July 14, 1999

 

Honorable Raymond Bramucci
Assistant Secretary for Employment and Training
U.S. Department of Labor
200 Constitution Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20210
ATTENTION: Eric Johnson

Dear Mr. Bramucci:

On behalf of the National Association of State Workforce Board Chairs, we are forwarding the attached comments and issues related to the Interim Final Regulations for implementing the Workforce Investment Act of 1999. We appreciate the opportunity to comment.

First, we want express our appreciation for the significant effort the Department has made in developing the interim final regulations and other guidance and consultation papers to assist states and localities in implementing the Workforce Investment Act. We encourage the Department to continue consultations with its state and local partners to ensure that all levels of the system have a voice in shaping the policies for implementing WIA.

There are several key points to highlight. We believe that Governors should have clear authority to promulgate interpretations and other guidance to state and local agencies involved in the implementation of the workforce development system in the state and the use of services available through the system. This flexibility is critical to designing a system that is truly responsive to customer needs in each state.

In addition, it is important to recognize that the Workforce Investment Act provides an opportunity to build a new system. It will take time to develop the new customer information and performance management mechanisms across programs and universal services required by this new system. The Department should, to the maximum extent possible, allow an extended period of transition to the new WIA system.

Finally, in our comments on the draft regulations in December 1998, we encouraged the Department to use restraint in issuing regulations for implementing WIA. In many areas this restraint is evident and we appreciate it. In other areas the interim final rules provide helpful interpretations of the Act. Yet, there are several key areas in which the Department is overly prescriptive in the regulations. These key areas are:

• Defining membership on local boards to include two representatives from several mandated categories will result in local boards that are too large to manage effectively and will constrain the participation of the private sector. While using committees will help by allowing greater participation, the full board must still meet as a whole and important leaders, particularly those representing the private sector, will not waste their time if their individual contributions cannot impact the decisions of the board.
• The cumulative reporting requirements are excessive and will create administrative and financial burdens beyond their usefulness to better serve customers and continually improve the system.
• The regulations and the guidance on state plans focus on process and compliance and lose the strategic nature of the state plan that is emphasized in the Act and is of greatest value to states.
• Sections 662 and 663 of the regulations are written so that the role of the local elected officials appears to be enhanced at the cost of diminishing the authority of the local workforce boards. If applied literally, this could discourage business from active involvement with these boards. This appears inconsistent with the Department’s continued emphasis on developing strong local boards.
• The prescriptiveness around performance measures and accountability systems seems counter to the intent of the Act which recognized the uniqueness of states and localities by giving Governors the authority to negotiate performance measures with the Secretary and local workforce boards.

We encourage the Department to revisit these critical issues as you work on finalizing the regulations. In doing so, we think it is important to give more emphasis to promoting partnerships with states and localities in building the highest quality system possible and less to compliance matters. The system must focus on meeting the needs of the customers while being accountable for the public resources invested in meeting their needs. We recommend that you use the powerful tools of technical assistance and consultation to design a system that meets the intent of the Act.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Interim Final Regulations. The state workforce board chairs are committed to working with the Department to ensure a successful implementation of the Workforce Investment Act.

If you have any questions regarding this letter and the attached comments, please contact us directly by calling Betty Jane Narver, chair of the Washington state board, on (206) 543-0190 or Alice Galvin, chair of the Alaska state board, on (907) 564-1242, or contact Martin Simon, the Association’s staff director, at the National Governors’ Association on (202) 624-5345.

We look forward to working with you.

Sincerely,

 

Betty Jane Narver Alice Galvin

Association Chair WIA Transition Task Force Chair

 Attachment

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF STATE WORKFORCE

BOARD CHAIRS

Comments on the WIA Interim Final Regulations

July 14, 1999

Provided below are specific issues and comment that are related to the Interim Final Regulations for the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA).

• Membership on local boards. Requiring two representatives from several mandated categories expands the membership of local boards to an unmanageable size and reduces the emphasis on private sector leadership. Given this requirement, each local board will have a minimum of forty-seven members (23 required members and 24 business members). This burdensome requirement makes it very difficult for workforce investment boards and especially their business members to fulfill their primary responsibility for policy-making and strategic leadership. Larger boards tend to be more dependent on their staff and the few members that are workforce professionals.

Solution: The Act is clear on local board membership--additional interpretations through regulations are not necessary. It would be sufficient to say that states should ensure that the One-Stop program partners are adequately represented on the local boards. Also, by allowing several required program partners to be represented by a single individual when all these programs are housed within a single agency could significantly reduce the size of the board.

• Creating a One-Stop System. The regulations are not very helpful with respect to getting the One-Stop partners, other than WIA providers and Wagner-Peyser, to share in the costs of core services. While the regulations imply that the cost of core services provided to an individual enrolled (or subsequently enrolled) into another partners’ program should be born by that partner, the regulations describe the core services of other partners which must be provided at the one-Stop center as those that are in addition to the basic labor exchange services traditionally provided though Wagner Peyser funds.

Suggested Solution: The Department should negotiate federal policy compacts with the mandatory partners or provide greater flexibility in the regulations concerning payment of services. The ideal would be to allow the pooling of resources for overhead costs and flexibility to negotiate each partner’s proportionate share of service costs.

Also, a consistent and cohesive message must come from the federal agencies to the state and localities in support of sharing costs and integrating services across programs.

• Cost Allocation. In the Interim Final Rule, the Department indicates that it hopes to provide additional guidance regarding cost allocation methodologies. This is an issue of great importance to establishing the One-Stop centers, so it is critical that all relevant program administrative entities have a common understanding as to allowable and appropriate cost allocation methodologies that will be applied to a One-Stop environment. In the absence of cost allocation methodologies, which support systemic integration across programs, state efforts to realize the full potential for system change authorized under WIA will be stifled.

Suggested Solution: The Department should not try to regulate in this area, but should make a bold departure from past practice tied to an old system and bring all the stakeholders together to work this issue and come to consensus on methodologies that are suited to the new system.

• Performance Measurement and Reporting Requirements. The differing definitions and terms related to performance measurement and reporting compound miscommunication problems among partner programs. In addition, the measurements do not promote measurement of "system" outcomes, but rather perpetuate the old system of different measures for every funding source. Also, the substantial number of measures and complexity make them inaccessible to policy-makers, elected officials, workforce investment board members and the general public.

Reporting requirements have doubled (there were 85 data elements that had to be reported under JTPA. The proposed reporting elements for WIA are 161). These reporting requirements do not complement those of other systems that must be integrated as part of the one-stop system.

Suggested Solution: Develop a common lexicon of definitions for performance measurement terms across federal programs related to workforce development. For WIA, develop very direct and understandable measures, which meet the statutory requirements of the Act and complement overarching system-wide measures. Simplify the reporting requirement to include those that are necessary to meet the requirements of the Act and to ensure that customer needs are being met.

• Youth Eligibility Determination. Section 664.110 of the regulations does not allow income eligibility under the National School Lunch program to be used as a proxy for income eligibility for youth services under WIA. This will create a major administrative burden, particularly for large workforce investment areas.

Suggested Solution: We recognize that this is a statutory issue and strongly encourage continuing efforts to pursue technical amendments to allow this substitution.

• Confidentiality. The differing interpretations surrounding confidentiality issues make it expensive and problematic to negotiate agreements for sharing information. This has been a problem across federal programs for years, but one that must be resolved in order to build an efficient and effective One-Stop system.

Suggested Solution: Issue federal guidelines on data sharing or remove all performance, reporting, eligibility or other requirements that assume availability of data from any outside entity. Also, convene an interagency group to review current program-specific statutory, regulatory, and administrative constraints pertaining to confidentiality. Develop One-stop system guidelines and models of interagency agreements endorsed by all relevant partners that can be used by states and localities as they look to share customer and program outcome information.

• Incentive Awards. There is a lack of correlation between the seventeen core indicators devised by the Department for Title I of WIA and the required measures under Title II of WIA and the vocational education programs under Carl Perkins. In order for a state to be eligible for incentive awards, they must demonstrate they have achieved their performance goals across all these programs.

Suggested Solution: There is a strong need for DOL and DOE to develop a consensus on common definitions of performance and methods of holding states accountable for achieving performance goals across these programs.

• Unified Planning. A unified plan approach is not possible under the Interim Final Regulations and planning guidelines issued by the Department. The planning guidelines are too narrowly confined to how WIA funds will be used to serve specific demographic groups and do not focus on the system-wide strategic issues necessary to build a universal one-stop system. The problems identified earlier around common definitions, cross-program performance measurement and reporting, and cost allocations create significant barriers to unified planning.

Suggested Solution: Revise the state plan guidelines to focus on system-wide processes for serving all customers across programs. Develop final regulations that support rather than constrain unified planning. And, expedite the work of the federal agencies to address the cross-program barriers to systemic strategic planning.

It is also important to recognize that an integrated workforce development system will evolve over time. The state plan should be treated as a "living" document that can be modified as the system evolves.

• Eligible Training Providers. Section 666.510 of the regulations goes beyond the Act to place the burden for verifying the accuracy of provider lists on the state. This could be very expensive for states and seems a more appropriate role for local workforce boards, which have the responsibility to certify the eligibility of local providers under WIA.

Suggested Solution: The Department should not go beyond the Act in shifting this responsibility to states, but should work with states to provide support and technical assistance to local boards in carrying out this responsibility.

• Continuous Improvement. The references to continuous improvement in the regulations suggests that the Department views continuous improvement as ratcheting up performance on core indicators rather than a process of improving the management of the workforce development system at all levels.

Suggested Solution: Continuous improvement practices are not something that can be regulated. This is best handled through technical assistance and by modeling the process.