March 2: ALC Study Committee

Senator Jane English Good morning. Welcome to the committee meeting. I call this meeting to order. And this morning, one of the things we’re going to do today is we’re going to kind of look at the audit that the Alliance for Opportunity did for us and kind of go through that. So everybody received a copy of it. You were emailed a copy. 

Hopefully you had a chance to go through it and kind of look at the things that they were talking about in here, that they pointed out. They did a lot of work. And there’s a lot of things we probably already know, but it was very good to be able to read them. 

And some of them have some key recommendations for us to think about, which is something we’ll be doing as we move along. So I’m going to turn this over to Mary. Representative Bentley. 

Representative Mary Bentley Thank you, Senator. And again, thank you all for showing up. I know that we’ve been meeting quite often, but this is really an important topic. I think something transformative that will really change the lives of Arkansans and move Arkansas in a direction we have not been in. 

We’ve been spending so much money and not really seeing any results for all the money that’s been invested. And I know all of you know Arkansans work quite hard for their tax dollars. So I’m extremely excited about moving things forward. We’ve done so much with Arkansas LEARNS and moving our kids forward and with ACCESS. 

We’ve got education moving in a good direction, but we need to get those people up that have been stuck in poverty for a long time moving forward. So I’m excited about it. Do you want to start off with the key recommendations? 

Senator Jane English Yeah, I think that’d be good. 

Alliance for Opportunity Audit

Representative Mary Bentley So if you guys can look in this report in the audit starting on page 8, looking at actionable steps to move things forward here. I think if you look in the middle on page 9, I’m just really excited to see the thoughts that they had moved forward of just getting regional alignment. Because in each part of our state, there’s different things that will affect. The northeast part of the state and the northwest, very different things that are going on. 

So if we can combine things that work, our economic development and our workforce areas and regional asks and get the regions together, working together. I think it’s extremely important for us to be working forward into integrating work into everything that we do, especially when folks that are going to the DHS offices. If we look and see, that’s really the one spot in many of our rural districts. We can come here to Little Rock and see so many opportunities for people here that just are not available out in the rural part of our state. 

So if we can use our DHS offices and integrate those and get all of those folks trained to what’s available for our constituents that are in rural Arkansas, whether it be education or work training, but have those folks just even thinking to me is a whole different mindset. Because right now when you go to the workforce office, everything is, are you eligible for food stamps, are you eligible for Medicaid. 

But this says the first thing is, what job opportunities are available to you? What can we do to move you forward? Because some of these people hadn’t really even thought about that in a long time. They feel trapped and have just felt like they’re at a dead end. 

So just trying to move things forward on that, I think is really exciting for us to look at that. What can we do to get those folks aware of what’s available education-wise and training-wise. And I think with SNAP E&T and all those things, we will really be able to move folks forward. So that’s my opening comment. So we’ll go from there. 

Senator Jane English And I think the thinking about things on a regional basis, all the workforce programs and all the DHS programs, thinking about those on a regional basis rather than an individual site. And then unfortunately, that’s what happens so many times is we have an individual site or an individual workforce area that has its own plan and has its own things rather than something that goes across the state of Arkansas. 

So we had those key recommendations, and one of them was to integrate the administrative structure. And that’s kind of to move from these siloed agencies that we’ve got throughout the state government and put them together in one agency so that we have one group of people and everybody’s talking about the same things. And then we have an integrated service delivery, which is exactly the same thing. 

It’s kind of rather than across the state, each individual DHS office and workforce office and health care, health department office, all of these things would have a central theme and location and a plan that goes across all of them. But as Representative Bentley said, today, what happens is that people go and apply for a benefit. They do not go and apply for a job or think about that in a job. 

And some of the things where they have an opportunity to go, they don’t have all of the options that the rest of us would have to be able to go in and see what kinds of programs are available at the two-year college or free training or whatever else that’s out there in their region of the state. So they miss out on those opportunities, never really get a chance for a future. 

Representative Mary Bentley Representative Ladyman, would you like to check in? 

Representative Jack Ladyman I just had a question, Mary, if y’all are ready to take a couple of questions. 

Representative Mary Bentley Certainly. 

Representative Jack Ladyman Or maybe it’s a discussion instead of a question. 

Representative Mary Bentley Yeah, we had hoped to be in room 151 so we’d have more of a discussion, but it’s not available today. So I’m sorry. We’re having to bounce around, look around. This is discussion time today. 

Representative Jack Ladyman Well, on page 8 there where you were talking about that. And I really like the idea of having one source. I believe that’s something that we need to do, not just in this area, but in a lot of areas. On page 8 down there at the bottom, it talks about an imposed start date of July 1, 2027, for legislation recommended. 

And then it talks about, name a new secretary and create new work groups. I mean, where is the executive branch on this? Are we talking about an additional secretary? Are we talking about replacing one of the current secretaries? What’s the thoughts on that? 

Senator Jane English So these were just recommendations that they made, and all of that would be to be determined. And that’s what we will all be discussing. But I think that the, I believe, that the executive branch and the legislative branch will be working together on all of this because it’s to everybody’s benefit. So what you’re asking, that question is really to be determined. And that is what our committee will be doing. 

Representative Jack Ladyman Has the members of the executive branch been following us and working along with this? 

Senator Jane English Oh, yeah, Yeah. 

Representative Jack Ladyman All right, thank you. 

Representative Mary Bentley You’re welcome. Representative Beck. 

Consolidating administrative costs

Representative Rick Beck Thank you, Madam Chair. Sort of question, discussion, I guess. And this might be one of those, another that falls in that category that will be determined later. But we’ve seen a lot of cases where services are being provided. And we go through one tier and then we go down to another tier, another department, and then maybe another department down. 

And each one of them is adding administrative cost to whatever block grant they’re operating under and all that. And it’s 12%, 12%, 12%. Before you go too far, you’re out of money, right, or have very little money to provide services. So my question or my discussion, I guess, would be more like this. I do like the idea of having the central location to where we can, a person can go. 

Instead of collecting different data at 10 different locations, we’ve got all the data right here. And this is our path forward type of approach. I do like that but would this be done in a matter of where we’re adding another layer. Or are we going to, I guess, cut into an existing layer as far as the administrative costs and all of that? 

Senator Jane English I think the idea really is to reduce the administrative costs. If you go through this and look at what they determined while they were doing their study is that an inordinate amount of money goes for administrative and infrastructure costs and very little of that money goes to servicing or training for people, that there’s a very small amount of money that anybody gets to get or every organization has. 

So the goal here really is to increase the number of the amount of dollars that we’re spending on people and reduce the amount of dollars we’re spending on administration. 

Representative Rick Beck Just a discussion. Is it possible within our legislation that we could somehow put in that we would be able to say, okay, there are people who are strictly administrative and that’s what they do. They have their things, and what they’re doing is great. 

But we find too often, in reference to what you just said, that there’s where all the money’s going and very little of the money is going to the actual people who are doing the training or providing the service of someone trying to get them self-sufficient. 

Is there any way that we can integrate it within whatever proposal that we put together, sort of a generic guideline as to what percentages of the funds should be spent at the administrative level versus the level to the people that are actually what I would call frontline workers, that are actually helping the people get self-sufficient? 

Representative Mary Bentley That’s the recommendations. That’s what we’re after, right? The task of this committee is to bring recommendations. They can definitely be part of recommendations that we get down into. And if you look at, to me, on page 8 where we need to know– and I was going to ask Caitlin to do for us– is to find out what is the eligibility requirements for each one of these programs like for HUD and for SNAP and for E&T. All of them have different entry levels. What is that? Can we consolidate that? 

So, to me, if we can get eligibility also in one spot it is going to decrease the amount of administrative costs and all that and get it all working in one focus, get everybody to work. There’s a whole plan. How can you get people earning money and get people that are trapped in poverty out of that? So if it’s okay, we’ll add Representative Pilkington into the conversation 

Using AI to help

Representative Aaron Pilkington Thank you, Chairs. And I don’t have a binder in front of me. And I’m a little late to the conversation. So if I’m saying anything redundant, please just shush me. But, I mean, it seems like, from what I’ve seen with a lot of the new, especially the AI recommendations from the governor that came out recently, a lot this, though, if we can just get a central database that uses artificial intelligence, it can interact with the constituents, get the information, and then self-populate this information, let them know what programs are eligible and things like that.

I mean, I think in some ways, we try to reinvent the wheel, but a centralized hub can be virtual. And then of course, as we expand telehealth with rural health transformation dollars as well, I think there’s a real opportunity to use some of those telehealth services to do it. 

So a good example, if you’ve got an app on your phone that you’re eligible to use because you have Medicaid, be at the same time while that is taking its information from you, it can ask you a few extra questions it needs, then auto-populate that information into certain forms and let you know other things you’re available for. And also probably notify the Department of Workforce Services that you are available for work to then send that information to employers who are actively working for people to work. 

So I don’t know if we’ve had any discussion with AI vendors or anything like that, but I think this is something that that new technology can drastically help us with, because we’re talking about large amounts of data that we’re going to have to comb through. And having a program like that that’s already doing it, I think could massively save us a lot of money. 

And to Representative Beck’s point, I think we don’t have as large of an administrative cost because we’re not using people. We’re using a program. And then the people are actually there on the ground getting them into these services as opposed to being stuck in an office somewhere helping someone fill out a form. So I just want to add that to the conversation. 

Representative Mary Bentley Yeah, I think it’s highly, especially when looking at DHS,they are already talking about using AI and all that for filling out different forms, getting people. But again, we’re going to have those constituents that don’t have that technology, and we definitely want to have case managers available. 

I want each one of our offices, DHS offices across the state, to have case managers there to help those folks that aren’t to that point right because we have different age groups, different people. Some are very comfortable doing stuff on the phone and others are not. So I just want us to get everybody. I want to have an opportunity for us to make sure those people that are trapped in poverty for generations have a way to get out and someone to help them do that. 

And also, I think the way that we do this is we hold people accountable. I think that’s important. We’re bringing in our different community organizations to hold people accountable and have people on the right track that are actually moving forward and not just trapped in the system and using the system to not go forward. Anyone else have something else they want to add to the conversation looking at these key, key points moving forward? 

Senator Jane English I think all of these two are opportunities for us as we move forward, to have conversation groups and some organized, because AI is a really big thing. And so that deserves to have a working group of people to study AI and what it could bring to this conversation. So I’m hoping we’ll have a number of different working groups to look at each of these issues and have people together to talk about it, not just legislators, but other folks as well. 

Representative Mary Bentley Yep. Representative Ladyman.

Representative Jack Ladyman Yeah, thank you, Madam Chairman. Looking at page 53, where it’s the one door to work, I think that’s a great idea. Like a clearinghouse, maybe. And I think if you could make that work, if we could focus on some groups that I think are not participating in the labor market because just of difficulties that they might have, you mentioned people that are in generational poverty. 

Maybe they live in rural areas and are not aware of any programs or the programs. That’s one group that needs to be focused on. But I think there’s a couple others. You know, I believe we need to tap in more to people that are coming out of prison for a bunch of reasons so that they don’t go back. It’s very difficult for those folks to connect. They have no resources. Maybe they don’t even have any family.

I think we need a focus group on that. That would add a lot of people to our labor market. And also people moving into the state. You know, our population’s growing. Maybe sometimes they don’t know our departments or who to contact to find the job that they’re looking for that maybe they had in another state. So I think if we can have some focus groups, and I believe that’s what you’re talking about here, the working groups that might focus on one particular area. But I think that would be a good thing to consider. 

Senator Jane English One of the things I think that is probably at the forefront of all of this is we have somebody, just as you mentioned, that has to sometimes have to go four, five, six different agencies to get the same paperwork almost filled out instead of being able to know this is the place, these are the pieces of paper you have to fill out and that would go across all these agencies, as well as, here are all the programs that are available for you as a person coming in so that you have an opportunity to look at what you might want to take advantage of. 

One of the options out there today if you just go into the DHS office, county operations office, nobody has any idea inside of there what the possibilities could be. We need to change that so that folks that are going into that office would actually have the benefit of knowing what those programs are out there that might be able to help them. And not just to go for a benefit, but how is this program or this benefit going to help you to get where you need to be in the work world. 

The goal really is to start figuring out, and there’s no silver bullet for everybody that is not working today or is on some of these programs today. But how do we build a system that includes everything so that people 10 years from now or 12 or 15 or 20 years from now aren’t part of this system, but they have been able to find themselves a career pathway in the future. That’s what our education is the beginning of that. 

All of these things are working together. There’s no one silver bullet or one program that’s going to solve it all. It’s a combination of a lot of things. It’s a system. And a system is not a group of federal programs. 

Representative Mary Bentley All right, Representative Bick. 

Representative Rick Beck Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to jump, Representative Pilkington, comment on what I said. I’m going to comment back on what he had said. But I think the AI is a perfect way to push this forward because it really addresses the issue at two points. 

Number one is AI will be much more efficient than having offices full of people trying to interpret data. So that always works better. And I think that if it’s done right, AI is just priceless. But if it is done wrong, it’s just another barrier. And it will be a barrier, as you mentioned earlier, to some of the people that aren’t very computer literate or digital literate or whatever you want to say. 

But I think part of the program also ought to be that with the AI group, using that as an administrative part, that we make sure that there’s oversight as to how that system is working. Because I’ve seen a lot of times in the past, we put a system in and, oh, it’s a great system and it works really well. And we get five years down the road, no one’s using it because it’s not as great as we thought it was. 

Almost like a continuous feedback loop as to if someone’s not using it, why are they not using it, what’s the hurdle that stopped them. I guess I’m being an advocate for having someone working continuously on it. Don’t just do a one and done on an AI thing and say the world’s going to be great. 

Make sure that it works, because the more that we can push into that arena, it means the more people that we can pull out of those offices and put them in front of people actually helping on an individual basis. So I think it’s important that we don’t just try a one-and-done approach to that. 

Representative Mary Bentley Yeah, I think that’s what Senator English was saying. It’s going to have to be different for a lot of different folks. We want no wrong door, right? Every door is an opening for us to get people back to work. And with AI, when we’re looking at maybe 50 million if we don’t get our error rate decrease on SNAP, it’s really important that we get a more efficient effective system. 

So to me that’d be a way for us hopefully get that number down below 6 and we’re not going to lose that 50 million out of general revenue. All right, Senator Sullivan. 

Estimated cost savings

Senator Dan Sullivan Thank you, Madam Chair. Maybe I’ve missed it, and I apologize. Is there an estimate of how much we’re going to save with this, or we’re going to spend, but we have no estimate at what we save? 

Representative Mary Bentley No. We have just looked at, if we look at the audit here, if you go through and see how much money we’re spending now on workforce, and that’s just strictly on workforce. The money we’re spending, we’re spending very little on actual training individuals, a minuscule amount when the rest of it’s being spent on administrative costs. 

So we’re trying to take, not necessarily spend less money, but spend that money that we’re getting federally more efficiently and effectively to actually get people to work and not just spending money on an office and administrative costs.

Senator Dan Sullivan I agree, and that’s what we hope for. But at some point, it seems like we would have a range of what we expect to save, and what that cost savings is. And it seems like that would come fairly early in what this group plans to do. If we lay out, you’re going to do these things, it seems like a deliverable would be to come up with cost estimates and our savings estimates that can be redirected somewhere needs to show up in a deliverable. 

Representative Mary Bentley Yeah, no, I agree. 

Senator Jane English I think we’ll have that. 

Representative Mary Bentley Yeah, I think will definitely have that. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Okay, thank you. 

Representative Mary Bentley Representative Brown. 

Representative Karilyn Brown Thank you, Madam Chair. I am assuming that a lot of people who, I don’t know, majority or just a large number, but I’m assuming a number of people who are receiving benefits or who might be eligible for benefits of some sort have possibly got a bunch of misdemeanors and issues like that, lack of driver’s license and things like that. And people who are coming out of Department of Corrections that would be eligible to become productive citizens and have reason not to re-offend to go back to prison. Are we going to be incorporating any of this with their workforce objectives so that we can maybe possibly keep more people from re-offending just to get three hots and a cot?

Senator Jane English I think the goal is to try and increase the labor force participation rate. It’s not just the unemployment rate. It’s all these people that are out there that aren’t part of the workforce. And they are part of that workforce. 

So some of the things that you’re talking about I think will be our perfect place for the Governor’s 1033, where they’re working hard to try to get to those people and some folks in communities that are in some really untenable situations and how to help them be able to move out of those situations, which may not be exactly the same as somebody at a workforce services office being able to help somebody with their career pathway. 

But sometimes you have to have those other things going alongside to help people move forward. And the goal really is, how do we get more people into the workforce? And a lot of them are not sitting at home. Then you will find as we start looking through here that there are a lot of people who are working, but they’re not making very much money. So they qualify for most of these programs. So we’ll be looking at all of that as well. But the group that you’re talking about is exactly who are trying to get part of this. 

Representative Karilyn Brown Wonderful. Thank you. 

Representative Mary Bentley Representative Beck.

Representative Rick Beck  I want to comment on the deliverable comment, which I think is a great idea. But I’m not so much interested– but what I’m going to say is this, I think the deliverable needs to be tied to performance directly, like how many dollars are we spending per person that we’re putting, making them self-sufficient into the system? 

That type of deliverable to where it’ll have an automatic built-in feature where it says, okay, you’re doing what we want you to do, and that’s how you’re getting the dollars and trying to keep those dollars under check, just like Senator Sullivan said.

 As far as Representative Brown’s comment, I think that’s great. Because I think, if you don’t, certainly the ones, individuals coming out of prison system, if you don’t do something they’ll be back in a couple years. And that’s at a cost to the taxpayers. So why not do that? 

But I think one of the things that we ought to try to do is to say if we can help with this system to make the best system, it’s the system you want to plug into if you want and get a job, and then invite the people from the Department of Corrections when individuals are coming out of that system to be able to plug into this system because this is the system that’s going to take you from– what was the thing– open the door, the one door to employment. So I think that’s a great idea. I think both of those are great ideas. 

Representative Mary Bentley Awesome. So I think when we’re looking at this, if we can get this with the reentry programs that we currently have and get them all into this data hub and know what’s available regionally for those people to get a good job and training that we’re going to move people out. And we know that’s going to be definitely more successful for keeping them out of prison if we get them a good job and moving forward with community support. 

Senator Jane English And one of the things I think, too, is that hopefully what we’re going to see is I said there’s no silver bullet for today. But if some of the things that we’re doing in education and we’re trying to help people find a career pathway hopefully down the road, those numbers of people will be less and less going into prison, going on to Medicaid, going on to SNAP, some of these things because they have a life and they are productive citizens. And they’re being able to support their families. 

To Senator Sullivan’s thing, I think if you look in here, one of the things that we found was that through our WIOA, our workforce things, we had about $14 million that goes out to all the 10 workforce development areas. Out of that $14 million, $1.5 million was spent on programs. In one of the areas, the only training program that they had was CDL truck drivers. Now there’s a lot of people in that area but that’s the only training program they had. 

So those are the kinds of return on investment I think we’re hoping that we change is that instead of $1.5 million for training, that we have upwards of that amount of money and less spent on administrative costs and infrastructure. 

Representative Mary Bentley All right, Representative Ladyman. 

Representative Jack Ladyman Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, I appreciate what Representative Brown talked about there. And we’ve talked about people coming out of prison. But there are a lot of people, if you’ve been to the courts and you’ve seen how many people are in there and they’re in this legal process, they might be in that for a year or two. 

And employers won’t hire those people because they don’t want to train them. They don’t know where they’re going to go, what’s going to happen. So I think we’re missing out on some productivity there. If we had a way to connect those people with companies or employers who would be willing to give them the job while they’re going through the legal process, I believe there’s a whole bunch of people in that group.

 And I believe they’re non-productive right now. And I think they could be productive if they had the right connections to people that would be willing to bring them on board for that period of time, even though there’s some unknowns there. And that’s just another group that we can identify. And if we all got together and think about it, there’s probably other groups where we could really increase our workforce. So anyway I just wanted to make that comment.

Representative Mary Bentley Thank you. And I think it’s key that we have actual industry leaders involved in this conversation, because too many times they’re left out. And so exactly what do they need and how can we connect is going to be key to making sure we move this forward in the manner that we want it to. So Representative Brown?

Representative Karilyn Brown Thank you, Madam Chair. Two things. I’m not quite certain, but I believe we’re going to be trying to address the benefit cliffs while we’re doing all of this?

Representative Mary Bentley Yes, definitely part of the conversation. 

Representative Karilyn Brown And then another thing that I think is very concerning is that we have people involved with DHS– I mean, I’ve got, it’s not my constituent, but a constituent has reached out to me. He and his wife are going through all kinds of nightmares with classes and counseling and stuff. 

He is a productive person making at least 100,000 a year. He has lost $20,000 in annual income simply because of all the classes he’s been having to take for things they have not been accused of. We need to look at DHS and see what they’re doing to hinder people from making a living while we’re at it. 

Representative Mary Bentley Well, that’s definitely part of this committee’s task. So, we’ll look forward to digging deep into that as well. So, Senator Sullivan. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Thank you, Madam Chair. I think this idea that we believe this and we hope this and we anticipate this, some of those are known numbers. We know how many people are incarcerated. We have a projection that the people that are doing the study should be able to project that we hope to improve that number by X. And that when those people are involved in the workforce, that they’re going to make a salary. We know what the average salary is, what Y is. 

And hopefully these people have had experience doing this so it’s not just us out on an island hoping and believing there are real numbers out there to go by. We know what those numbers are. They can get those from other states and other places they’ve been involved in. I don’t know any of us that would be willing to invest anything not knowing what our return on investment is. 

And I think that is a requirement to give us a range. And they can give us a range based upon what their expectations are. And if we expect, if these things happen, this will be our return. If those things happen, this will be our return. Surely they can have the data out there from other projects and ongoing with this project to give feedback on there. 

And I see that in the document. That they’ll give us continual updates on their success. What determines success? I mean, is success saving money? Is success putting people in jobs and losing money? What determines that? I don’t know. 

Senator Jane English Our goal really for this committee was to look at social programs and workforce development reform. So looking at all the myriad probably 40 different workforce development programs and about 80 social services programs. 

So of all of those programs, how efficient are they and how are they helping to serve people? And how do we do a better job of coordinating those efforts so that we’re not just spending billions of dollars a year and it’s going out the door but we don’t see any benefit to the people that they’re serving or that they are spending money on. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Yeah, I agree with you 100%. Those numbers should be quantifiable. 

Senator Jane English But I don’t know that we have those numbers. That’s what our consultants, they’re going to help us to come up with those numbers. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Yeah, I’m not necessarily disagreeing. I’m saying those numbers should be quantifiable, that they’re quantifiable now. We may not have it ,and that may be their first project is to quantify what those data points are. Because that’s what we’re going to use to make the projection about how much we’re going to save or how much we’re going to lose in this. So yeah, I think we’re not disagreeing with you. But I just want to be clear that I think there needs to be ranges out there on what they think we’re wasting on, our savings on, and what that number will be. 

Representative Mary Bentley Thank you, Senator, and I agree with you 100%. There’s no reason we can’t get an ROI in what we’re trying to do. And once we get them specific data, what specific goals we want to go for, so we have to set out what we want to do. And once we get those data points, then we can move forward and get in some specific. Yeah, awesome. Good deal. All right, anybody else want to chime in on this conversation at this point? 

Senator Jane English So we want to move to Jill. So Miss Thayer, if you would like to join us please at the table and we will talk about our contract. Yeah, Mason’s on the Teams. So in case we have questions, they’re here. There he is. Thank you for joining us. And if you will identify yourself, you’ll be recognized. 

WorkED Consulting contract

Jill Thayer Thank you, Madam Chair. Jill Thayer, Bureau of Legislative Research. And I think you should all have– is it in their packets, Kate? Yes, you should have in your packet a copy of a draft consultant services agreement between the Bureau and WorkED Consulting LLC who Mr. Bishop represents. I’m just going to go over the main terms of this contract for you all and then I’ll be happy to answer any questions. 

Attachment A to this contract sets out the statement of work that WorkED would perform for this subcommittee as it relates to your study that you were just discussing that was assigned to you under Act 145 of 2025. If you’ll look at page two, this contract would be effective March 20th. The reason for that is if this subcommittee decides today to move forward with this contract, it will then go through the Executive Subcommittee at its March 19th meeting.

 And then final approval would be by the full Legislative Council on March 20th. Once that occurs, Marty would be able, Director Garrity would be able to sign the contract and it would be effective. The contract would run through June 30th of 2027. This would provide you with this consultant’s assistance through the regular session. If there is legislation that results from your study, they can assist with that. 

The maximum contract amount under this contract is $158,000. The Bureau always sets out a maximum contract amount that’s based on actual billable hours. WorkED has set out their fees and estimated expenses in attachment B to the contract. So they would bill us monthly. We would pay them for actual hours worked and actual travel expenses up to $158,000. If they were requested to perform any services outside the statement of work that set forth here, you would have the ability to request an additional 10%, and that would be approved by the Legislative Council chairs. 

They do have a few sub-contractors listed that they’d like to utilize in this contract. And they are members of the Georgia Center for Opportunity team that assisted you and completed the audit and recommendations that you were just reviewing. And they are also listed under the fees and expenses. The rest are just our typical contract terms. And I would be happy to answer any questions. 

Representative Mary Bentley Senator Sullivan. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Thank you. My questions may be directed to Mr. Bishop if that’s– is that appropriate at this time? 

Representative Mary Bentley Yeah, that’s why he’s here. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Thank you for being here, first of all, and appreciate it. And I may have missed out some of the meetings or some of the questions you may have already answered. I apologize for that. Are the deliverables that are in this contract, services, are those similar to what you’ve done in other states? 

Mason Bishop Yes, and they’re very similar to my earliest experience in Utah in the 1990s when I was directly involved in creating the Utah Department of Workforce Services. So I’ve been at this for about 30 years. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Yeah, I think I was here when you did that– I think you’ve been here to give a presentation, haven’t you? 

Mason Bishop Correct. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Yeah. And I remember being here at that one. So again, I just wanted to get that on record that you– so are you able then with your previous experience, able to give us ongoing return on investment updates? 

When you give those updates, you’ll be able to come and say, here’s what we are doing, we know the cost. So this will be the anticipated savings at this point. And those certainly are, we anticipate those will change as circumstances change. But will that be included in your reports? 

Mason Bishop Yes, absolutely, we can do that. And I should add that my most recent experience was in Louisiana, helping them go through their year-long process of moving from an executive order task force in their case to legislation a year later. So absolutely, ROI is something we can absolutely help with.

Senator Dan Sullivan Yeah, I would see a need to have that in a contract. Is that normal that it’s in a contact? And I don’t mind doing an abnormal. But I would say that is having language in the contract that says we’re going to get ongoing return on investment updates and we define what that is. Is that unusual? 

Mason Bishop No. I mean, absolutely. I’m open to whatever deliverables, activities you want in the contract and that would be appropriate. At this point, I think we left it somewhat high level so that there would be flexibility that I could be directed by you and by the chairs to do the work that you need me to do. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Yeah, I’m fine with that. It’s got to be fairly general because it’s very dynamic in what you’re addressing. And the conditions change with every new study you do or the outcomes. Okay, thank you very much. 

Mason Bishop The ROI absolutely, we can give you ongoing ROI updates. Absolutely. 

Senator Dan Sullivan And can you provide that language? I guess it’s in other contracts. Can you work with BLR to provide samples of what that language looks like? 

Mason Bishop Sure. 

Senator Dan Sullivan I hate to create something new if it’s already done. 

Jill Thayer Senator Sullivan, I would say if that’s the will of the subcommittee, we’ll get it added to the statement of work for what’s presented to the Executive Subcommittee. 

Senator Dan Sullivan Okay, I may have to come up with my own contract then because I want to see it. 

Representative Mary Bentley Representative Ladyman. 

Representative Jack Ladyman Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a question on the contract on that attachment A, that first paragraph, and I hope I’m not duplicating what Senator Sullivan just asked. But it talks about services and technical assistance as directed by the co-chairs of this subcommittee. And not that I distrust our chairs of this committee, but is there any– and it talks about BLR staff. Would the co-chairs of council or anyone else need to review these requests on an ongoing basis? I don’t know, maybe chairs can address that. Is that necessary? 

Jill Thayer So the subcommittee is defined at the beginning of the contract as this subcommittee. And that’s typically how we do that. Once Legislative Council authorizes you to utilize the consultant by approving the contract, they leave it to the final say on that is usually the chairs of that subcommittee. 

Representative Jack Ladyman I know a lot of times when we have things like this, we’ll have just the chairs of council sign off just so that they know what’s going on. I don’t know in this case whether that’s necessary or not. Maybe chairs might want to comment on that, but just a question about oversight. 

Representative Mary Bentley I’ll just say that we have kept the chairs of ALC informed of every move that we make. They have been keenly involved in conversations. And as we move forward with this whole thing, we brought them in to make sure that they’re keenly aware of what we’re doing as well as the administration knows exactly what we are doing and moving forward. So if it’s the will of this committee, we’re just right now looking at recommendations. 

But I think it’s highly important to have Mason and his group working with us to make sure we’re moving in the right direction. This is very, this is complex. What we’re trying to do here is transformative and nothing simple. I think it’s really important if we want to do it correctly to have folks that have done it elsewhere in other states to bring us and move us forward in the direction that we want to go. 

So that’s what today’s contract is to make sure we have their keen insight and their experience to move us for the direction that we want to go and do it in a fast manner. We’re trying to get things done pretty quick, even now as we’re moving forward with the waivers and stuff for workforce. These are things moving forward instantly that we wanted to get their input on. And they’ll be able to attend Zoom with us to meetings that we have with this group.

Representative Jack Ladyman I’m not making a recommendation for that. I just thought it was something that we need to consider and think about. So thank you, Madam Chair. 

Senator Jane English Do we have any other questions, discussions? 

Representative Mary Bentley Seeing no discussions, do I have a motion by anyone to move forward with this contract? Representative Beck. And a second, Senator Sullivan. All those in favor of moving forward with this contract, say aye. Those opposed? Thank you. To me it looks like we’ll move forward with the contract. Mason, thank you so much. We look forward to some amazing transformative things happening here in Arkansas. Thank you so much. 

Senator Jane English It’s exciting. We have something really, really exciting that we can do here in state government. We’ve done some exciting things over the past few years but I think this is probably one of the most exciting things we can do. So I think we’re finished. Seeing no other business, we are adjourned.