure that Tano still has them, I don't know,
Speaker 95
1:00:28
I don't remember. We do have work requirements for TANF and SNAP. Medicaid
Speaker 40
1:00:33
hasn't fully released theirs yet. We did do Medicaid work requirements for a couple, like a month or two prior to COVID. So we had implemented work requirements just in January. COVID hit in March.
we didn't do it long enough to know that it was successful or not um because it was just it was so quick um but we do our snap uh work requirements we actually do those uh more similar to um virtual we actually do our snap uh interviews mostly virtual unless someone wants to um be in person so uh we have a few people statewide they make they call out to individuals
lizzie froze yeah yeah i was wondering so so we do that virtually um for snap work requirements we have a few people statewide in fact we only have three workers that do it statewide. They call out, they do virtual appointments like this with individuals across the state, help them with job search. TANF, we do that in the office because there's a little bit more of a workload there. So we have workers in the offices that will sit down, do the required
assessment, do the employment plans. And so, and Medicaid is yet to be determined because I think there's uh some complexities of what they added into the rules that weren't there when we did it before so i
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:02:08
just i just keep wondering how we're going to get people to um what
i keep seeing is this kind of on again off again if you do or you don't and you're on for a month and you know i thought if if we're trying to figure out how we put people long term into some employment opportunities
and this is their their support system versus the other way around it almost sounds even even with the work requirements almost like that's the first thing and and it's not a long-term plan does that make sense yeah i think um for us
Speaker 40
1:02:43
so it depends on the program for tana if it's a little it can be a little bit more uh i don't want to say long term because it's not because it's not time limits and but it's it's a little bit longer of a runway to help you get employment i think
that's why it's important and one of the things that we that we know is education matters some kind of skill attainment matters and when i say education i'm not necessarily talking about like college track i'm talking about short-term education and so a lot of these individuals where it makes sense we're referring them to the workforce innovation and opportunity act and coupling those services together. That's why it's so important that we do some of
Speaker 44
1:03:22
those services together because that matters. Okay, good. Anybody else have some more?
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:03:30
Let's see. Oh, Representative Crawford. Thank you.
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
1:03:34
My constituent again. How does Utah determine what amount of
funding goes where and for what without a regional board submitting a plan, who makes those decisions. Can you tell us which
Speaker 130
1:03:53
funding? She's probably talking about
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:03:56
WIOA. I imagine she's talking about WIOA.
So, Cindy, from a state level,
what happens is that money goes by formula to each of our workforce boards, and the state keeps about 15% as an administrative thing, the governor's but that money goes by formula to those
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
1:04:16
so that would continue if we did something like utah no wouldn't probably not we
Speaker 41
1:04:25
so how we govern it in utah is we we do we do allocate it
Speaker 40
1:04:32
to certain areas of the state um and but we just don't have to have that there's no plan it cuts out a lot of the work you don't have to have a local board submit a plan it really is as simple as one of my area directors picks up the phone he calls my program specialist and says hey it looks like we're getting really tight on our funding we've got a we got a bunch of ojts coming up for our youth is there is there extra money and and we go and we look and say oh this area
of the state doesn't need as much and we shift money or we're and we're always talking about it we're always looking at the budget. Where is it? Where are we at? What are the needs? But really, it's not complicated at all. There's no plan. It's a phone call or an email. We don't have to
Speaker 31
1:05:20
dispense the entirety of our allocation if we don't want to. We
Speaker 30
1:05:24
could give everybody a million dollars and sit on the rest and then deploy as needed. And I guess the reason why we would struggle to relate to what you would go through or are about to go through, should you
adopt something like this we're sitting on 28 plus years now historical records so we kind of know up front we have we have some degree of historical knowledge that we can lean on to allocate money with some degree of confidence that we're going to be somewhat close for the three
Speaker 28
1:05:55
titles adult dislocated worker use and then as liz said that the complexity is eradicated When it comes to having to move money, I don't even know if it's a phone call.
A text message usually gets it done. And when I say she said 24 hours, I think she's being kind. It's like a text message, and then about 15 minutes later, the money's moved in our
Speaker 30
1:06:20
system if everybody's available. So it is that simple. And I know we're spoiled. We don't know what
Speaker 28
1:06:26
we don't know because this is all we know. So we like what the model allows us to do. and i guess it's counter you know counter cyclical with such a strong economy our wioa
allocations i mean they're they're out for public you you can see them there we're not we talk to our colleagues in texas and tell us we tell them our allocation and they just kind of chuckle and you know pat us
Speaker 133
1:06:52
on our head and say okay that's cute because we're we're 10 12 million excluding Wagner-Peyser and you know that's not what they are
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:07:02
it's not what it used to be it keeps going down all the
Speaker 28
1:07:07
time even if it doesn't go down just by staying flat
that's a cut in and of itself the cost of doing business between bricks
Speaker 134
1:07:16
and bodies goes up well I don't see any
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:07:21
more questions but this has been very very informative and we probably now have thought of new questions to ask you again so maybe we will invite you to come back but we appreciate you spending the time this last hour with us and giving us an insight because it we we really do have to look at all kinds of models to see what
is going to work for us and what we can do uh realistically with the federal government um how how can you change they've got some pretty strong rules to keep us from doing a lot of things so Mary do you have some thank you so much for
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:07:57
giving us so much time today we really appreciate and we will be back in touch thank you again
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:08:02
both of you appreciate it have a great day okay
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Overview of Utah Workforce Services Programs [Exhibit B]
C. Discussion of Recommendations by Committee
D. Other Business
E. Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — ALC - HOSPITAL, MEDICAID, & DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES STUDY SUBCOMMITTEE, Sep 25, 2025 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit B- Overview of Utah DWS | Exhibit | 2 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Speaker 1
Speaker 7
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
Speaker 13
Speaker 26
Speaker 28
Speaker 30
Speaker 31
Speaker 32
Speaker 27
Speaker 40
Speaker 41
Speaker 44
Speaker 54
Speaker 56
Speaker 70
Speaker 52
Speaker 81
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
Speaker 98
Speaker 111
Speaker 114
Speaker 79
Speaker 116
Speaker 95
Speaker 130
Speaker 133
Speaker 134