ALC-Hospital, Medicaid, & Developmental Disabilities Study Subcommittee
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Unknown speaker
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Speaker 2
2:00
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Good afternoon. Welcome to the Hospital Medicaid Subcommittee.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
4:49
been charged with
the study of social services and workforce reform.
So we have a 3.7% unemployment rate. We have about 52,000 people unemployed. We have 1,900,000 people out of the workforce, which is almost as many people out of the workforce as we have in the workforce. We have approximately 45,000 job openings. So what we need probably is a system, a more efficient system,
that provides people who want to work with the initial education, social supports, and connections to job opportunities that they need to obtain self-substitiancy. Today we have on our quest for looking at how we become a more efficient organization in government, we have Mason Bishop, who is with WorkEd Consulting. And Mason has come in and is going to work with us through this process.
But he has worked with Utah in their efforts to develop a one-door policy. and just most recently with Louisiana and their efforts at a one-door policy and legislation that they've just recently passed. So I would like to introduce Mason and have you proceed. If you'd identify yourself and pull the microphone up
towards you. Yes. I think I have it
Speaker 13
6:32
turned on. Can you all hear me okay? Yes.
Great. So thank you for having me this afternoon. It really is a pleasure to be here. it's the funnest thing I get to do is I'm a big believer in states and government closest to the people and so this brings me back to days in the 90s when I would do a lot of work at the Utah legislature actually so it's a lot of fun for me to be here. Real quick I'll give you my background I've been involved in workforce development in higher ed for about 30 years now. I had the opportunity in the 1990s to work in Utah after college where at the time then Governor Mike
Levitt brought together starting in 1995 all the workforce and welfare at the time our public assistance programs and by 1997 created what's even today the most integrated model of service delivery in the United States I had that opportunity from there I had a chance to go to Washington DC and from 2001 until 2007 I was the political appointed deputy assistant secretary at the Employment and Training Administration within the U.S. Department of Labor.
What that means essentially is the Employment and Training Administration is the age of an $11 billion agency in the federal government that provides a lot of the workforce funding that you all get here in the state of Arkansas. That includes what's now the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act money, funds to help with unemployment insurance administration, and the like. From there, I had a chance to go back to Utah, and I was a vice president of Salt Lake Community college for three years so I had an opportunity to work up close and personal in higher ed at a large community college one of the largest in
the country and from there we end our family ended up going back to Northern Virginia which is where I reside now and I started my consulting business in 2010 and decided to go full-time in 2012 it's the best decision I ever made actually and a lot of my clients are community colleges but I have had an opportunity opportunity to do a lot of state policy work in places like Virginia, Florida, West Virginia. As Senator English mentioned, Louisiana last year, we undertook a whole process with newly elected Governor Landry to create a task force and to just recently they passed legislation
moving in a direction like we did in Utah. We're trying to combine programs and move toward a more integrated service delivery system. Now I'm going to tell you that the challenge with these discussions is over the decades the federal government's done a great job making this a very complicated kind of mess. And so it's a challenge that I have is how do you take sort of a complicated bureaucratic thing and narrow it down into something that is understandable for all
of you and actionable and that's what I'm trying to do today. So my goal here is to present you with some background for obviously and potential direction that you may want to go in and I think it really is an opportune time right now because we're at a point with the federal government that there's interest in state innovation and state flexibility and I think maybe for the first time in a long time there's a real opportunity for you all to really move in a direction that's bold and is better off for the employers and citizens in your state.
So with that, I wanted to start out by talking about just some foundational facts, but facts that are somewhat important in the context of this discussion. Right now, about 16% of people are living below the poverty level, but an additional 28% earn above the federal poverty level but are still challenged with cost of living expenses in their counties. What this means is you have roughly 44%, nearly half your population, that at some level may be struggling financially.
Labor force participation is, you have a participation rate that's 43rd in the nation, and so you're struggling a little bit with having people stay attached to the labor force and participating. Yet you have an unemployment rate as designated by the federal government of 3.7%, which some would argue is full employment in theory. In 2023 and 2024, you had 32,689 students graduate from high school in Arkansas.
Now, my point of this slide is this. Often what I find in these discussions is it's easy for us to default to high school students and the public education system and look for ways to fix that to solve our employment issues and educational issues in our states. However, this neglects the fact that so much of our talent is those individuals who maybe the school system failed or have run into other struggles in their lifetime, and they're sort of that non-traditional student, for lack of a better way of saying it, people
in their 40s and 50s and even 30s. You had, in June of 2025, 52,681 unemployed workers, and you had an additional estimated 41,000 underemployed workers. So when you start to look at the number of high school graduates coming out of your high schools as compared to individuals who are already well out of high school and are either unemployed or underemployed, if you start looking at it from a talent pathways or talent pools kind of discussion, you have a lot of individuals who are either sitting on the sidelines or are struggling while they're working and aren't making enough money because they're underemployed, meaning that they're probably underskilled and undereducated as well.
In February of 2025, Arkansas employers had 86,000 unfilled jobs. In September of 2024, that was 102,000, and you have a job opening rate of 6.9%, which is tied for highest in the nation that month. So again, you can start to see the story here of employers that are going with unfilled jobs and have employment needs. You have a large unemployed and underemployed talent pool. And then, of course, you've got your high school graduates coming out to some level either prepared or underprepared for the world of work.
So what are the goals of reform and why am I here? I think this is important to state because this is really, I think, for me, what we're really trying to do here and why this discussion is so critical. First of all, I'm a big believer in promoting upward mobility. I think really everything we do should always be with an eye of how do we help people, no matter where they are in their lives, be upwardly mobile. I think we also want to try to provide greater access to services that promote longer-term employment and labor force attachment.
In my consulting business, I have a lot of opportunity to do different projects where we're talking to employers, either through focus groups or interviews, and they are really struggling right now with labor force attachment. I call it a dysfunctional churn going on in our labor markets right now. You know, people come and go in jobs that are in a capitalist system that's a normal, there's a normal churn to that, but we're well beyond that where people are not, for various reasons, able to stay connected to jobs, and that's a real problem.
I think we should also maintain a strategic approach to helping employers access sources of talent for well-paying jobs while also creating efficiencies that promote effective government services, outcomes, and impact. I would say the efficiency issue is a big problem. Right now, our systems are such, and I'm going to talk a little bit about this, that we really promote a lot of inefficiency. And you'll always hear calls for the federal government needs to spend more money on these programs. The federal government needs to spend more money on these programs. Yet we never sit back and look at the way we're actually governing these programs to say,
is there a level of inefficiency here that could be turned into those services for more people? And then also, obviously, a lot of talk about artificial intelligence, technology, et cetera. And so how do we innovate to meet the rapid changes in employment, labor markets, skills, and deployment of that technology? I like to say often that our workforce programs and our social services programs are New Deal and Great Society programs trying to operate in an iPhone economy. And it's really true. If you look at most of our federal programs, they were created in either the New Deal or Great Society eras
and have had very little reform since, and it's one of the challenges. So identifying the problem, our federally funded public workforce system is broken. And as I mentioned, it's not really a level, it's not, in my opinion, an issue of funding. I don't think any appropriation level from the federal government or from the states will overcome inefficient and poorly designed governance and service delivery architectures, which is what we have now state education workforce and social services agencies receive billions in appropriations for dozens of programs from a multitude of
federal agencies so let's talk a little bit about the workforce side I know this committee is more engaged in I'll call it the public services social services sites so I wanted to give a little bit of background the workforce side and why it's important for all of you to understand this part of the equation There's a core law called the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. It passed in 2014, and in my opinion, it's the culmination of decades of failed laws that the federal government continues to pass to try to fix problems
that seemingly always go unfixed. They started with the Comprehensive Employment Training Act. It was known as CETA in 1973. That program is well-documented, full of nepotism and fraud and other things, And when Ronald Reagan was running for president in 1980, he vowed that he was going to get rid of CETA. But he didn't. He basically turned CETA into what was the Job Training Partnership Act in 1982. Well, we get to the 1990s, and the Job Training Partnership Act has lots of training providers and lots of training and no evidence or very little evidence that any of those training are for any well-paying or high-paying jobs.
And it really created a cottage industry of people sprouting up and saying, I'm a training provider with little accountability. So in 1998, they passed the Workforce Investment Act, and that was, again, kind of in the same era as temporary assistance for needy families being created and sort of work-first kinds of philosophies. And so WIA was really an attempt to sort of combine career services with job training to try to make that work. Well, then 2014 comes along, and what we have now is the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act,
which really carried forward a lot of the WIA stuff with a few little changes and a lot of people saying we're now going to be more accountable and transparent, and we're now 10 years into that experience and calls for new reforms. Last year, Congress almost enacted a Stronger Workforce for America Act, H.R. 6655. I spent a lot of time working on this. It would have been very beneficial for Arkansas. We actually had a pilot and demonstration authority language in there that Arkansas would have been able to be part of,
which would have allowed you to completely overhaul your workforce and social services programs to be able to do some of what I'm going to talk about today. Frankly, it got blown up at the last minute because of Elon Musk tweeting about continuing appropriations and, you know, we're spending lots of money, and it wasn't because of this law, but as a result of that whole controversy, they had to slim the bill down. And so, unfortunately, Aswa was, you know, a couple hundred pages. And so in slimming the bill down, they had said we had to have less pages.
But, again, the point here is that the federal government continues. And much of what you're dealing with now at the state level is a legacy going back to the 1970s, frankly. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that. So let's talk about what the workforce system is and what WIA does. WIA has a number of titles. And in Title I, it does two things. It creates a framework for what is called one-stop service delivery system and one-stop services and one-stop career centers. You may hear that language a lot. The idea being that there is one set of physical and virtual architecture
that anybody can go to to access the services they need. It also authorizes funding for three programs, adults, dislocated workers, and youth. And often this law and the legacy of this law is that workforce services are delivered locally, but that's very true in a, it's true, but it's in a limited sense. If you look at this slide, what you see here is that the three programs I just mentioned, WIOA Title I, most of that money goes down to what are called the Local Workforce Development Boards.
yet if you look at the myriad of other quote-unquote workforce programs, they are not sent down to the local workforce boards. So you send a small portion of the overall appropriation down to local workforce boards, and then you basically say they're the ones that are supposed to operationalize everything. Well, you also in the state of Arkansas have your local county human services office. They're completely separate from these one-stop centers. So you've got different delivery systems that are all separate.
There really is no one-stop. The Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act identifies six core partner programs. Now, to Arkansas's credit, within the Office of Workforce Innovation or Division of Workforce Innovation, now a number of these core partner programs, I believe all of them, in fact, are actually in that agency. So from a state sort of organizational, some good things have happened. But there are a number of other partners that the federal government talks about, including temporary assistance for needy families, that are to be delivered through this one-stop system.
So the question is, how do you take all of these siloed programs that are coming down to you at the legislature, you appropriate the funds, you have certain requirements around that that the federal government imposes, But how do you create a system that is something that employers can access? Because that's a big issue, too. Employers have dozens of different people hitting them up and places to go. And how do you create a cohesive structure for both employers and for job seekers and workers to be able to access the jobs, the training, and other things that are available?
One other quick anecdote, some of you may know that the federal government, through the big, beautiful bill, just created what's called workforce Pell Grants. Those are funds that are now going to be available next July to students at community colleges and other training providers for job training. Well, WIA is supposed to be the job training law. Those laws that I just talked to you about, CETA, JTPA, WIA, WIOA, they were always the job training law. Well, now all of a sudden what happens is those laws don't work
because hardly anybody's getting any training services because the money is spent so much on keeping buildings going and people employed and other kinds of administrative architecture that very few people get the training services. So Congress comes along and has to create another appropriation so that people can get access to training, which is now Workforce Pell. There's lots of additional complexity, and I won't go through it all today, But essentially, the idea I want to mention is what you'll hear a lot in Washington, D.C. is, well, WIA helps with coordination, coordination and referrals.
And I'm just here to tell you that we've been coordinating and referring for decades now, and it doesn't work. We need to create a system where people don't have to be coordinated, they don't have to be referred, but they can access the services so they can become self-sufficient, so they can be gainfully employed, and so that they can realize upward mobility. i already mentioned my little saying here but i can tell you that if you were designing if i came to all of you today and said okay we have x amount of dollars here in arkansas we need to design a system where people can get access to the public assistance benefits leading to workforce and
careers and jobs and i said to you design that system i can guarantee a hundred percent not a one of you sitting before me today would design the system we have today because it's so inefficient that you would not be able, if it was a private sector entity, it would have gone out of business 20 years ago. This is just a quick slide to tell you that this is, I always call it the tail wagging the dog because if you start to look at the percent, this is from 2019, so it's a little bit dated,
but it holds true the same. I mentioned that we owe a Title I, and what happens is often is because the federal government mandates that money go locally to, quote-unquote, the one-stop centers and the local workforce boards, what happens is we let that control and direct how we do all the rest of it, and yet that's one of the smallest appropriations. So when we say that workforce is local, you'll see that the bulk of the appropriations are actually being administered here in Arkansas by state employees, not local or county employees.
So it's important to understand kind of the perspective of what we're talking about. And then one other thing, and then I'm going to talk a little bit about what Utah did and where a direction Arkansas can go in for you all to work on if you're interested. But now there's even another imperative to getting this right, which is the new work requirements being imposed upon Medicaid and these programs. Again, we're going to talk a little bit about what Utah did and how Arkansas could move in that direction. But again, these work requirements are not an issue in Utah
because a single state agency and a single delivery system is the one that deals with all these work requirements. We're now here in Arkansas. You've got human services dealing with SNAP. You've got human services and department health programs dealing with Medicaid work requirements. You've got your Office of Workforce Solutions that has work kinds of things. And so you can start to see now how do you coordinate all these different work requirements. And again, many of the times we're talking about the same people who are accessing SNAP, Medicaid, and these other programs, and yet you've got
multiple agencies and multiple people case managing and now trying to deal with these new work requirements. So there are really three areas as we start to move into, okay, what actions can be taken? What are the kinds of things you all as a committee can take a look at? One is workforce program administration. How are they organized and functioning at the state level? Does it make sense to reorganize them? I know you've had some recent reorganization efforts, and so I hate to bring it up, but there may be some other things you could take a look at doing, again,
to continue to consolidate and integrate these programs. The second piece is service delivery integration. How are services to business and workers and job seekers being conducted using a one-door approach? One of the anecdotes I like to tell people, the difference between Utah and I would say almost every other state, if you were to mystery shop in your districts how many places in any of the towns that you represent how many places and how many buildings do you have to go to to access the services that you want to avail yourself of i guarantee it's probably three might be as many as five in utah
it is one i have one literally one door i can go to in any community in utah and i can get access to all these services and programs here in arkansas it's going to be multiple places and multiple case managers and multiple case management systems, et cetera. And then there's financial integration. Utah has a very unique blending of funds behind the scenes that makes their system work, and we'll talk a little bit about that. So why interest in the Utah Governance and Service Delivery model? As I mentioned, it integrates the myriad of federal and state resources
to focus strategically on upskilling workers. It creates cost efficiencies that focus resources on employers and job seekers and workers. and then it provides enhanced one door services. Utah has what's called a single state area and again if that pilot and demonstration authority had passed you would have been able to move toward this single state area but what this means is that Utah operates their system as a single state not as in your case of Arkansas 10 local workforce areas. So in Utah they don't send money
down to local workforce areas the state retains all of the money through the Utah Department of workforce services, and yet I'm here to tell you that those services are still delivered locally because just because a state writes the check for somebody in a small town like Blanding, Utah, or Moab, Utah, or Cedar City, Utah, doesn't mean that those services aren't being done locally, and Utah also creates different advisory councils and other things so that local individuals have the ability to influence the system.
Now one of the interesting things about this, though, is that Utah also, because they have a single state area, they can move monies around the state depending on what economic needs and characteristics are going on. So for instance, if the governor here in Arkansas was negotiating a large business relocation, you could deploy assets to do that job recruitment. If you had an unfortunate layoff in another part of the state and needed resources to
go help workers with getting access to unemployment benefits or other kinds of things, Utah has the ability to do that. You are very limited here in Arkansas in being able to move those resources around the state based upon needs and other economic kinds of situations. In Utah, board governance, regional planning areas, and local board governance are all defined and authorized in state law. This is where the legislature becomes very important because what you can do is you have at your behest the ability through state legislation to create the kinds of feedback mechanisms, advisory mechanisms, and other things.
And you're not mandated by federal law to do those things and have that be completely disconnected. And as I mentioned, there is a true one-stop door in all communities in Utah. The Utah Department of Workforce Services manages all of the one-stop centers in Utah. You don't have separate voc rehab offices and separate public assistance offices and separate one-stop center workforce offices.
The Utah offices are all part of the same system. It's a true workforce and public social services system. Whereas I've already mentioned in most other communities in the United States, you've got three to more. three or more the other piece about this is if you're a vulnerable individual in a community you're dealing with a lot of problems a lot of issues in your life you don't feel like telling your story three or four or five times to different people in utah you work with one employment counselor who helps you access and develop an employment plan depending on what you
need and what your services are and then that's all provided and deployed for you and as i mentioned Also, Utah has a very unique model of financial integration. It's approved by the federal government, and what I like to say is this. If you're to walk through a door of, say, a one-stop center or another office here in Arkansas, people are going to identify themselves as I'm a WIOA person, I'm a TANF person, I'm a SNAP worker. They identify themselves by program.
Utah does not do that. When I walk in a one-stop because I've integrated all the finances of paying for those folks behind the scenes. I'm meeting with an employment counselor. They have no idea what
Speaker 16
30:29
program they belong to. So it's a true system approach, not a program-by-program-by-program approach. This is done
Speaker 13
30:37
through a system called random moment time sampling. Again, we could spend a whole hour talking about this, which I won't do. But essentially, they have an approved cost allocation plan from the federal government
that allows them to basically every day they send emails out to workers and say, who are you working with? And through that statistical process, they're able to then blend their funds behind the scenes, and cost sharing occurs through that. Here in Arkansas, every year or every other year, you have your local workforce areas negotiating MOUs and cost sharing arrangements, and it looks different every single place you go in Arkansas. So I always say, and I've said this to Congress, that your people probably here in Arkansas spend at least as much time negotiating MOUs and infrastructure funding arrangements and others as they do serving people.
None of that happens in Utah. All that burden is placed on a small financial group in Salt Lake City that does all of that, and the workers out in the field are serving employers and serving workers and not negotiating administrative bureaucratic requirements. So that's a very sort of high-level overview. I would say that I think that, again, there's an appetite at the federal level to do reforms and to do innovations, and basically you're putting a little bit of this back at the state level to say,
okay, states, you take some of this on, and if you need help and innovation, we're open to it. But a Stronger Workforce for America Act was passed on bipartisan basis. It had bipartisan support. Like I like to say, it had Senator Bernie Sanders sign off on it all the way to the most conservative Republicans. And so there's definitely in Congress an understanding that these kinds of reforms are necessary and needed and that we need to move away from sort of an interest group and stakeholder approach to this to a people approach,
to how do we help people become self-sufficient, How do we people realize upward mobility, and how do we help employers get the skilled workers they need to be productive and grow their businesses? So with that, I will end my comments, and thank you for your time. I know that's quite a bit of time that I've been talking, and welcome any discussion or questions. Thank
Senator Jane English
Unverified
33:00
you very much. That was very interesting. So do we have some questions here from our committee? We do.
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
33:10
Senator Sullivan? yeah thank you so you used Utah as a model that we look at and I don't know how similar they are to the makeup of Arkansas but of course we had the Delta which is extremely poor and then other sections of the state and there's a big divide so if we've centralized those decisions and you centralize how the money will be distributed it seems like most of the votes for how you distribute the money would go to the people that are doing better and the other areas would suffer how does
how do you how do you uh actualize where people get what they need
Speaker 13
33:49
yeah so that's a great question and so yes i i always say that obviously every state has its own unique populations unique circumstances and characteristics but what i also like to say is there are principles that utah implemented that are universal everywhere. And yes, Utah doesn't have like a delta region, but it has Blanding, which is down on the Four Corners area near the Navajo Nation, very poor area.
There are other pockets of poverty. Utah has historically always dealt with a large working poor population, people who are low-wage workers who are trying to get by, but in the labor force. So they have their own unique challenges as well. When I say centralization, what it really means is it doesn't mean that you're centralizing all decision-making and ensuring that funds don't get out, because, again, other than we owe a Title I being distributed to those 10 local areas, that's the only program that's going out to those local areas.
All the other larger funded appropriations are already being administered at the state level, and, like, for instance, in your TANF program, being pushed out into county offices by the state. And so essentially what you do is you make sure that you have the representation and the employees in the offices, and part of that is the process this committee can go through. I would encourage you, for instance, to look at how many buildings is the state paying or lease, own or lease,
to do all these programs and how many different buildings are in each community. And what you find is, again, that there are so many inefficiencies and sort of redundancies built in that you're actually hamstringing people from places you're talking about of getting the services. And what Utah's experience was, when we wrestle with that and find that there's actually a lot of money, in the case of Utah, on the millions of dollars that we were able to quote-unquote save as a result of the efficiencies
we created, we're now able to serve people in the Delta region better because we now have more dollars that can pay for training, that can pay for other supportive services, that can pay for
Speaker 26
36:02
the kinds of things that help those individuals that they're not receiving
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
36:15
now. yeah so i get you we're going to have savings or but the bottom line comes down to somebody's voting or somebody's making a decision to push money in one direction or the other
and the people with the most power and influence are generally end up directing the money to their area does that not create a problem in the system
that you're describing no it has not i
Speaker 26
36:39
mean utah has a set of offices and air and communities
Speaker 13
36:44
all throughout the state of utah poor and wealthy and urban and rural and again utah has a very urban population actually if most of the people live along the wasatch front from ogden down to provo and so it's a state where people in rural areas
are very concerned about you know all the money stopping at salt lake city kind of okay right
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
37:06
i like yeah appreciate the program yeah appreciate the information there's a lot more questions to ask and information out there thank you yeah absolutely representative beck thank you madam chair so
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
37:23
my question is going to sound a bit negative but it's okay it's just
Just trying to get the information. So you mentioned that there would be a lot of the, you know, we have a lot of programs in the county and local offices.
And, you know, sometimes those programs are, you know, like this particular program is going to be administered by this person half the time, and they have other responsibilities locally and all that. And then also you have the, you know, silo effect of everyone wants to kind of protect their own positions. So I guess my question is, in your experience, how do you handle that to get this group? Because you yourself in your presentation said, you know, they identify with the program that they're helping with.
And, you know, how do you get them to start looking at, you know, like, hey, I'm part of this state program, which is this. Is it just a total, well, that program, your whole program's gone and now you're going to this. How did, for an administrative standpoint, how
Speaker 13
38:25
do we do that? Absolutely. So let me tell you, if I may, just a quick anecdotal story. So in May of this year, I was actually in Fredericksburg, Virginia, because the local workforce manager wanted me to come down and do a little bit of consulting to help. They were having some partner issues.
And we were having a very positive day. It was going really well. And the third part of it, I was going to do the customer experience. But instead, I mentioned to them, I said, you know, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how do we become a workforce system and how do we measure that? And they said, well, what do you mean? And so I ended up spending about an hour with them. And I had a whiteboard behind me. And I said, let me tell you what's happening in Utah and how it works, right? And then they were all getting really interested. And then I pointed to them. And I pointed all the different.
There was the TANF person and the Wagner-Pizer person and the WIOA person. And I said to them, I said, and your job doesn't go away. And your job doesn't go away. And your job doesn't go away. And before I got it out of my mouth, a woman said, yeah, but we're all part of the same team now, aren't we? And I said, that's exactly right. You're now not part of a program and a different, but you're now all working on the same team. So what I've seen is if you properly engage the people who are currently working in the system now and give them a vision of what future state can be versus current state,
they will want to be part of the solution. I fundamentally have seen that and believe that. So, again, in terms of the mechanics of it, what happens is, Louisiana is going through this right now, actually, because of their legislation, is you have to have discussions, and we did this in Utah about, because we merged five different agencies in Utah into a single state agency. And you have to have those kinds of administrative discussions around how do you transition what may be a county employee to become a state employee and what happens with differences in benefits and pay and things like that.
I mean, those are the realities of this kind of reform. But the bigger picture becomes, how do you engage folks in being part of the solution so they can all be part of the same team? And that's really, I think, the power of this. And so, you know, I hope that helps answer your question. But, you know, there's obviously minutia and administrative details that have to be worked out down the line on these things. and I'm not naive as to how challenging those things can be, depending on state systems versus local systems and things like that in terms of HR and all of that.
But what you find is that, again, I argue that it's not that people's jobs go away. We did not fire one person in Utah. Not one person got fired through that experience. What you do is if you have savings, what you find is that your savings really are in things like administrative. Instead of needing five regional managers, you only need one. I mean, if you look at each of these state agencies, they all have their own administrative architectures that are somewhat redundant in and of themselves,
including the local agencies too. And so when you start looking, and again, these are the kinds of things I think this group, this committee could be looking at over the next year, is gathering that kind of information and data. What are the administrative structures of all these entities? what are the buildings what are the you know there's different things like that you can find and I think you start to realize pretty quickly that there are a lot of redundancies and things that actually allow you to restructure work with the executive branch and restructure these in a
way that again creates better services for people and a more efficient way to deliver those services and yet you can do it in a way that you're not firing public workers and things like that because you still need them except the state may be signing their paycheck as I mentioned versus a county right now. Does that help? Does that make sense? Do you have another one? Go ahead.
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
42:24
So understanding that you were talking about it's a single door I think was maybe the term that you use or a single system that people would use and I like that concept but at some point you
have to build a single source from multiple inputs yes so how do you do that i mean do you and i might be getting too much into the weeds at this point but but the how do you actually who's going to be the owners of the different sections to make sure that they're incorporated into this larger one
Speaker 13
42:57
door solution i guess great question so in both the case of utah and louisiana last year you deploy a process by which an organized process by which you engage
people you have different group working groups or however you want to to structure it that are working on different issues so for instance in louisiana last year governor issues an executive order creating a task force i worked with them and helped staff that task force we created in charters for five subcommittees those subcommittees then were responsible one was for infrastructure one was case management you know you have different topic areas you involve people
both external to the agencies and internal to the agencies and you gather information you go through that process and we did the same thing in utah in 19 so in the way utah did it is in 1996 they passed a bill the legislature did that created a planning year and so same thing we had task forces and other things and then in 1997 is when and i worked on this bill with the governor and the legislature is when we had the implementation and then the department was effective july 1 of
97 so that was a year and a half process so under the auspices for instance of this committee you could you can create a process by which you're gathering you're having people gather information you're having people be engaged on different topics you're getting data and information and then you can start to make some decisions and then you can look to is there a piece of legislation we want to do in 2027 for instance to codify this work that
Speaker 14
44:36
we've just done and and the data we've just gotten,
the recommendations we've gotten from
Senator Jane English
Unverified
44:46
people. Representative Pilkington. Thank you, Madam Chair,
Representative Aaron Pilkington
Unverified
44:51
over here. Well, I appreciate your presentation. I'm fully on board with something like this. I am curious though, can you talk a little bit more about as we get these, If we were to integrate this system, though, how are they working with employers to then get these people employed?
I mean, we're doing work requirements. We're doing things like that. Is there any sort of actual integration, you know, with the business community as a whole to get more people off these services and to get employed? Maybe you said that, and I didn't hear it, but I would appreciate kind
Speaker 13
45:29
of walking that out a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk current state, what's probably going on in Arkansas right now. I can probably assure you with pretty high confidence. You probably have your community colleges that are all hitting up business people for help.
You've got Office of Workforce Solutions doing that. You've got the human services folks doing that. You've got discretionary federal grantees doing that. You've got the local workforce boards doing that. And so right now your current state is that we make it so the employers don't want to engage with anybody because they're getting hit up by six or seven different, at least, different people or different kinds of initiatives and such. Versus, again, a Utah type of model where you have a business services unit
that is representing all of these programs, including those that have the work requirements now, that are engaging kind of a single, almost like a one-door, basically, for businesses. And one of the things I like to say is this. If you look at Utah's economy right now, it's going like gangbusters. And can this all be attributed to an integrated agency? No. I think it's one of the factors of many. But I always tell people this. Imagine being the governor of Utah, and you're competing against other states for, say, a big business relocation.
And in the state of Utah, I can go to my economic developers, my workforce development. All the programs are in one place there, and I can go to my higher ed system. And I literally can have three people sitting at the table to attract that business or to help small businesses grow or whatever my industry or sector initiatives are working with businesses versus other states where I've got to have multitude of people sitting at that, some of which aren't even within my state cabinet, for instance.
so it gives such a huge advantage to a state like utah in my opinion working with their business community and growing industries and being strategic because of the consolidation there that you basically have three legs of a stool that i'm the governor of utah i get to work with to move toward what the business community needs either through a relocation kind of thing or growing small business or industry initiatives, whatever it might be. So you've got all of these people now who are individually hitting up businesses
or doing business engagement activities, and they're now all, again, part of the same system or the same agency instead of five agencies
Speaker 49
47:55
or five systems. Got you. Thank you. Appreciate those comments. Okay. okay
Senator John Payton
Unverified
48:12
senator payton thank you madam chair uh it's very interesting i think there's a lot of uh i think it's pretty easy to get us to admit that there's room for improvement
a lot of room for improvement and if utah has found a system that works better i'm very interested Your first three or four slides had a lot of data about Arkansas and where we currently stand. And basically that's a measurement of our success or failure implementing these programs you're talking about. Do you have any data like that to show us the before and after for Utah?
in other words where they stood and what improvements this this plan has has generated in other words yeah we'd like to see the proof in the pudding if
Speaker 13
49:07
you have that data yeah absolutely well we we are absolutely there's a group of us who are pulling data together I'm actually having some conversations with some philanthropic organizations about putting a pretty large quantitative study together to do just that there's some we're looking at how can we do a
retrospective analysis kind of targeted some of the areas you've talked about we've also been talking about how do we take a state like Louisiana that just passed legislation and start to look at them now while it's fresh and new and see what does that look like in over the next one to five years so we absolutely so we can work with you to try to help pull whatever data you find helpful around that. Again, this was in 1996 and 1997, so we have to go back a ways to try to see a before and after.
Senator John Payton
Unverified
50:05
So Utah implemented much of this in the 90s? Correct, 96 and 97. And
Speaker 13
50:12
then let me explain something because I think this is kind of important. So what happened, I mentioned those laws, so what happened is Utah implemented this And at the time, it was under the Job Training Partnership Act. In 1998, when WIA passed, there was a provision in there that prohibited other states from doing some of what Utah did. And I would just ask, why do you think that is?
Why do you think Congress would do that? It's kind of interesting. So I've actually made the argument that what is arguably one of the best
Speaker 58
50:44
models for workforce delivery in the country, Congress has
Senator John Payton
Unverified
50:49
disallowed other states from doing. Well, and I appreciate that. If I could follow up, if you're going to refer to Utah's success, then I would appreciate
you being prepared to show us that success. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Representative Finley.
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
51:06
Thank you. And would you not say that Utah's current workforce participation rate at one of the highest in the nation at 68.3 is really some good backup to say it's definitely working much more so than ours is, as well as when I look at ALEC, and I go to ALEC every year, and Utah is at the stop of rich sports states every year, year after year. So something's working there if they've got one of the highest participant patient rates in the nation for
Speaker 13
51:31
over a decade now. Yeah, and let me tell you something else. So the reason there became a renewed interest in Utah
and what we did in 1996 and 1997 is because of COVID primarily, because Utah came out of COVID back to pre-employment COVID levels faster than any other state by far. wasn't even close and so there were people that started to look in 2021 and 2022 at why that was and this issue was one of the factors that people felt very strongly and again i can give you another quick data point if you all remember coming out of covid what was one of the big issues everybody
was dealing with the legislature were dealing with unemployment benefits right claimants people were taking forever some of you may have heard from your constituents i can't get my unemployment it's taking too long, the system's broken, those sorts of things. Utah was able to shift when their one-stops were forced to close like everybody else's, they were able to shift employees into taking UI claims. And they did not have the same delays or problems that other states did. And in fact, after the barrage of UI claimants,
the state of Utah called 40,000 UI claimants payments to talk to them about re-employment, 40,000. And they got a 40% pickup rate because they hypothesize that people thought they were calling about their benefits and keeping their benefits when the reality is they were calling about, hey, we have opportunities to get you re-employed. So again, there's some data points that I think point to the fact, more recent data points that point to the fact that Utah's model had significant impact, I think, on helping
people get off of unemployment insurance and back into the workforce coming out of covid thank
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
53:20
you another when we bounce back to looking at the delta and looking at um our opportunity our communities
that are really struggling uh would you not say that with a statewide approach like this the decisions will be made by the legislature to make sure that every community has unemployment counselors there to make sure their needs are specifically met so if we could pass on a state level then we would pass in legislation to make sure correct that's what we're looking for to make sure every community is covered that's absolutely correct i mean that's
Speaker 13
53:46
the the beauty of this is it's within the power of the legislature to put in necessary whatever they feel are appropriate provisions to ensure
Speaker 26
53:54
that there is equal access to services throughout the state
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
53:59
and one last question so what's our what's our first step what is the first
thing that we need to do
Speaker 71
54:06
to head in this direction well i think would be to put
Speaker 13
54:10
a plan together and think about, I'll call it a project plan, for lack of a better way of saying it, to work toward, I believe it's December 2026, is the deadline correct,
and to start, I think, getting interest in who on this committee would be interested in being involved, looking at other stakeholders and other interested parties, and then putting together actual, if you want to call them committees, subcommittees, work of this under the auspices of this committee toward getting the kind of data and information you need first and then be able to start talking about what are our recommendations or solutions moving toward what I would recommend is legislation by 2027. Again, I would urge you all to look at
the report the Trump administration put out on Thursday. Basically, they're looking at consolidating Economic Development Administration, the Employment Training Administration, department of education programs they have called on the states to look to do the same and that they're committed at the federal level to trying to gain more efficiencies and improvements in these programs and are welcoming states to look for opportunities to do the same i think there are different waivers and other kinds of things working with your executive branch colleagues you guys could look at and so i think there's a number of options toward
working toward a vision for what you want to where you want the arkansas system to
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
55:41
go Representative Mayberry. Thank you. I appreciate it. Can you help me understand how this would affect people with developmental disabilities or disabilities? You know, we have Arkansas Rehab Services. It's where a lot of people go to get services to help them cover whether that's payment
to help them scholarship for college or to be able to find employment. Can you tell me in Utah how that was working? You know, I don't know if this would save them any paperwork because Medicaid, many of them would apply for. And from what I'm understanding, this is not Medicaid services. So they still would have to do all of the DHS paperwork. And so I don't know if I don't understand how this really cuts it, cuts the paperwork out for them.
I'm always trying to find an easier way for people to have less paperwork, and there are services that are divided in so many different areas. It's very frustrating. Many people don't even know that something's available. It's always nice to have it more central, but I'm not sure if it helps people with disabilities cut out some of that paperwork. Great
Speaker 13
56:48
question. So what I neglected to mention, because I didn't want to get into too many bureaucratic details, but one of the main features of Utah that I think they've really gotten right is centralized
eligibility. Utah has centralized the eligibility for all of these programs at the Utah Department of Workforce Services. So Utah DWS does Medicaid eligibility. They do the eligibility for SNAP, Medicaid, vocational rehabilitation is in the agency. In 1997, voc rehab was supposed to be part of the original DWS, but it was not. We made a decision not to because, frankly, the small-p politics of it were too challenging at the time. In 2016, the legislature moved vocational rehabilitation
from the Utah Department of Education to the Utah Department of Workforce Services. They did so for two reasons. One, it was facing some financial issues over at the Utah Department of Education. But the most important factor was the legislature did a study on vocational rehabilitation and found that 70% of the voc rehab customers were also DWS customers. So they said, this makes no sense. Why are they separate?
So I would say when it comes to different disability programs and such, it depends on the level of which you are able to centralize the eligibility. So again, if I go to the Utah Department of Workforce Services, the Utah Department of Health and Human Services manages the Medicaid program. They do the policy work for the Medicaid program, but DWS does the eligibility for Medicaid. Everything is centralized. And in addition, their centralization is remote. So you want to talk about rural programs,
Utah has people all over the state of Utah that are doing that eligibility. When you walk in the door of a Utah workforce office, which is also the public assistance office, the first thing you talk about is not, what am I eligible for? am I eligible for welfare, am I eligible for cash benefits, am I eligible for this? No, it is what is going on in your life, what do you need, what help do you need? And then they go and do eligibility after they've had that initial upfront discussion with an employment counselor about what's kind of the plan
that we're going to try to put together, sort of the case management plan. And again, you do that eligibility, you don't meet a worker at the office, you actually do that eligibility remotely through either the Internet or a phone call and so the eligibility workers and then when you're applying for those you're applying for all the programs so in that case that's where the paperwork streamline comes in I'm not going to this office and applying for this disability program applying for Medicaid here no you're when you're doing eligibility it's for the myriad of programs that are under that
administrative umbrella of the department workforce services so there are opportunities so as part of this discussion you've got the discussion of what's the service delivery infrastructure we want to have and how do we want to design that the other part of the discussion is and Louisiana just had this in the last six months and had to make some decisions around this but the issue becomes really critical is how do we centralize eligibility for many of these programs as possible so when somebody is applying for something they're applying for all of the things that they might be
eligible for not just a few things here and then they got to
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
1:00:16
go apply somewhere else for this and apply somewhere else for that follow-up if you don't mind then so so this person saying I need help I'm gonna go and I'm gonna fill out one form centralize that application but then that application would then be sent to the different departments the different services but there would still be individual case
caseworkers in those other areas that would all be contacting the same person
i mean would you still be dealing in other words would you still be dealing with a caseworker for this a caseworker for
Speaker 78
1:00:52
that no a caseworker for you're dealing with one worker or one team only
Speaker 13
1:00:57
for the services that you need and you're eligible for for your plan you're not dealing with multiple caseworkers you're not dealing with multiple eligibility systems you're dealing with a single eligibility system for a number of programs so let's say you went and applied and it and it's you know you
gave one time your income your asset all of that kind of stuff your information your on your employment history etc your disability your disability yes disability diagnosis or whatever that is and then it will plug in what you're then what services you're eligible for and then as i mentioned, in terms of funding that, that all happens through that random moment sampling piece I mentioned to you. Now, if you're a 100% Medicaid person, that's handled a little bit
differently. But you're there under a single eligibility determination for all of these different programs, and you're dealing with a single caseworker or a single upfront team. So you may have a specialist that's more on the disability side, but they're also working with the workforce personnel, for lack of a better way of saying it. So in other words, you're not over here and you're not over there. You're not getting contacted by different people. You have a single person that's kind of your main contact.
And it may be somebody that has more of a disability program knowledge and experience. It may be somebody that has more of a workforce or get you employed experience. It depends on the situation. But, again, that's all individualized based upon what the person's needs are versus having to access three or four or five different people. Does that make sense? It helps. Thank you. I know. It's hard to visualize it. I mean, I hate to say it, but it's always interesting to me when people actually go out to Utah and see it in action because every single time they come away and say, yeah, we've got to do this.
Because when you see it actually in action versus conceptually, like I'm trying to describe it, it's a lot easier to formalize what's really going on. But in terms of individuals with disabilities, to the extent that the Department of Workforce Services administers programs for individuals with disabilities through a single eligibility system, it determines which of those services you're eligible for and which of those programs are funding those services. It's a single point of access. Now, if there is, say, another disability program, it may be the Department of Health and Human Services is operating
or something that's not under the DWS umbrella, then they have those relationships and those referrals and then, you know, you're working closely with a second agency, so to speak. But again, you're not being handed off to three
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:03:40
or four different people. Do you think it would be fair to say, I guess this is what my perception of what we're trying to do, that we really would like to see people employed and that all of what we're
trying to do is figure out here's here is we're going to work with you to figure out where you need to be employed but we're going to figure out what your barriers are what those issues are that are keeping you from getting too employed and trying to solve those problems rather than a social service program which I sometimes you hear case management we're still talking about the people who are on the programs without the further goal for me a goal
would be that people are employed it may take a while to get them there but these are some issues that they have to we have to work with them on in order to get too employed but the big goal is employed. It's kind of like we do in our education system right now. What we're saying is people we want leave people leave high school employed, enrolled or enlisted. So I kind of think that's sort of the same thing we ought to be thinking about with our workforce programs is how do we make sure we're leading people down the path to being employed
whether that's training or getting in the social services programs. Am I wrong there? I'd say you're correct. I
Speaker 13
1:05:12
would actually take a step back and say what we really are, again, back to my slides, our goal is that we want people to be upwardly mobile. How do you become upwardly mobile? You become upwardly mobile through improved earnings. How do you get improved earnings? I get employed. I get increases in skills. I get access to services that are going to help me get those skills and that better employment, not on a one-time shot either for most people I mean everybody in this room
we've had multiple times we've had access education or other things to be upwardly mobile in our own lives and so absolutely and let me say this to to get there was a big concern and debate when Utah looked at this about if we merge public assistance programs with workforce programs do we just become one big pub bigger public assistance agency that is not what happened and that's not the experience. It's back to what Senator English said. What Utah's experience found
is that you couch public assistance programs in the context of providing those surround services to help people become gainfully employed, to have careers, and to be upwardly mobile. And so the public assistance doesn't become an end unto itself. It has a goal or a mission of how do you support people during vulnerable times in their lives to be able to get back on their feet and move towards self-sufficiency. And self-sufficiency is a real important key to all of
Speaker 44
1:06:38
that, I think. Thanks. I think that's the goal.
Representative Garner. Thank you, Madam Chair. Over
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
1:06:47
here. Thank you. Prior to the legislature, I worked in public health and nonprofits and then small business as well and all of those things have we've had issues where we've gone to a variety of agencies to try to find help for for folks we would have loved to have something like this and we fought for that in the legislature as well the the
thing that most of the agencies have said is that we don't have the infrastructure for hardware and software and can't merge those and can't delve into some of the protected information for different agencies and that kind of thing. What did Utah do for that, or what is Louisiana doing for that now, and how can we make certain that that's not a barrier to doing these kinds of things? Yeah, that's a great question. So again, kind
Speaker 13
1:07:39
of back to the idea of what could this committee do and what do we do going forward, I think that's one of the real areas
that has to be truly investigated. And, you know, frankly, I would always challenge somebody that says, yeah, we can't do it. So, in terms of eligibility system, Utah, as I mentioned, has a single eligibility system. In terms of case management system infrastructure, they have their own homegrown system, essentially. It's called UWorx, is what they created. Now, that is an issue where, you know, IT systems and other things cost a lot of money.
And so, if you've got two or three different systems going on, how do you bring those together? And I'm not sure I have an answer for you today. In terms of personally identifiable information, I'm not sure what that issue would be other than every agency has, you know, obviously protections that they have to do around personally identifiable information. But, again, so many of the systems have the same people in them that you're trying to protect information from somebody else against somebody they already have in their own system. And so, you know, I can't really make an editorial comment to what extent that some of those issues are real versus, you know, red herrings that are put up to keep progress from occurring.
But I would say that that is a major area that if you're moving forward, you really have to focus on is sort of that. I call it just generally the infrastructure. I think the infrastructure, both in terms of physical buildings, infrastructure in terms of IT systems and other things, those are all the kinds of things you really have to get a handle on through a planning process that would be, for instance, during the next coming year for you. Great. Thank you very much.
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
1:09:24
I wasn't insinuating that it wasn't real. I'm sure it's real. I know it's a real problem. No, no, no. You didn't insinuate anything.
Speaker 13
1:09:31
I'm just sort of saying. I mean, through the year, you know, I'm kind of at that point in my life I've heard it all, you know. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was in charge of marketing when we created the Department of Workforce Services, and I had the financial people come to me and say, you're not allowed to market because we were creating. Because I always joke, I mean, I had six months. We had a whole new logo. We had new office locations. We had new signage, all that kind of stuff. And I had people telling me I'm not allowed to spend any money on any of that stuff and TV commercials and all kinds of things to let the public know what was going on.
And I said, show me in the law, federal law, where it tells me I can't spend it. And they had to come back to me and say, well, yeah, actually, you're right. It doesn't quite say that, as long as you're doing something that helps the public and not, you know. So I'm always a skeptic. I'm a natural skeptic sometimes when people say we can't do that or we can't do this because, you know, sometimes that's accurate and sometimes it's not as
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:10:25
accurate. Sometimes it's just they don't want to do it. Could be that sometimes. Thank you. Representative Duke.
Speaker 95
1:10:37
Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for the information you shared.
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:10:42
Oh, I wanted to. Go ahead. We're good? Okay. It was interesting. I'm going to try to ask this question. It may be a little bit of a run-on question, so I'm sorry about that. I'm trying to understand exactly what, if you can simplify this for me. So what I'm understanding, I think, is that you're saying here we need to analyze and then make recommendations on ways that could be, like, I'm trying to kind of read my notes,
be more efficient in the state. Is that in these areas and then make some changes
Speaker 71
1:11:24
to provide better or more streamlined service? i think i think that the primary motivation
Speaker 13
1:11:32
is to develop a service delivery infrastructure that works for employers and workers better okay so but that it's not a program by program approach but is a true
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:11:45
system okay thank you i okay so but to get to that like analyzing all these different
areas right to see where the inefficiencies correct is that okay
Speaker 13
1:11:54
so that's correct or to gather data so you can make informed decisions as a legislative body about what direction should we
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:12:01
move in okay so i just want to make sure i was understanding that correctly so then after the idea then
being after you receive that information make the decisions on what the state what the body thinks needs to be done to be run more efficiently in the state correct and is that kind of the you've mentioned mostly utah and louisiana are there other states that have i mean
i'm assuming that have analyzed this is there a particular reason why the focus has been on utah and louisiana is that just what you're most familiar with have you
Speaker 13
1:12:34
worked with them um do you know what the other states have done yes absolutely so um virginia where i live now um did have a bill um under governor youngkin a couple years ago that merged some agencies into a single state agency I have observed that very closely I've actually worked with some different stakeholders on that and to some extent they've had some
success and they've had a number of challenges I would say I mentioned three different areas how you administer how you organize your programs your service delivery and your financial integration I would say that Virginia had some success on the reorganization they have in my opinion not had the level of success or focus on the service delivery side so I don't think much has changed in how services are being delivered and I think they got too bogged down in sort of shifting employees around and some other kinds of things
and didn't have enough thinking about what are the implications from service delivery side of things so Virginia has done that Louisiana probably was the most aggressive out so we did what we did in Utah and as I mentioned WIA they stopped other states from doing that. So it basically suppressed the discussion. Ohio actually in 2000 tried to do what we did in Utah and were told they couldn't by the Department of Labor. So kind of the momentum that started with Utah kind of got stopped right around 2000. And
so we kind of went, I'll call it the stagnation for quite a long time. And again, my opinion is that based upon what happened with COVID, it sort of created this renewed interest in, okay, we got to figure out, is somebody doing this workforce stuff right somewhere? And all I can tell you is my experience is I started getting calls from governor's offices. And as I mentioned, I got calls from some of these other groups that said, what happened in Utah? Governor Youngkin's people were actually one. After he got elected, his folks called me and said, Governor Youngkin,
being a businessman said we want to be best in class who is best in class and he said Mason we put some I don't know what factors they use but they put some factors in some data together and they came back to me and said best in class our answer is Utah so what did you do in 1996 in 1997 so again that's an anecdotal example and so what happened was there started become this renewed interest among I would call it half a dozen to eight states have contacted me
Pennsylvania's recently contacted me wanting to talk now about this one door model and so I think it's gained momentum over the last three to four years and that's just building and building and building now to the point where as I mentioned in federal welfare or in federal workforce reform last year we had a pilot and demonstration authority for eight states Arkansas being one of the eight that could have more aggressively moved to a Utah model than they
are able to now under current law, federal law. So I hope that helps, but that's kind of what's happening is I think COVID sort of spurred this interest in what happened in Utah because it
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
1:15:51
seems to have worked better there than it is everywhere else. Follow up? No. Thank you. So then WorkEd, your group, so they could help states analyze, right? And then after they receive the data and the information, implementation as well.
Correct. So you provide both of those services. Correct. I absolutely
Speaker 49
1:16:13
consult with you to help you get to where you want to be. Okay. Thank
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
1:16:25
you. Yes. Senator Boyd. Thank you, Madam Chair. You maybe already answered this, but I didn't hear it if you did. How long did it take to integrate the systems in Utah? Did you say that, or if not, could you help me understand that?
Speaker 13
1:16:40
Yeah, that's an excellent question. So as I mentioned, in 1995, the Governor Leavitt at the time put together a task force. I was actually at the Office of Family Support. I was in the public assistance agency, and there was a small cadre of us that said, if Governor Leavitt, he had a state, he had, I don't know if you remember Utah jazz player Mark Eaton, was 7'4", at his State of the State, he had Mark Eaton come at his State of the State and stack up all of the different laws, and it was like as tall as Mark Eaton or something,
you know, he did that little thing at his State of the State. And then he kicked off a task force, or kind of a, I would call it a little bit of a task force in 1995, which led to legislation in 1996, January through March of 1996. That was House Bill 375, and that created that planning year. I was part of that planning. And then in 1996, excuse me, yeah, 1997 legislative session is when we passed two pieces of legislation that codified the Utah Department of Workforce Services, implemented it,
and then also at the same time federal welfare reform had passed in August of 96. so we codified Utah's version of federal welfare reform as well into the new Department of Workforce Services. The department started July 1 of 1997, and it's not easy. It's like any other major reorganization, and if you ask the people who are in leadership now, some of which who were there then, not in leadership, but were at lower levels of department, but they've seen the evolution over 20 years, the first five years are not always easy
Because, again, you're integrating systems, you're integrating organizational cultures, and that's going to have its challenges. But at the same time, I think, again, both in terms of whatever factors you want to look at, whether you want to look at public assistance caseloads, whether you want to look at employment rates, those kinds of things, the department was seeing some results.
In about 2007, and I left you with a couple of papers for your reading if you're interested, because I covered this in the papers that Caitlin provided to all of you. It talks about the evolution of the department. In 2007, that's when housing programs got moved in, and you'll see some key moments, as it seemed like this sort of one-door model was generating success, the state continually has looked at, well, what other programs really belong as part of this one-door model? And so the department has evolved quite a bit over the 20 or so, 30 years that it's been in existence.
So I would say, so the actual implementation, planning and implementation process is about two years. then I would say you know your first five years are you gonna you're working out the kinks so to speak um and then I would say probably if you were to ask them right around 2002 or three they probably really felt like their feet were under them and they
Speaker 68
1:19:43
were moving in a direction where by 2007 they're moving other agencies and programs into the department so just to follow up
Speaker 104
1:19:52
But was this working across multiple administrations? I mean, so the way
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
1:19:56
the timeline would work here, let's say we approve this, and now we've got less than four years for our current governor, and then you're going to have another one. So how did that go? Yeah. So Mike Leavitt was governor
Speaker 13
1:20:12
at the time. Then he ended up in the Bush administration. He became EPA secretary, and then he was Health and Human Services secretary in the Bush administration.
And so Olene Walker was his lieutenant governor and she became governor for a while and then after that was John Huntsman and then Gary Herbert. So yeah, they've had three or four or five governors during that time. And I think everyone, and now Governor Cox, I think every single one of those governors, I can't speak for them, but I would dare say that every one of them would say that the Department of Workforce Services was a real strength to their administration. and they they were supportive of it and and continued and um just like any other state
government you know they have legislative oversight and the legislature at times wants to see changes or or other kinds of things i know for instance one of the things the legislature did i think back in 2011 in utah was originally um it was a single line i department was a single line item and i think at some point the legislature said yeah we probably need to break it out into multiple line items in terms of appropriation so you have that kind of oversight and things like that you have legislative audits that occur over time and and that and the departments had those so you have the legislative
Speaker 49
1:21:27
oversight issue as well that's ongoing thank
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
1:21:37
you Representative Crawford. Thank you. Rumor is that WIOA may be reorganizing and become a block grant. If that happens, would it, do you have any idea what that would look like? Would it take care of the redundancies?
Speaker 13
1:22:01
No. So the Trump administration has asked for the three Title I programs I mentioned, as well as the Wagner Pies and Employment Services, to be integrated into a single grant that would come down to states. So it would, I mean, from that perspective, it would simplify funding amongst four funding streams. But it's still only one part of a multi-part puzzle that I've mentioned, all these other programs that make up the and if again if you just combine those four
appropriations that the state of arkansas gets it's dwarfed by other appropriations that you're getting like tanf and vocational rehabilitation and other programs so um and i would say if i were a betting person i would not bet that congress will do that because my guess is that congress will not combine those programs in the next appropriation cycle. I'd be very surprised if they take up that recommendation. So it's a really
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
1:23:00
bad rumor. I think it's a rumor.
Speaker 26
1:23:03
Thank you. Yes. Well, it's not a bad rumor in that the Trump administration in their budget for next
Speaker 13
1:23:10
fiscal year, which starts October 1, actually, asked Congress to combine those four funding streams. But I can tell you we made the same suggestion in the Bush administration back in 2006 and 2007. seven and it hasn't happened yet so all right thank you Mary Bentley thank you
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
1:23:29
chairman um so real quick question I know as we have talked with this was in my colleagues um one one area of concern is um did Utah see a real increase in the
amount of money they're spending on social services once they did this so I hear people saying well if we do a one-stop shop we're gonna have a huge increase in people getting you know snap or Medicare or all that so all of a sudden we're going to have a huge increase in the amount of money we're spending on that so did did
Speaker 13
1:23:56
utah see that when we did the one-stop shop no in fact i've i i do have this data not on me but i have it back in my house that showed utah had dramatic decreases in its public assistance caseloads post 1997 a decrease decrease awesome thank you so much because you're getting people
because you're full again you're not focusing on eligibility you're focusing on employment the discussion you're having with people when they walk through the door is about employment it's about self-sufficiency it's about what do we that's what Utah talks to people about they don't talk to them about okay you can get on this program you can get on that program you can get on that program you get on those programs to the extent they help you become employable and help you get through a tough time now yes are there people that stay on programs longer than others yes but again if you look at I mean one comment I heard from one other
state was, well, we've got X amount of people on Medicaid and Utah only has like 200,000, so how does that compare? And I said, well, they probably only have 200,000 because they're having discussions about getting employed, you know. So I would argue that some of Utah's lower caseloads shouldn't be seen as a weakness and that they're different than us. It should be seen as maybe that's something we can aspire to, to having those kinds of reductions in our caseloads because people now have employer health insurance and other kinds of things through being gainfully employed. That would be the goal, at least, I think. Awesome. Thank you.
Senator Jane English
Unverified
1:25:19
And that is the goal, is to get people into the workforce, kids, families, everybody into the workforce, and give them the support that they need to get there, but not to stay on forever to do those things. So, yeah, there are questions here from the audience, I mean, from our committee. we've had quite a discussion we do appreciate you coming to me and this is only the beginning and you have sort of set the stage for us
and we're now going to begin working and I'm hoping that at some point we have put some groups together and that each of you will be involved in one area or another so that you're part of the discussions and you hear what's going on But so far, the agency folks from DHS and from the Department of Workforce Services have been 100% on board and ready to go and get working. So I think they see the merit and the value of what we're trying to do or we're thinking about doing.
And I think they have to be major players in what we're doing because they're the ones that are running these programs, not us. We don't know all the ins and outs, but we certainly bring something to the table. So, thank you so very much, Mason. I appreciate your coming here from Virginia, or actually from Maine today. And we will all look forward to working with you some more. Thank you. The meeting's adjourned.
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Discussion of State-Specific Workforce Reform Initiatives [Exhibits B1-B5]
− Mason Bishop, Principal, WorkEd Consulting
C. Discussion of Recommendations by Committee
D. Other Business
E. Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — ALC - HOSPITAL, MEDICAID, & DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES STUDY SUBCOMMITTEE, Aug 18, 2025 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit B1- WorkED | Exhibit | 22 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit B2- Utah Department of Workforce Services | Exhibit | 14 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit B3- Final Utah Model | Exhibit | 18 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit B4- Arkansas Final State | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit B5- One Big Beautiful Bill Analysis 2025 | Exhibit | 5 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Speaker 2
Speaker 4
Senator Jane English
Unverified
Speaker 13
Speaker 16
Senator Dan Sullivan
Unverified
Speaker 26
Representative Rick Beck
Unverified
Speaker 14
Representative Aaron Pilkington
Unverified
Speaker 49
Senator John Payton
Unverified
Speaker 58
Representative Mary Bentley
Unverified
Speaker 71
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
Speaker 78
Speaker 44
Representative Denise Garner
Unverified
Speaker 95
Representative Hope Duke
Unverified
Senator Justin Boyd
Unverified
Speaker 68
Speaker 104
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified