Kansas labor agency has had a rocky year. Gov. Laura Kelly must pick a new leader soon
Since the pandemic began, the Kansas Department of Labor has been an agency under stress.
A wave of unemployment claims led to a backlog for aid. Mistakes prompted the departure of the agency’s leader in June. Months later, KDOL remains hamstrung by an antiquated computer system.
The department stands at a turning point as 2020 comes to a close. The worst is over, but the formidable task of bringing KDOL into the 21st century remains ahead.
At the center of it all will be the next Kansas secretary of labor, who will need to continue improving the performance of the existing unemployment system while planning its eventual overhaul.
Since the resignation of Secretary Delia Garcia in June, KDOL has been led by Acting Secretary Ryan Wright, who had been Gov. Laura Kelly’s deputy chief of staff. Under Wright, the agency has significantly reduced backlogs, increased the size of its information technology staff and used a consulting firm to boost the number of people taking calls.
But Wright isn’t under consideration to lead KDOL on a permanent basis and his time as acting secretary is up against a Dec. 22 deadline imposed by state law.
Instead, Kelly appears to have considered at least two labor officials from other states, including Patricia O’Brien, who was a deputy director of the Bureau of Unemployment Compensation at the Maine Department of Labor when it launched a massive overhaul in 2017. O’Brien didn’t respond to calls on Tuesday.
The second official, Nicholas Toth, is assistant director of the New Jersey Department of Labor Office of Apprenticeship. Toth told The Star on Tuesday he was no longer under consideration.
Both filed financial disclosure forms with the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office in November listing secretary of labor as their position. The forms list business ownership interests and sources of income, and must be filed by cabinet nominees and state employees.
The governor’s office declined to comment on O’Brien and Toth, but indicated more information will be released in the next few days. Kelly’s ultimate selection remains unknown. It’s possible she will nominate someone who’s name hasn’t become public yet. A spokesperson said Wright isn’t under consideration for the position, however.
Kansas law allows an acting secretary to serve for six months. Wright took over on June 22, the day Garcia’s resignation was announced in response to KDOL’s decision to take back overpayments made to benefit recipients. The sudden clawbacks resulted in some Kansans having their bank accounts overdrawn.
Whoever is ultimately nominated will have to be confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate.
While the search for new leadership goes forward, some jobless remain frustrated. Toni Mygind, a mother of five in Olathe, said that she’s been waiting for months to receive unemployment benefits that the state Department of Labor told her she was due.
Pregnant at the start of the pandemic, Mygind said she was forced to quit driving for Uber. She claims that the department told her she qualified for pandemic-related benefits, but has yet to receive her first payment.
On any day, she might call the department more than 100 times, she said. When she does get through, she said she’s been told that a “technology glitch” is to blame. Mygind has taken to social media to share her struggle and talk with others who say they’ve waited weeks for benefits, frustrated that there are so few answers.
“We already went through all of our savings, and I’m getting threatening letters saying I’m going to get evicted,” she said. “That’s why I’m panic calling unemployment every single day. I’m in tears saying ‘please, just help me.’
Past upgrade experience
In Maine, O’Brien was with the state’s labor agency when it moved its unemployment system into the cloud. It was part of an effort to join ReEmployUSA, an unemployment insurance collective that includes a handful of states, such as Mississippi and Rhode Island.
O’Brien’s current status in Maine is unclear. Her financial disclosure doesn’t list any employment during the past year.
O’Brien was quoted in news stories at the time of the upgrade touting its benefits. She told Government Technology magazine in 2017 that Maine had a 25-year-old unemployment insurance system that had reached retirement age and relied partially on a computer programming language from the 1950s.
“We got to the point where the IT staff to maintain them, we were facing both very expensive infrastructure costs; and, quite frankly, the state staff skillset was essentially aging out of the workforce with the technology we had,” O’Brien told the magazine.
Like many states, Kansas has a badly outdated unemployment system, built on a 1970s-era mainframe.
“It is not just this group of folks in the Department of Labor or this administration. This has been an ongoing thing for a number of years and there’s a number of different administrations, both Democratic and Republican that have just—they’ve failed us,” said Rep. Richard Proehl, a Parsons Republican.
KDOL spokesperson Jerry Grasso said a cost estimate of around $30 million for upgrades has been discussed, adding that Wright has said it’s possible the spending would be spread out over several years.
“Acting Secretary Wright has said in the past that the agency had actually started this process before the pandemic hit and that we’re finishing up that modernization plan,” Grasso said. “We’re trying to be smart about this so what we’re doing now to stabilize the system hopefully will be transferable when we move to a new system.”
In the short term, KDOL has brought on IT consulting giant Accenture to help make improvements. The company has temporarily boosted unemployment insurance staffing levels to 339 people, up from 75 prior to the pandemic. Grasso said in an email the backlog has been cut from around 25,000 claims at the end of June to 5,169 last week.
Timelines in state law limit what the agency can do to speed up the process. “Still, we are making headway and are on target to eliminate this backlog,” Grasso said.
Kelly said last week that the vast majority of residents are no longer having problems with benefit claims, though she acknowledged some people have had difficulties.
“We’re making tremendous progress,” Kelly said.
This story was originally published December 15, 2020 at 3:22 PM with the headline "Kansas labor agency has had a rocky year. Gov. Laura Kelly must pick a new leader soon."
