ALC Hospital: Jan. 12, 2026

Representative Mary Bentley Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for coming back again for another important meeting. I think that you guys will all find this discussion really will take off from what we started this morning hearing from Nick Moore on the federal level. 

We’re going to hear some results from the state level. So if you guys will all remember, this is the company that we hired to do an audit for us of what’s going on in Arkansas with our current workforce and so they’re here back to report to what they found out. So today we have with us Rachel Barkley, Mason Bishop and Les Ford, all here from the Alliance for Opportunity. And we’re so glad to have them here in person. A little bit easier than trying to do something on Zoom. 

So thank you all for taking the time to be here with us today. We really appreciate it. So I’ll see if Senator English has anything to say before we get started. She’s fine. All right, everybody. Get your pencils ready for some questions. And we’ll start with the report. Thank you all so much for being here. 

Report on reforming Arkansas workforce efforts

Rachel Barkley Thank you so much for bringing us in to do this work. We have spent lots of time virtually and in person with folks in your state over the past few months, and we are grateful for the leadership of Senator English and Representative Bentley and you all in wanting to address these important issues. 

I’m Rachel Barkley. I’m the executive director of the Alliance for Opportunity. And my colleagues here are senior fellows with the project. And we have two more folks on the phone, Erik Randolph and Ray Packer. And amongst the five of us, we have, gosh, probably five or six decades of, probably more, decades of experience working in state agencies, in state legislatures, in Congress, and at the federal level on issues of workforce and public assistance or safety net funding. 

You’ll hear us use those words interchangeably for kind of the human services programs. And we are all about doing research and work across states to see how we can help people move from dependence on government programs into lives of flourishing through the dignity of work. So that’s our background. And you all brought us on for these objectives you see on the screen. 

So we looked at the participation across workforce and public assistance or safety net programs and what those costs, what the administrative costs look like. And we are looking for improvement. So when we talked to you all at the beginning of this contract, you said, we don’t want just to see the numbers. We want to know what we can do differently, what we can change. 

And so today, we’re coming to you with not only a diagnosis, but also some suggestions. Now, our methodology, we looked at publicly available reports. We also asked your agency officials for some numbers, some outcomes behind the scenes in their data sets. But importantly, we spent a week here in three DHS county offices and three workforce offices where we interviewed and observed what’s going on in those offices on the ground with caseworkers, with folks working throughout the systems and the services, as well as many virtual interviews with agency leaders running the programs. 

So how this presentation is going to go is we’re going to talk about what currently exists, what does the system look like, and then we’re going to give our diagnosis and talk about what we found in those site visits. And then we’ll talk finally about what we see as best practices across other states as a plan moving forward, some options for you all to think about. And then of course taking questions and feedback from you all. So I’m going to start with, what does your workforce look like with some key numbers. 

You all can see these numbers. And I think I’m going to start maybe with some bad news on this slide, and then we’ll move to good news on the next slide of things you’re doing well here in Arkansas. But if you just kind of look at the environment, the state of things in Arkansas, The number I want you to really key in on is that 202,000– 202,000 prime age working adults who are not engaged at the workforce at all. And you say, well, that doesn’t match up with our unemployment rate numbers. Your unemployment rate number doesn’t catch folks who are not engaged in work search. 

So our methodology brings together everybody on the sidelines who is disconnected from work, people who have fallen out who are not even looking for work anymore. So that’s a large number of human capital on the sidelines in your state. Also important is you have over a million folks on Medicaid and CHIP. 

That’s more than 30 percent of the population. And you have more than 10 percent of your population who are on SNAP. So these are just things to keep in mind globally about the state. Also, consistently Arkansas is in the bottom 10 states when it comes to labor force participation rate. So that’s kind of the bad news portion of what we’re trying to fix with this work today. 

Now, the good news is you all have done quite a few things to lay the groundwork for some good actions moving forward. Very important is the 2023 Learns Act. K through 12 obviously sets you up for a good workforce in the future. So education reform, critical. You’ve done a lot of work on integrated eligibility in your public assistance. That’s Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF. 

That means behind the scenes you’re doing eligibility in an integrated system. And in your data, in your intake, there’s been a lot of work in your shared services to integrate across programs. And we’ll talk later about why that’s important. That data sharing infrastructure is there, even if it’s not fully being utilized yet. It is there. It is built in your state, which is great. 

Governor Sanders’ 1033 Initiative, we think lays the groundwork for some important case management that wraps around and helps these families flourish. Inbound migration is good news. You have people, human capital coming into the state. And this last piece I want to make sure we think about is that, and I know you had a presentation right before us from DC, is that the agencies in DC right now are very friendly to innovation. 

They are asking states to come up with innovative ideas on these federal programs and to make the systems better. So DC is saying, bring us your ideas. So you’re in a good environment for that. 

Now, before I pass it and introduce my colleagues here to talk more in depth about workforce and then the safety net, this took us many, many hours to put together. Because as you can see, we’ve got a very diffuse, very complicated system. So what you see in this screen, the red level at the top are your federal agencies. So I won’t sugar-coat it. A lot of the problems are handed down from DC and how they administer the programs across agencies. 

You see DC, the Department of Education, Department of Labor, etc., comes up with different rules for programs. And then you go to the next layer, the dark blue layer, are your state-level agencies. Then you go the light blue layer. Those are the programs themselves. And then if you go to the very bottom, the gray boxes are your intermediary, like local school districts, community and technical colleges, workforce boards. Those are kind of your local intermediaries. 

The very bottom layer of boxes is how individuals apply for services. Look at all of those different avenues people go through to apply for different programs and services. The bottom yellow level are families who need the help. And so with that, I’m going to hand it over to Mason Bishop who has worked across many different states and has deep knowledge in how to reform our workforce training programs. 

He’s going to go over what the workforce system looks like and why systems are important to success. And then Les Ford, who worked in the White House. Les and Mason have both worked in the White House and on these state level programs. Les will talk about how our safety net programs are administered here in Arkansas. So, Mason, we’ll go to you. 

Mason Bishop Thank you, Rachel. It’s good to see you all again. I was here in August and had an opportunity to present. 

Representative Mary Bentley Mason, if you don’t mind, pull that microphone just a little bit closer to you. 

Mason Bishop Sorry about that. 

Representative Mary Bentley Much better, thank you. 

Mason Bishop Is that better? Thank you. Appreciate it. So before we go to the next slide, I do want to address the right-hand side of the organization slide, because this becomes really important with regard to some of the issues. You’ll see there that essentially what I like to say is that we don’t have a workforce system in the state. 

So what we have is a set of silo programs working side by side by side. And it’s important as we look to how to reform these programs, how to modernize the Arkansas and how to actually create a comprehensive workforce system in Arkansas, that it become real clear that part of what we’re dealing with is federal legislation that has been going on for decades, but that there are opportunities for you to actually take what are current parameters in federal law and turn them on their head a bit and be innovative. 

Primarily, what I want to get across is if you look at the right-hand side of this, you’ll see the 10 local workforce boards. What becomes important is a lot of times as legislators and as public officials, you will hear that workforce is local, that it must stay local, that it most run through these local boards and local workforce development areas. Local boards and local workforce development areas are defined by the Federal Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act. 

However, the only dollars that the local boards are responsible for administering are the WIOA Title I dollars, of which your current appropriation is roughly $14 to $15 million per year right now. So it’s like the tail wagging the dog. It’s like saying, we’re going to structure our workforce system around these local boards, of which only have a very small portion of the dollars. 

Now the other thing you’re going to hear from us is that cost allocation, how do you actually bill the federal government for all these different programs and how do you do that? And right now under the WIOA law, it actually asks these local boards to negotiate in different ways how all of these federal partner programs are to work together in 10 different ways in 10 different geographies across the state of Arkansas. 

Of all those programs that they’re negotiating cost allocation plans for, essentially they’re only responsible for the one Title I. So what do you have? You have all these other programs sort of like in a de minimis way saying, we’ll participate or we’ll talk to you and work with you. But you really don’t have a structured way to create a funded workforce system of which people have access to training, to education, and to upward mobility. 

Just to show you one of the interesting dynamics is one of the other programs on this chart is called the Wagner-Peyser Employment Service. That program’s been around since 1935. It’s a New Deal program. And under that program, it is state employees who actually provide that service, the employment service. Well, that employment service provided by state employees is exactly the career services that the local WIOA Title I people are providing. 

So just right there, you have a lack of integration around how we’re even providing basic services to individuals who are coming into our offices. One last thing I just want to emphasize around the workforce part of this is that you have what are called one-stop career centers. Sometimes they’re called American job centers. And what you’ll find is that, and we’re going to have a chart later on that demonstrates this, is that those physical locations across the state of Arkansas are primarily funded only with the WIOA Title I and the Wagner-Peyser dollars. 

All these other programs you see on this chart are not really participating in any meaningful way in the connection, in the service delivery, and in the financing of, quote unquote, a one-stop shop. 

So to Rachel’s point, essentially, the people who need the education training and are most vulnerable in your state are having to maneuver through three and four and five different systems or programs to avail themselves of the kind of assistance that will help them be upwardly mobile. That doesn’t even get into the fact that you have your community and technical college system, which also gets a variety of federal dollars, Perkins and other things, to provide education skills training. 

And so the question becomes, how do we better connect in a meaningful way the quote unquote money that’s going for workforce and job training, the money that is going to education and job-training, and the public assistance dollars that are to support people’s education and training and workforce journey to upward mobility. So that’s what I wanted to say before we get into the next slide. 

Les Ford And for the purposes of pointing out what’s on the left-hand here, those are your human services over here. We’re talking about–

Representative Mary Bentley Les, can I ask you the same thing? Sorry, those microphones are very touchy and some of us are a little, anyway, a little less hearing acute. I’ll put it that way. 

Les Ford Okay, so on the left hand side, you’re going to see a box there. You’re going to see TANF– that’s cash assistance– Medicaid and ARKIDS– that’s your Medicaid and your CHIP programs. And you’re going to see SNAP. That’s food stamps. They are all in a system together. But you might as well draw a big wall, cement, iron-gated between the public assistance money going to folks and your workforce system. 

So when we talked before at the beginning about all the folks who are on the sidelines, if you want to guide them back into the heart of your communities, you have completely separated the systems. They are siloed next to each other, where you could help the people receiving funds get the assistance they need to get back into the workforce if they need assistance. So that’s essentially what we really want you to garner from this chart before we get into the particular details. 

Rachel Barkley And I’ll add quickly before the next slide, think about each of these streams of arrows going down carry their own administrative costs. And the goal of this study, the goal of this work is to help people get into the workforce. But there are also significant dollars that get diverted to administrative costs that are duplicative. 

And we’ll talk more about that. That could be going to help people with training, funding training or services that instead are caught up in administration. So we’ll get to that later. The next slide, Mason will start with more of what Les was talking about, that iron wall and what we observed in our site visits. This starts the portion of the presentation where we talk about our research and site visits and what we have observed about silos to start with. 

Mason Bishop The first thing I want to mention, and Rachel, Les and I feel very strongly about this, is all of our work, this is not an indictment on the people who are actually working in the system, who are working in agencies, and who are providing services, because they are doing so under the culture and under the organizations and under structures of which they’ve been handed. So we want to make sure that we give you that caveat that none of this is a criticism. 

In fact, one of the things I wanted to mention about this slide is Rachel and I were interviewing one particular group of individuals at a one-stop and one of the things we did at the beginning of our interviews, we said, Hey, kind of keep in the back of your mind our last question that we’re going to get to is, If you could wave a magic wand, if you had a wish list, what would it be? 

And what we heard at one of our very first one-stop visits was, we want to be part of the same team. And when we heard that, we had a very robust conversation for about 10 or 15 minutes. And it was very clear to us that a lot of the people that are frustrated about the current situation are the workers in these systems and in these silos themselves. They would like to be part of the same team. And that’s what they asked us to help them with. And so the reality is that customers of these programs are stuck in these siloes. And that is actually the great tragedy of all of this. 

As I mentioned already, what are called one-stop centers under the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act here in Arkansas are essentially being primarily funded through WIOA Title I and Wagner-Peyser Employment Service. It’s a very limited sort of look at what a one- stop center is. And in fact, in the couple of centers that we visited, a number of individuals were primarily there just to apply for unemployment insurance. Well, unemployment insurance can be applied for virtually through the internet, through telephone. 

And so essentially, you have people coming in just saying, how do I apply for unemployment, and they try to divert them to discussions around workforce or other things. But a one-stop center in Arkansas is not this diverse set of programs being funded from different kinds of the programs you saw on the chart, where an individual can afford themselves an array of assistance that get them on that workforce path. 

And so essentially if you’re an individual with a disability, if you’re an individual whose primary motivation to showing up at an office is to apply for public assistance, or if you are somebody who just wants to know skills upgrading, you’re going through other different doors. You’re either going through a public assistance human services door, you are going to a community and technical college, you might be going to a one-stop center. 

But you have to figure out which of these quote unquote systems or programs am I going to actually avail myself of the service? And then it’s luck of the draw. If I end up through one of these doors, my opportunity of trying to access the other doors become very challenging. And one of the things we heard in all of our interviews, whether they were human services interviews or workforce services interviews, was, once I go through that door, my connection between the public assistance side and the workforce side is basically non-existent. 

In fact, we heard very loud and clearly that they do not really have an opportunity to talk to each other to do even basic referrals. And unless you knew somebody from a professional connection, you didn’t even know who to call in the other agency. So we were very concerned about that fact that there’s absolutely, between the public assistance, human services side and the workforce side, an absolute disconnect and lack of any opportunity for individuals who are asking for help to get connected to all of that. 

And so the results are really that customers who need an array of these services are not able to get them. And therefore what’s really important is their access to upward mobility is extremely limited. So to try to solve the kinds of problems like labor force participation, you don’t have the system tools as a legislative body for that challenge to be well done. 

And so the risk really is that you do not have a comprehensive workforce system in Arkansas. And so your ability to, again, address labor force participation, upward mobility, skills upgrading, attracting businesses into Arkansas because you have an educated and skilled workforce, all of those kinds of issues that you’re going to want or try to involve yourself in dealing with are going to be very limited 

Rachel Barkley Mason, can you go real quick about the employer side having to deal with silos? 

Mason Bishop Yeah, thank you, Rachel, for bringing that up because that’s the other side of it. We often talk about the customers as the job seeker, worker, student customer. But on the business side, which some people argue is the primary customer because without the jobs we don’t have the ability to connect people into upward mobility, what this does is– think if you’re a business in any geography in Arkansas, essentially what’s happening is I may get called by the WIOA person. I may be called by Wagner-Peyser and unemployment insurance people. The community college is calling me. The human services is calling. 

And now with work requirements in the public assistance programs, are we going to have five and six and seven and eight different people calling a business trying to get them to connect in some way with helping employ people? And often these are the same people, the workers are. 

We’re calling businesses five and six and seven times to try to employ the same person who’s come into our different silo programs. And so there’s a real opportunity here in what we’re going to be presenting as solutions to really have more of an, I’ll call it a consolidated or centralized way we work with businesses, so that we’re being very strategic in how we upskill people and how we get them connected to the jobs that are available in a number of industries. 

Rachel Barkley And now you may be saying, I’m here to work on workforce. Why do they keep talking about public assistance programs? And because you’ll see later, we’re going to do a side by side of the federal and state monies, but mostly federal monies that fund our workforce programs and then that fund our social safety net programs. And the social safety programs far outweigh what we spend on workforce training.

 And we really view our human services, our social services should be work supports. You have child care as a work support to help people get back into the workforce. All of this should help people on a path to work because we know that work is correlated with better family formation. If somebody’s working, their physical health, their mental health are all better. Many studies across time, across all ideologies show this about work. 

So we’re talking about human services because these services are work supports. And Les is going to talk about what we saw when we went into county offices, and again, give this story of how great some of these workers are that we met. The people working on this in your state really care about the people that they’re serving. But the structure that we showed earlier is not focused around a core culture of work from what we observed. So Les. 

Les Ford Yeah, so your human services are really good at enrollment. So you have over a million people coming into Access Arkansas to apply for Medicaid. You have nearly 400,000 people on food stamps. And that’s what the frontline caseworkers, that’s where their job is. It is to enroll, to check for eligibility. 

So when we went on the ground and we asked those frontline caseworkers, OK, you do a 10 minute phone interview, you get on the line. What happens if that person wants to advance in their career? What happens if that individual needs access to child care in order to advance in their career? 

The frontline caseworkers in two instances began to cry because they did not have the tools at their disposal to help the vulnerable person, their neighbor in their community, get the help they needed. They couldn’t connect them to child care. They had to Google for them. They didn’t have access to housing services, and they definitely didn’t have access to anything to help them get back into work. 

And so two things we heard from the frontline workers was an air of frustration, of inevitability. These are people who genuinely care about their neighbors and they don’t feel like they have the tools in their toolbox to actually help them. And the second thing we heard constantly is, I Google. I Google, okay, is there a homeless shelter you can go to? I Google where’s the closest community college? 

There’s nothing, they don’t have the tool in their system to say, okay, here, you’re automatically enrolled in this workforce program. It’s available down the street, show up on Monday. Now, they do have access to SNAP E&T, but they make the referral, they have no idea if the individual shows up. It just pings back against the area system and three months later they’re cut off from benefits if they don’t happen to enroll. 

And again, the people who are connected to SNP E& T, the smallest of the workforce programs in your state, is less than 1% of SNAP enrollees. So it’s not a workforce program. You guys have an enrollment program and only for a few programs. TANF, SNAP, Medicaid. 

Rachel Barkley And as you can see at the bottom, this is a critical risk in the coming year or two, because there will be Medicaid work requirements, which we know Arkansas applied for a waiver and got off the ground and tried before. And so you have back end systems that are ready. So that’s good news. 

You have good eligibility and data systems ready. But at the human level, what happens if somebody on Medicaid says, all right, I’m going to be subjected to this new work requirement, but I don’t have the skills or I need help finding a job. Where is that referral happening? How do they get connected to the workforce training? And if they don’t, then you run the risk of them just falling off the rolls if they don’t get a job. 

And so that’s not a good outcome for anyone. And so this is a big risk over the coming years as work requirements get implemented. Next, we’re going to talk about inefficiencies that are just baked into the siloed system. And when we talk about inefficiencies, we’re talking largely about the administrative duplicities. So Mason. 

Mason Bishop So, again, on the workforce side, we have a caveat that while it’s hard to quantify exactly what these inefficiencies look like, I would guess that it is probably in the millions of dollars. You’d need to do a forensic audit to actually get a specific number. But we did look at some, just some interesting data points that you’ll see on your slide. 

So, for program year 2024, Arkansas had an allotment of $14.8 million in WIOA Title I dollars. Again, these are the dollars that primarily go locally to the 10 local workforce boards. The data we were provided showed that of that 14.8 billion, only 1,273 people were served. And again, for that 14.8 million, only 1.7 million was spent on training. 

In fact, I always say if you’ve heard about the Workforce Pell program, which is going to be effective in July, that WIOA is supposedly the job training funding and always historically has been, and yet so little money goes to training that Congress has come along and created Workforce Pell now to hopefully help get people trained. 

Now, people may ask, so if 1.7 out of 14.8 was spent on training, where’s the other money going? That’s really where it goes to physical infrastructure, staffing, administrative costs, and the other kinds of things that we’re going to talk to you about in terms of solutions. The state also received another $5 million for the Wagner-Peyser employment services program. 

So again the impact of this, just looking at these programs, this isn’t the entire map that we showed you earlier. You can see that as funding constraints grow, you don’t have any money to actually operationalize helping serving people because so much of it is just trying to keep our doors open and provide basic services to people. 

Les Ford And now we’re going to focus in on the human services. So your SNAP E&T dollars are largely going to your community colleges. You’re kind of double funding there to low-income people who are attending your community colleges, but that’s where the funds are going. And a large amount of what you’re spending via TANF, which is the block grant that’s given to you, is directly going to subgrantees. 

So it’s not funding participants, cash benefits, or training there either. So again, on the human services side, even the money that is going towards employment and training is going toward infrastructure and not necessarily direct training provision. So on the Human Services, you’re leaking funds from administration that could be serving beneficiaries. 

And especially as you implement work requirements with the vast number, vast percentages of folks who are in your Human Services who will be expected to return to work, those who need extra assistance won’t find it. 

Rachel Barkley And I’d put a point on there that, as we looked at the list of providers, grantees who are receiving these TANF dollars and these SNAP E&T dollars, we are not passing judgment on who these providers are. They all seem to provide good services, and we didn’t do an audit of each individual. 

Our point we’re trying to make there is, there isn’t a statewide strategy when you look across the SNAP E&T training, the WIOA training, the TANF training that’s going on, the wraparound services. They’re all being administered in their pieces without an overarching whole state strategy on how these dollars are being spent so that they can be spent wisely on the populations that really need the training, the jobs that are open in your state. 

There isn’t even a side-by-side analysis there of, these are the jobs that really need to be filled in Arkansas and how are we training people to fill those jobs with all of these federal dollars that are coming down in their different streams. All right, Mason’s going to talk about, this is a map of the physical location. So the light blue dots are the DHS County offices. The stars are the different one-stop job centers. And then the red are community colleges. 

Mason Bishop So one add-on to what Rachel said, too, is when we went to local areas and asked, what are you actually, with the $1.7 million, essentially, what training is occurring? And really, the only thing that was really happening was CDL truck driver training. That was by far primarily the only training that was happening. And my guess is because you have providers of that training that are referring people directly to those one-stop centers for that training. 

But if you’re in a state that has a diverse number of industries, which you do, you have health care, you have manufacturing, you have all these other kinds of industries. Not that CDL isn’t necessarily a bad training avenue, but with limited training dollars and only being the only training people are getting, you can see here you’re very limited in helping impact and upskilling people in a variety of industries across Arkansas. 

Now, with this map, I think the primary takeaway I’d like you all to have on this is, if I’m in a poor county or I’m a vulnerable individual, what office is my only option or what am I going to go to first? And the argument we make with this map is that, again, I’ve told you that the idea of one-stop centers are anything but because they’re very limited in their footprint and limited in what services they actually have and what partners are actually involved. 

But if you look at this map, the message we send most Arkansans is, if you need help, go to the welfare office. That’s the message this sends. So we want you to just really understand what that physical footprint looks like throughout Arkansas. And what really becomes important, you’re going to again hear from us on some solution areas, this is why we really talk about how do we bring these infrastructures together in a much more comprehensive way to be workforce and culturally, organizationally, workforce-focused so that you send the right kind of message to people when they need assistance in any county in Arkansas. 

Rachel Barkley The next two slides, we went through. These are obviously not all of the programs, but key programs. So you can kind of see, it will produce a final report at the end of the month where we’ll have more details and explain what these numbers, going to do a little analysis of what they mean. You’ve got a state fiscal year that’s different than the federal fiscal year, so picking state versus federal dollars, that it all comes in about the same, but just a little bit about that analysis on these numbers. 

But we chose fiscal years here just to give you an idea of what a year looks like. And this first slide are the workforce dollars and the workforce participants, much of which we talked about. But we wanted you to have just a visual snapshot of what that spending looks like. And before I go to human services, Mason, do you want to say anything about this? 

Mason Bishop No, other than, again, this just, again re-emphasizes that the idea that WIOA is the workforce system shows you that really WIOA is but one of a small program in a myriad of programs and dollars that the state of Arkansas is receiving to help people with upskilling and training and upward mobility. 

Rachel Barkley And then this next slide is the human services. And you see the amount of money spent dwarfs what is spent on the workforce training. I mean, we’re close to $10 billion spent on human services, largely from federal dollars. 

Les Ford Again, we’re comparing billions here on this slide to the millions on the previous slide. But I also like to highlight at the top that SNAP Employment and Training is about $5 million. So there’s just not a lot of funds going towards workforce altogether. A lot of the focus is distribution of benefits. 

Rachel Barkley All right, so that concludes kind of our analysis. We’ll have much more in our final report. If you have feedback of things you want to see in that final report, we have two weeks left until we finish the writing of that. But now we’re going to go into our suggestions on what to do next. So Mason’s going to give an overview of how we think you can create a one door to work. Key emphasis, not on the door, but on the ‘to work’ part of that.

Mason Bishop So we’re recommending looking at this in three buckets. One is, what is your administrative or consolidated administrative structure? How do you organize your programs in the state of Arkansas? And who sits together and what does that footprint look like? Then you have service delivery. And we have three different areas we’re going to discuss with you. 

One is what we’re calling regional alignment. In other words, what does that physical infrastructure and virtual infrastructure look like? How do people access it? How do we organize ourselves regionally? 

Second is integrated eligibility and intake. And third is how do we have integrated case management? And then number three, the third big bucket is integrated finances. How do we have some kind of statewide cost allocation model which appropriately is federally approved, in how you bill and charge each of these program silos at the federal level? 

But at the same time, having a single way of doing it across the entire state versus 10 different ways in the workforce system. And then Human Services has its own cost allocation that it’s doing and billing of the federal government. And it’s kind of all over the place. And really the idea of the integrated finances is, how do you support a system approach and not a program by program approach? 

So when you go to the integrated administrative structure, how do we get there? How do we create this? We’re recommending sort of some broad parameters here. Number one is we do believe on the legislative side that you could consolidate into a state workforce agency including the appropriate public assistance programs into that and that it really creates a culture of work around all of these programs. 

And that you would provide a transition with data collection in 2026, move toward 2027 as kind of a key start date, July 1. And that obviously there would be transition in that. There’s legislative and executive opportunities here around the governor’s workforce cabinet and legislators working together to develop and implement a plan to have a single administrative agency focused on work, including a plan for physical location integration. 

Now, we showed you the map of Arkansas. The reason organizing these programs into a consolidated agency is because then, all of the sudden, all of those physical locations that now are sitting at separate agencies or with separate programs, now all become the footprint for a single administrative workforce agency, of which people, no matter what county you’re in, no matter which of those buildings you’re in– and by the way, there’s also savings in that because you have probably in many counties two and three buildings sitting next to each other kind of all doing the same thing. 

But now you’ve got this footprint that is providing services with a consolidated agency. And then not to get too far in the weeds, but we can work with the executive branch right now on state planning and waivers, the federal government too. Rachel’s point is looking for states to be innovative, to ask for waivers of current law and regulations. 

And we have a methodology that we’ve developed, our team has, to provide states with, right now, in over the next 60 to 90 days, with the opportunity of asking for a waiver package that would free up Arkansas to also be able to start moving on this on an executive branch side absent any legislation that would pass. So then in terms of an integrated service delivery, the regional approach. 

We believe if you do pass any legislation, you would designate Arkansas as what’s called a single state area, a workforce area, and then provide assurances that all regions of the state will receive appropriate resource allocations. I know that there’s always concerns, especially with rural regions of a state, are we going to get our fair share of the dollars? I think that could absolutely be something that the legislature has some kind of hold harmless provision or something to assure that that happens. 

I think you could also fund a transition process to consolidate physical locations and transition staff as needed. And then on the executive branch side, I’ve already mentioned the waiver package. There’s something called planning regions with waivers. And again, we have what we believe is a map for working with states on right now kind of creating integrated service delivery through state planning, state plans, updates, and waiver packages. 

Les Ford So the second part of service delivery is ensuring that the customer intake and eligibility is in a single eligibility division. You do have a very good eligibility division in human services. It’s called your ARIES system. This is where someone who’s coming in for food stamps or Medicaid or TANF, they go through a single-eligibility process. 

But guess what? If they want to go to any workforce system or they need any other work supports– say they are on food stamps, but they have a child under 5 and they need access to WIC. That’s a completely different system. That’s a different application form. If they want to go to a community college, it’s a different system. It’s a different application form. If they want to go the WIOA down the street, it’s a different physical location, a different application for them. It’s going to take them time. It becomes a full time job to navigate the Arkansas system. 

So we’re looking at a single eligibility system, not only for the individual who’s coming through the door, who’s ultimately the same family need, but also for you so that you know who is in each of your programs. You should know, Jane Doe is in our workforce system. She is receiving food stamps, she is receiving Medicaid, she is receiving WIC, she’s receiving child care. Her mother is incarcerated. We need to know every single Arkansas program that that person is receiving. 

So in enacting legislation, you can require this new agency to utilize the launch program that is already under development in Arkansas, and City Form, which is also under development and close to being available, to train staff on common intake forms. Executively, you could also implement a statewide master client index number. There is a master client number in ARIES, but it doesn’t translate to the other agencies. 

So to know the person in front of you, you should be able to identify them, not by their address, but by the number across every program. And in this integrated workforce system, even on the human services side, you should know if someone’s both on SNAP and they need access to WIC, if they need access to LIHEAP, if they need access to child care, and if they need access to workforce programs. 

We have to look at the vulnerable person in front of us and look at that pathway back into work and say, all right, we’re going to give you all the work supports you need, and then we’re going to hold you accountable to moving back into self-sufficiency. This is a long-term partnership with this individual in front of us. Part of that long-term partnership between this new agency, this new consolidated agency and the individual is case management. 

Like I said before, you have a great enrollment eligibility checking system. That’s not case management. Case management looks at the individual and says, in three months, will you be back in work? And how do we track that? How do we follow you so that you’re having the same conversation with the same person? 

You have a great foundation here with Hope Hub. It’s one of the few systems across the nation that I really see being a best-in-class case management system. And it’s deployed now, I believe, in 19 counties. And so that’s a great base for active case management that tracks the individual long-term and is able to see, are they moving from radical instability, as in they can’t provide food for their kids, to self-sufficiency in 13 categories over the long term. So you have a great foundation in something like Hope Hub. 

And the key here is you’re going to need to be able to track outcomes as work requirements are implemented. The last thing, work requirements are an incredible tool for moving people back into your workforce system. But the last thing you’d want is for someone to come to the state and say, work requirements just pushed a bunch of people off our programs into poverty. 

Now, if you actually are tracking folks long-term, you will be able to see when their incomes double and triple. You’ll be able to see when they move into employer-sponsored insurance. You’ll be able to see when you finally are able to put a wedge and stop into intergenerational poverty and see people move from generations on the rolls to generations of flourishing. So case management and tracking outcomes are incredibly important parts of a revolution in your poverty programs. 

Mason Bishop And then on integrated finances. Again, not to get too far into the weeds of how money works in government. But we do believe there is a series of executive and legislative actions that could occur. First would be that the governor’s workforce cabinet assess agency expenditures and develop some type of asset map that could eliminate inefficiencies. 

For instance, look at what is the physical footprint of all of these programs and are there opportunities to, either in state-owned or leased buildings, vacate those and consolidate staff into more efficient physical locations. That would be an example. They could then make recommendations to the legislature to align appropriations toward that. 

We also believe that, and we are having some initial discussions with some friends at the Office of Management and Budget around appetite for what’s called a new approved cost allocation model across these programs. And we do believe there is an opportunity for states to start to say, we need this in order to build an actual workforce system. And then as part of that, we would strongly urge that the executive branch and legislature work together to try to come up with an integrated cost allocation model. 

And then also, obviously, you would align your state appropriations toward that integrated cost allocation model. And then, again, real quickly, the importance of the cost allocation model is this. I always tell people, one of the big differences, again, you heard me talk about Utah when I was here in August. 

If you walk into a quote-unquote one-stop in Utah and ask a worker, How are you paid for? What program do you work for? They could not give you the answer to that question because all of those program dollars are blended behind the scenes to fund that individual’s case management or whatever they’re doing for the agency. 

Where, if you go into a location here in Arkansas and ask somebody, What program do you work for? What pays your salary? They can tell you, I’m a WIOA person, I’m Wagner-Peyser person, I’m a TANF person. And so what happens is by not having blended funding cost allocation behind the scenes, it perpetuates this program-by-program approach because it’s the easiest way to figure out, Oh, this is what we bill the Federal Department of Labor or this is we bill Health and Human Services for at the federal level, because this is TANF and this is WIOA. 

In Utah, what they do without getting, again, too far into the weeds is they have what’s called a random-moment time sample model where each and every day workers of the agency, the consolidated agency, get an email and it asks them, What are you working on at this moment in time? This is an approved cost allocation model that Utah has had since the late 1990s. 

Essentially what it does is you have a staff at the consolidated agency level who take all those what are called random moment time sampling strikes and they look at and then bill the federal programs or the state programs appropriately based upon what percentage of the person’s time was actually working on that program. 

So you’ll see if you get into the weeds of this, when you start looking at what programs are billed the most, this becomes the importance of why the workforce parts of these public assistance programs must be part of a discussion of how do we have a consolidated work approach in the state of Arkansas. Because just on a pure resource basis, public assistance problems are resourced at a much larger level than, quote unquote, workforce programs are resourced. 

And if you do not include them in your mix of cost allocation and how we help people become upwardly mobile, you just miss out on a lot of opportunity. It’s a very limited approach. And again, my argument is those challenges that Rachel talked about at the beginning of our presentation, you’ll never make a dent in them. You can’t improve labor force participation by, say, 1% or 2% because you don’t have the system, you don’t have the strategies, and you don’t have the funding in place by which to dramatically address those issues. 

Rachel Barkley So to summarize this, why are these three buckets that we just talked about as solutions, what’s the there there? So why do an integrated administrative structure? You might be thinking, this is hard work to do. It’s important because it creates that statewide workforce strategy across all your programs. Everybody’s working on the same team, and the people, the frontline workers, helping people know that there is a strategy that’s geared toward work. 

So you have a statewide workforce strategy. The second pillar, that was about the integrated eligibility and integrated casework. That makes every program a wraparound work support for those who can work. And that is a critical culture shift. And thirdly, that cost allocation model that Mason just talked about doesn’t just make it easier and more cost effective to report to the feds how you’re spending federal dollars, but it stops that administrative leaking. 

Every arrow that you saw coming down from federal grants that has administrative costs to it, you stop losing that. The physical locations that cost money to keep up. You stop losing those administrative millions. And that money is than helping people instead of keeping the administration of the programs going, which is the ultimate goal of these programs is to go to training people and helping people. 

And so we did just a future state example of how could a new structure look that’s different from that first slide. So if you decided you wanted to go big and you integrate your human services and your workforce services together and you created a new, you’ll see there in the middle, new Arkansas Department of Workforce Services, ADWS, has a single administrative reporting structure– that’s that cost of allocation model back to the feds– and one work first, one-stop system that has integrated eligibility, case management– that’s what’s in those boxes for the individual. 

The bottom is the yellow. That’s the families and individuals that need assistance. They’re going through that one system to get what they need. And that one work-focused culture. So  we know that this is a lot of undertaking and there will be more details in the report to come, questions, additional information you all want. But this is what a future state could look like. Mason, Les, did you want to add anything on that before I say a final word and we open up to Q&A? 

Mason Bishop I’ll just add one thing about this, if you have this integrated workforce services department, the state of Arkansas now has this three-legged stool of economic development, workforce development, and education that is more streamlined and can work together for business attraction into the state Arkansas, for small business growth and development in the state of Arkansas, and for ensuring that your supply of labor is better aligned to your demand for labor. 

And what it does is it gives the tools to you as a legislature and to the governor, frankly, to have an integrated workforce, integrated economic development, integrated education, working as three legs of that stool to build the economy and the growth of Arkansas. 

Rachel Barkley And the last thing I would say is that this creates a more nimble system. You know, I think the Covid crisis showed all the states that in this day and age, lots of crises that we can’t anticipate come along. And I will tell you that we based this off of Utah’s similar model. And why we did that is because we saw Utah responded the quickest to mass unemployment. 

They quickly re-employed people because they had a nimble system. They could reach for staff resources across the state to call everybody who was unemployed and say, how do we get you back to work after this crisis hit? And we don’t know what a future crisis could look like. 

We’re looking at how AI is radically shifting the labor force, how Arkansas needs to be competitive in drawing employers for a new workforce into the state. And we just believe from what we see empirically out of Utah that a state that’s able to act nimbly with a statewide strategy is able to respond to the future. 

So with that, that is our presentation for you all. Again, the final report coming out at the end of the month with lots of details, but we’d love to open it up for questions or discussion. 

Representative Mary Bentley All right, thank you so much. I will, just one quick question to start with. I did have someone ask on the number that you had in Medicaid, where did we derive that number? Do you guys remember where we get that number for the 1 million? 

Rachel Barkley Yes, that was the last fiscal year annual report.

Representative Mary Bentley  So that that included the private option or the folks that are on Medicaid expansion population, as well as those, both populations combined, correct? 

Rachel Barkley Yes, off the top of my head, it was a little over 700,000 in traditional Medicaid and a little over 300,000 in the expansion population. 

Representative Mary Bentley So it is expansion. Okay, I just had someone ask me that question. I wanted to clarify that. So when we’re looking at this, so I know some folks that are very concerned about things fiscally. 

So you would say we’re not asking to spend any more money. We’re actually just taking the money that we currently have, using it much more wisely to get it to people and get it to training instead of spending it, wasting it on administration or buildings or whatever it may be to make that happen. 

Rachel Barkley That’s right. Mason can talk about, initially, this was not the goal but the outcome in Utah, the savings that they saw. 

Mason Bishop So we’re always hesitant to give numbers to this and that sort of thing. But just to give you one idea, within one year, back in 1997, 1998, in those level dollars, the state of Utah saved about $5 million in one year. Within about three years, it was about $11 million. Their appropriation for these programs was about $11 million lower. Now, to be honest, some of those people might argue, well, some of those savings are federal programs and such. 

But what it allows you to do, actually, is you still maintain your level of federal appropriation because you’re either formula funded by the federal government or you’re receiving a TANF block grant or whatever the case might be. But what it does is it allows you to take those savings and pour them into more intensive services for individuals that are harder to employ. 

And to Rachel’s point, with artificial intelligence coming and all of us trying to kind of figure out what that means, it’s really going to afford you potentially opportunities to take that money that’s leaking now in administrative inefficiencies and more directly target it to initiatives like helping people with artificial intelligence for their jobs and maybe making job shifts depending on whether their job and industry is being impacted by AI, etc. 

So that’s why we see this as so critical, is that it does 100%, I believe, there would be a fairly significant cost savings you would see easily within the first five years that would allow you to pour more money into training or other kinds of services for individuals. 

Representative Mary Bentley Great. So just another quick question I’ve got since no one else has lit up yet. I’ll take advantage of the opportunity. The case managers, so the case managers, are they in Utah, or the program that we’re looking at here, they’re financed through the workforce department that we are setting up. Is that how the case managers are financed? 

Mason Bishop Yes, so you have integrated case management system in Utah where all of these programs are done through one case management system. So number one to remember is, a vulnerable individual isn’t telling their story three and four and five times to three, four and five different people, being tracked three and four and five different ways. 

It is a single story told a single time managed by a single individual or a team of individuals at the workforce agency. And then those individuals, again, do not know what program is funding them because you have the cost allocation model that decides what percentage of their funding is going to that. So I literally, when I walk in a one-stop in Utah, and it is a true one-stop. 

You have one location to go to for everything in Utah, not three and four and five like you do in Arkansas. But in addition, those individuals are funded by the array of programs and they identify themselves as employment counselors, not as a WIOA worker or a Wagner-Peyser worker. 

They are an employment counselor and they can help those individuals with whatever service, their intake into whatever services those individuals need, whether they be financial assistance, whether it be workforce training, whether it be unemployment insurance, whatever the case might be. 

Representative Mary Bentley Thank you. Someone has a question. Before we get to that, real quickly tell the difference on how this will make it easier for a business in Arkansas that needs to find some employees. Can you kind of dig in that just a little bit deeper on how a little more business friendly than what we have currently? 

Mason Bishop Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll just give you a simplistic argument that you have 10 local workforce development areas. So if I’m a business that has a statewide presence, who do I talk to? Do I have to talk to 10 different individual workforce areas? We’re seeing this in a number of states, by the way, that if I am a business just navigating what’s the workforce system now, which is WIOA and other programs, I have to figure out in 10 different ways how I even engage that system. 

Never mind the fact that the community and technical colleges all have business engagement work that they do, trying to work with businesses to whether they even get a federal discretionary grant or not. You have now work requirements in these other human services programs. So are they going to also be hitting up businesses? Or do they then, to Rachel’s point, do they refer them over to a workforce system that’s got 10 different areas and other programs and such? 

So this actually provides businesses with a rational intake, common intake of their own, because again, looking at the Utah example, you have what I would call a centralized business unit that all of these programs then feed into. So now you’re dealing with business not on a program by program basis or a case by case basis, but in a very comprehensive strategic way where you’re now able to deploy the array of resources to help individuals get trained and get up skilled to support those businesses and their growth. 

Representative Mary Bentley Super. So if somebody would say that what we’re doing now is more locally based, I would say that I have a small county that has one office, right? The DHS office. And they’re really very limited to what they can offer for any training. So would you say that actually doing this will give our small rural areas and the folks that live there more opportunities to get some training out there as what we have now? 

Mason Bishop Yeah, absolutely. So Representative Bentley, giving your example where you are representing a county with only a human services office, if you have an integrated administrative structure with all of the programs under the same umbrella, you’re now doing a look at your physical infrastructure. 

All of the sudden, I now turn that human services office into a department of workforce services office where an individual’s coming in for whatever help they might need. And if human services are appropriate, that’s what they get. If workforce services are immediately appropriate, that’s what they get. But what they get is, what is your situation, what is going to help you become self-sufficient and upwardly mobile. And then we’ll figure out on the back end, on our own, what’s actually paying for that. It’s about the services, not about the program they’re applying for. 

Rachel Barkley And I’ll add quickly to that on the rural areas. And in some of our interviews, one of the comments we heard was, well, in some of these rural areas, there are no jobs, was the comment. So these human services offices can’t refer people to jobs because there are not jobs. And it was thinking on a county basis. 

And so if that truly is the scenario, thinking through, all right, then how do we have in this statewide strategy? Maybe there’s something virtually we can do or some long-term training program or transportation funds we can help to provide to another county for work. Because the answer can’t be for that individual, well, the only answer is public assistance for the rest of their lives and not providing for a future. 

Representative Mary Bentley Great. Okay. Representative Beck.

Representative Rick Beck Thank you, Madam Chair. My question, and you mentioned this, I think, but I want to know, you’re talking about cross-training these people so that they– I love the idea that they feel like they’re in a– they feel they’re like they’re in the silo. And so all their answers come from that source. 

But that tends to mean, I don’t want to be negative about it, but it seems like that is a huge hurdle as far as training is concerned. Because you’re talking about a person who might even be struggling a little bit with the DHS part of the thing. And now you’re saying, okay, by the way, we’re also going to do this, this, and this. I think it’s a great– from one of the customers, which would be with the Arkansans that are coming for assistance, I think it’d be great for them. 

However, I really see this as a huge training, let me call it an opportunity, right, for these individuals to be able to do that. And I worry about almost like too much, and you’re going to get differences. So is it going to be like a training program that’s like Southwest Arkansas and Northeast Arkansas or whatever and they’re going to have the exact same skillset, the person when you walk into that office will have the same skillset, giving the exact same? 

Are there going to be areas where it’s, okay, well this is kind of what we do in the Southeast because there’s some different job requirements and different requirements for jobs or employment there or whatever. It just seems like it’s almost too much to get your head around at this point. 

Mason Bishop Are you talking about the staff themselves? 

Representative Rick Beck Yes. 

Mason Bishop Yeah. Great question. So in Utah, when Utah consolidated in 1996 and 1997, this was a big question, actually. Can you have a super worker who knows enough about all these programs to be able to help an individual? And really, what the answer became was more of upfront teams of people. So the thing to remember is, a lot of these workers are actually providing the same services, but funded through WIOA Title I or Wagner-Peyser or TANF. 

So if you look at the actual service provision itself, especially around workforce services, there’s a lot of those similarities already happening, but they’re happening in these siloed programs. So your cross-training there becomes more about, what is our consistent approach to employment services or career services or training. When it comes to these, I would call them categorically eligible programs. Absolutely you are going to have to have local experts or at least regional experts who are doing potential eligibility. But this is where the centralized eligibility comes in. 

So the way to think about this is, I’ve got my people in my local offices who do my actual services and they’re doing a lot of the similar services now only in a siloed fashion. And I can do any cross-training across programs to have a common strategic approach to that across the entire state. On eligibility, the way to think about eligibility is eligibility is not the first experience you have when you walk in the office. Eligibility is done behind the scenes. 

And in fact, in Utah, eligibility is all done remotely. You don’t even sit face to face with an eligibility worker. You sit face to face with the career services or the employment counselor who then takes your information and then helps you work with an eligibility worker to figure out what actually are you eligible for with regard to financial assistance and these other kind of human services programs. 

So yes, I’d be the last one to say that it’s not tough work to integrate agencies, integrate service delivery and do this work. But when we were in Utah, actually a year ago, one of their deputy directors, he actually said this. He goes, I’m not, I– because there were people there from a number of states, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, other places. And he said, I am not going to tell you that it’s not really tough to do this, to do the integration. 

But he said, what we always remind ourselves here in Utah is, what’s really tough is, I’m the single mom with two kids and I’ve got a stroller and I’m trying to walk through a two-foot snow bank to catch the bus to get to an office, and I’ve got to do that three and four different times to get the services I need.

And so, yes, I would be the last one to say this, you’ve got to do a lot of cross training. I can tell you communications is extremely important and a lot of just systems integration and having those champions, frankly, within these programs be willing to come together. And that was a little bit of secret sauce of Utah. There was a group of us who wanted to get this right. And so you need to find those people, too. But absolutely, you can actually have upfront teams or sort of generalists that are already doing this work anyway that can be now doing it for a multiple of funding streams and not just their own. 

Representative Rick Beck Another question. So I’m going to shift a little bit. And I envisioned it when you said this but maybe I heard it wrong. But you were talking about, you’re reducing the trickle-down of federal dollars and thereby reducing federal dollars that trickle down. In other words, you’re reducing the federal dollar. 

So more of that would go towards the customers and less of it towards what you call the administrative cost, I believe. Where’s that reduction? Is it in manpower? I think you mentioned infrastructure at one point, some reduction in maybe some of the infrastructure cost. But where is that? 

Mason Bishop So it’s in personnel. Now, is anybody going to get fired? I would say, no, that’s not the goal. Utah didn’t fire anybody. You don’t have to fire anybody. You can do it through attrition, frankly. But let me give you this example. Each of these programs has its own regional architecture, right, and has its on org charts. Well, if I have TANF that has a regional director over your area, and WIOA has a regional director, and Wagner-Peyser has a regional director and SNAP has a, whatever the case might be, whatever the right framing of that is. 

The reality is you don’t necessarily save money on the frontline caseworker side of things, because you still need all of those people serving everybody. But where you start to see it in savings is in that middle to upper management level, when all of a sudden, I don’t need five different regional administrators. I only need one. I don’t need three buildings in town. I only need one.

 And so you start to see significant savings on physical, on systems. I don’t need three different case management systems. I only need one. I don’t need four different intake systems. I only need one. Et cetera. So that’s where you see the significant savings. Because essentially, most states are paying for the same thing three and four and five different times. 

That’s the easiest way to think about it. If you were a business, I can tell you right now, if any of this was a private business, it would have been out of business 20 years ago, because there’s so much inefficiency built in. And I’ll say one last thing about this.

The way to think about the framing of this, Representative Beck, is, think of the state of Arkansas, think of all this workforce system as, I like to call it as like a franchise model. And I mean that in a little sense of how a business franchise operates. 

How do you bring together the integration across the state of the appropriate things that a business or a job seeker customer should expect consistent service across the state of Arkansas provided in a highly efficient way with the ability to have regional variation depending on what is the experience of people within that part of the state that they may come from. 

And there’s absolutely an ability to create that franchise model, to create that organizational culture. And that’s another big important thing to this around the integrated administrative structure. I’d be the last person to say that it’s easy. You have different organizational cultures around human services programs and the people that work in them and workforce programs and the people that work in them. 

But what you find is that through very smart management in bringing this together, you can create your own workforce culture where everybody feels they can participate and that the workers of that agency and the workers at that system then have their contributions they’re making to that overall organizational culture and in the services they’re providing to people. 

Representative Rick Beck One final question and I’ll let someone else ask a question. It just seems like there’s a lot of experts that need to be sitting at the table. I’m just going to throw numbers here. If I have 100 people a day coming through my doors and they all need this large group of people, that’s not going to work either. 

The person who happens to be first in line and get the group of people, it’s going to be great. But some of the others might wait because of that might. So my question to that is, did you utilize any virtual type, like I might be there talking to this individual, but virtually, there’s a bigger, larger team. Was that a big part of the savings also? 

Mason Bishop Well, no. Again, I want to push back on the notion that you have to have lots of people because we have all these programs. And now if they’re all in one place, I’ve got to have seven people as part of a team to help a person. That’s really not the case. Again, you have to think about what are the actual services we provide people. 

And they really fall into very, I’ll call them a fairly small or contained number of buckets. They’re sort of your basic career employment service. I help somebody. Somebody comes in, they’re like, hey, I just need help finding a job, or I need to apply for unemployment, I’m going to be on unemployment for a few weeks, I need help to get re-employed, I’m a dislocated worker, I’ve been laid off. They’re sort of those workforce employment services. 

Then you have what I’ll call a training services bucket. I have somebody who comes in and, yeah, they need to get employed or re-employed or they’re under-employed, they’re working multiple part-time jobs. I need access to a community college program or some type of training that’s going to help me skill up and be now eligible for work. 

And then you have more of the, I will call them the intensive public assistance supports where somebody may also need a longer period of time to engage in those kind of employment services and or training services while they are trying to get skilled up enough at income level enough to not have to be eligible for those programs anymore. 

So it’s not like the services we provide people are like a menu of 14 different things with 14 different individuals who have to have a particular expertise in those things. The expertise piece you’re talking about is more on the eligibility. That’s why I was trying to split services from eligibility. The expertise is more in the eligibility side, which is a number of these programs have specific eligibility criteria in order to be able to access the funding to help that individual. 

For the most part, it’s not like we have these– I need, in a rural area, eight different people in order to serve people. I might only need two or three people upfront to help that person. And then I’ve got this team behind the scenes virtually of eligibility workers who can figure out what is the actual funding stream that can support that person? 

Rachel Barkley And I’d add quickly on that. What exists now, what we saw in our site visits is when that caseworker needs the team approach for, well, how do I help this person get childcare or work or into a shelter or whatnot, they don’t have that team. As said, they are currently Googling or they’re like, hey, I worked with Joe down the street so I know I can call him. But if I didn’t know him personally, then I wouldn’t know who to call at that workforce office. So currently that team doesn’t exist now. 

Representative Rick Beck Well, thank you very much. 

Representative Mary Bentley Representative Ladyman.

Representative Jack Ladyman Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m over here. I may be covering the same ground that Representative Beck covered. But the Utah program that you talk about, I’m familiar with that. I wouldn’t say very familiar, but I’ve talked to people in Utah at different meetings. And in the Rich States, Poor States, they’ve been number one for like 16 years. Arkansas finally hit number 10, and I told them, watch out because we’re coming after you. 

But this is one of the areas that they just blow everybody away, what I’ve seen. I don’t understand their system or how it works. You all have clarified some of that. But what I thought is, I call it a clearing house. So if I’m needing health services and I need a job, I don’t know, I have to go to DHS and then I have to go across. 

In my district, okay, there’s a DHS regional office. There’s a workforce regional office. But we cover, what you’re talking about here, we cover three of our secretary level departments here. And like you say, they are total silos. They don’t talk across silo to silo because you’ve got human services. You have workforce services, which is part of our department of commerce. And then you have education, which doesn’t talk to anybody else. I mean, they’re just, they are a silo on their own. 

And how can one person at Human Services provide just where to go, right? If I walk in, I need all these things, that Human Services person can only talk to me about what they provide in that department. 

So I see what you’re trying to do here. And I think we could train people up front to be a clearinghouse, basically. I worked for one of the largest corporations in the world and that’s the way we did it. Like you said, if this was a business, we’d have been out of business a long time ago. And even in regional, we were in like 60 countries. So you just step that down to go to the region or the country and you get the specialist in that area. 

So I understand what you’re trying to do here. But you’re talking about creating a office of workforce services at the cabinet level. Now, how do you do that when the experts are going to work in three different cabinet level departments? How does Utah make that work? That’s my question. 

Mason Bishop So in Utah, we had five separate programs that got merged into a single cabinet-level agency. There was the Department of Employment Security. That was its own cabinet- level agency, essentially. That was UI and Wagner-Peyser, Unemployment Insurance and Wagner Peyser at the time. 

We had the Office of Family Support, which is actually where I was working that was a sub-cabinet agency of the Department Human Services. That’s where all the public assistance programs were. We had The Office of Job Training, which at the time was in the Economic Development Agency of Utah at the time. So that got pulled out of that. 

So right there you had three separate agencies coming out of there. And then there were a couple of smaller programs, the Office of Child Care that was sitting in a different agency, and then what was called the Turning Point program, which was sort of helping single moms with kids kind of related to the public assistance programs. 

Those were the five separate organizations that all came into a single consolidated administrative department, Utah Department of Workforce Services. So the legislature basically passed a bill. 

Now I will tell you at the time it was interesting because we were also going to have vocational rehabilitation, which was sitting in the Utah Department of Education. And that’s an interesting story in and of itself, if I may. At the time, that was supposed to be part of the Department of workforce services which we took out because the political pressures were so much at the time. You guys understand that. 

Well, the irony is in 2016, the vocational rehabilitation got put into the Department of Workforce Services, so about 20 years later. And when I asked and talked to Utah about why did it finally happen, there were two things that occurred. Number one, the legislature was dealing with financial issues with vocational rehabilitation. The program was not being managed well. But the legislature actually did an audit. 

And they asked, how many vocational rehabilitation customers are also Department of Workforce Services customers? 70%. So seven out of 10 individuals with disabilities. We were telling them, go to the Department of Education Vocational Rehabilitative Services Agency and go to Department of the Workforce Service. 

So again, go through two separate doors to get all the services you need. Well, when the legislature saw that, they said, that’s enough, we’re putting it in. And so now vocational rehabilitation is actually in the Department of Workforce Services as well, as well as Medicaid eligibility and access to housing programs too, is at the Department Workforce services. 

And so again, it’s about, what can you– and every state’s different. Now Louisiana, their legislature passed a bill last year. They’re creating what’s called Louisiana Works. They’re bringing in all of these programs now. They’re working on this, actually. They’re now in the implementation phase of this, this year. 

And so we have another state that’s now moved forward on this. And there’s probably some lessons learned there working with Louisiana coming out of that, that you don’t have to rely on 30 years ago in Utah. But essentially, to answer your question, that’s essentially what happened was we pulled those through a legislative bill, created that agency. 

Representative Jack Ladyman Yeah, I understand that. What I’m talking about, just how would it function? And I guess that’s a work in progress. But if we pull these pieces out of these three different secretary’s department, there will be people left in these departments that you need to draw on their experience and their knowledge. So how does that functionally work? And, I guess, that’s just a work in progress. Like you said, states are different. 

Mason Bishop Well, yeah, so the idea would be you would pull the people out of the current agencies that are functionally doing this work. Now an example would be, somebody you would not pull into this agency would be someone in human services working on child welfare. So we would recommend that program would remain outside of workforce services because it has its own set of issues. It’s not really workforce focused, right? It’s more of a traditional human service focus. 

Would there be instances where the Workforce Services agency needs to work with humans? Absolutely, and so what you do is you still might have MOUs or those kinds of things when it makes sense. Again, in Utah, Medicaid, the program remains at the Department of Health, but Medicaid eligibility is at the department of Workforce services. 

So still you have the policy and the appropriation coming to the Department of Health. But they have an arrangement with the Department of Workforce Services where we’re doing all the eligibility for Medicaid. And that works really well for them. And so there are those kinds of arrangements you can create. 

But I just want to be clear that we are recommending that the people who are doing TANF case management right now, who are doing SNAP and SNAP E&T case management and eligibility would be part of a new department. They wouldn’t be sitting back while we have this new workforce services. 

Representative Jack Ladyman We know that Utah, that it’s working in Utah. And it’s been working for many, many years. If we can just shape that for our state, I think it’s a really good program. So thank you. 

Rachel Barkley Thank you. Real quick on the process, the year before it was implemented in Utah and then now in Louisiana this past year, basically created committees of interest, so a case management committee, a data committee, outcomes, et cetera, looking at what does it make sense to bring into this new agency? What does this culture look like? Building it with existing talent across the agencies that know the programs, that know the populations that sit on these committees, employers who are really important sit on those committees to shape what that looks like over the year leading up to the implementation. 

Representative Mary Bentley Thank you, representative. Representative Garner. 

Representative Denise Garner Thank you, Madam Chair. Actually, most of my questions were answered just now. So my question, so is it just now, Utah that’s been doing this for 30 years and Louisiana that’s just started? Are there any other states that are doing it or have tried to implement some of those things? 

I assume that Utah has kind of made sure that we have all the kinks out of the system, but they’re also different. There’s some things that are different in Utah than they are here. So are there other states that are doing it now? How can we catch up with some of those states? 

Mason Bishop Yeah, I think that’s really the exciting thing. It was interesting because I first got to know Rachel and Les right around 2021 when they were doing some work on this and hearing some things. And then I also was getting calls directly from governor’s offices coming out of Covid. 

And I think what essentially happened is for probably 20 years or so, kind of the Utah experience was sort of allowed to just, well, they’re different. They get along, we don’t. Like everybody gets along in Utah? Yeah, right. Just ask us BYU fans about Utah fans and vice versa. We have our own sort of rivalries there. Coming out of Covid, I think there was definitely governor’s offices, especially newly elected governors, and others that were saying, something’s going on there because they’re coming out of Covid at a much better rate than everybody else. 

I always give this anecdote. Governor Youngkin in Virginia, where I live, his staff called me and Governor Youngkin, being a businessman, said, I want to be best in class. Who’s best in doing this workforce services work? And the answer came back. I was told the answer was Utah. And so, actually, Virginia in 2022 did some reorganization of their agency. 

They didn’t do the human services piece, but they did bring some of the workforce programs that were sitting in their community college system and in other places, and did merge those into what they’re calling now Virginia Works is kind of the nickname of the agency. It has a much longer official name, employment and workforce advancement or something like that. So Virginia in the 2022 time frame did do this. 

So I’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about there are states that have started doing some elements of this since coming out of Covid. Louisiana, as we’ve mentioned last year. Currently, right now, the states that are probably most kind of on the same time frame right now that we’re having discussions is Arkansas, Mississippi, and West Virginia. 

Now, there’s a reason for this, too, and that’s because last year, we almost had federal workforce reform. The Stronger Workforce for America Act, it passed the house. It got negotiated in the Senate and then agreed to, and was on the floor as part of the continuing resolution a year ago December. And then when Elon blew that all up, the whole thing got blown up. So we didn’t get it. 

But the reason the states that you’re hearing about right now, including Arkansas, is because we had, actually, one of the things we worked on kind of quietly was a pilot and demonstration authority in there that would have allowed states like Arkansas– there were about nine states that were in this bucket– to be able to basically waive almost everything in WIOA and do what we’re suggesting you try to do now under current law. And so what we’ve tried to do is through this invitation for waivers and other things, try to kind of build that up. 

So yes, right now I’d say– but we’re also getting a lot of, I have a couple of philanthropic organizations that are talking to me because they’re very interested in looking at this from an evaluation standpoint and actually working with some of you in other states maybe doing some evaluations of, as you implement, what does that look like, what worked, what didn’t. And so I was asked to speak to a kind of an informal group of philanthropic organizations right before the holiday break who really want to know what is this all about and how do we get involved. 

And so there really seems to be a momentum behind this, at least in Washington, DC, from a number of different kind of organizations. And so it really presents states like Arkansas this real opportunity, I think, to be a laboratory of democracy and really do something that may work for your population. Does that help? Kind of a long-winded question. 

Representative Denise Garner Absolutely, thank you. 

Mason Bishop Long-wind answer, I should say. 

Representative Mary Bentley Thank you. Representative Springer. 

Representative Joy Springer Good afternoon. Thank you, Madam Chair, for allowing me to ask the question. Your numbers, your key numbers regarding Arkansas workforce, I’m just curious to know whether or not in your final report, whether or not you will share some of the key numbers from Utah and then tell us how they progressed over the years, maybe like when they first started and then where they are today. Is that something that you considered to include in your report? 

Mason Bishop You’re giving me work to do over the next two weeks. I’m already behind in my writing, and now I’m getting– yeah, absolutely. You let us know what you would like to see in that report, and we’ll do our best to make sure it’s in there. But if you would sort of like a longitude, we could probably do a high level longitudinal look at Utah. 

And just so you know, I also am a non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and I’ve actually published a couple of papers on Utah and done a landscape study on these programs all. And we can absolutely make those available for the committee to read as background. 

Representative Joy Springer That may be better. I don’t want to give you any extra work. I’m just curious to know how they’ve progressed over the years, how their numbers have changed based upon the implementation of this model that you’re suggesting. So that’s what I’m curious about. 

Mason Bishop Yeah, absolutely. We can provide you some data on the longer term. And then Rachel actually has some data on the shorter, some of the coming out of Covid data that really supports it. 

Representative Joy Springer I would just like to see that, to see how they progressed. 

Rachel Barkley And that’s, I think, a key thing we talk about studying actual outcomes because what you see on this slide aren’t outcomes, right? It’s just spending and participants. But what we do have readily available now is what those unemployment to reemployment outcomes coming out of Covid, which put us all, every state on the same forced unemployment footing. 

So we do have those outcomes that show Utah far above the pack. So those we have right now. The other pieces might take us a little more than the next two weeks we have to finish the report. But we can, certainly, that’s something on our list we want to get to is to show what these other kind of numbers look like. But as far as jobs and employment outcomes, we do have that data now. 

Representative Mary Bentley Thank you. If you can send that to Kate, she’ll get out to the whole committee for us. Thank you. All right, last but definitely not least, Senator Petty. 

Senator Jim Petty Thank you, madam chair. I have two unrelated questions. But the first, and I actually made a note about the Restore Hope Hope Hub system. I’m assuming that that’s not a vibrant enough system to manage what we’re talking about. But are there existing systems out there or is this a total customization from the ground up for an Arkansas project like this? 

Les Ford Yeah, with Hope Hub, one of the key benefits is just the connection. So someone comes in, you develop a work plan with them, and that is what one of the key things that Hope Hub allows is, what are your goals? What are the jobs available to you right now? What can you do now? What is your plan for a year from now? 

And even that beginning work plan, which Hope Hub allows, is a step above anything that most states are doing, much less Arkansas. So I think that’s the key piece. The second piece it has is the connection. The agency is not just, okay, around the corner is WIC and down the street is your local workforce one-stop agency. 

It’s, this is Janet at your local work force agency. You are already eligible for this program. You are getting enrolled on Monday. And so those are two incredibly important pieces to case management. So Hope Hub has both of those now and is deployed in 19 counties. You could also go a step beyond and do case management beyond that. So you have two options in front of you. One is to deploy what you have now and to begin to measure the outcomes there. And the second is to create something new. 

Rachel Barkley And we’d have to double check this, but from what we heard from Shared Services is they have the tools ready for this master client index number, which allows the state to track someone across the programs and see what all they’re touching as an individual as far as state programs go. So that infrastructure appears from our interviews to be already there as well. 

Les Ford And the final thing I’ll mention is ARLaunch, which is under development now and allows you– I believe it’s under development so that you’re deploying it in your education system so that as individuals in Arkansas, you track what skills do they have and then match that to the available jobs in Arkansas. And so between these three pieces, a case management system isn’t just one tool. It’s between the pieces you’ve already developed, it’s probably a braiding of the three. 

Senator Jim Petty Okay, last last question. So I was intrigued by the the cost allocation method discussion. Do you know how they vary from program to program and year to year as far as percentage? And I’m just going to make this up. Let’s just say it’s 10% in each of the programs or whatever. And next year, one of them is 25% or whatever, is there much variation? 

And then the last follow up to that is, if there is a significant amount of variation from year to year– and I’m talking about the state’s fiscal year– have you ever seen other states run into limitations on, wait, you can’t charge that much admin because all of our people, even though they were, like you said, behind the scenes, the vast majority of the work was on one program or the other. And so we went over the 10% admin limit or the 15% admin limit that a program might have. 

Mason Bishop Yeah, so there’s sort of a multitude of ways I can answer that, and I’ll try to be succinct. Number one is, I could absolutely try to get any questions you have about year-to-year from Utah. We can contact them and say, can you provide us some longitudinal data on what your strikes look like year-to-year? 

Number two is, it’s a very vibrant system in that, obviously, you have appropriations across these programs, some much larger than others. So for instance, TANF obviously is a lot more money than WIOA Title I. So when I do a random strike and I talk to a caseworker and then, let’s say, I get an email and I’m working with Rachel, Rachel might be eligible for Title I. She might be a TANF person. She might be– well, if she is part of that myriad of things, my understanding is, this is very simplistic, that she would be a TANF strike because there’s more money there. See what I’m saying? 

Now, one of the interesting differences between all states that I know of and Utah is this. Wagner-Peyser employment services is actually your most flexible money. It can’t pay for training, but there’s no eligibility requirements to that funding stream. I can serve you. They can serve me. It can serve anybody, no matter what your income level is, no matter what. 

So most states use that as their front door program. That’s the first program. That worker is the first one somebody sees physically, is that up front Wagner-Peyser person because it’s universal. And Utah uses it the opposite. If somebody’s categorically eligible for one of the other better funded programs, you’re going to strike that program. And then, if I’m working with Rachel and she’s not eligible for any of the programs, then that becomes the Wagner-Peyser strike. 

So actually it strategically allows you to use your most flexible funding sources to help more people versus I am now using it on the front end. Instead, they’re using on the back end as sort of their backstop for serving people who aren’t categorically eligible for something else. So it’s those kind of nuances within their cost allocation model that give them a ton of flexibility. 

Now, in terms of the administrative limits, absolutely, and they’ll talk to you about that. They have to manage their cost of allocation just like any other state has to. So if they start getting to a point, and, they’ll say this very distinctly, if we’re bumping up against, say, an admin cap or actual where we’re starting to get on this money, we have to make adjustments in terms of who, just like any other state, who we can serve. 

And there may be limitations there. They typically don’t run into that problem, though. But it is something that they have to manage as well, just like in any other states. 

Senator Jim Petty Okay, thank you. Thank you, madam chair. But if you could provide that staff about Utah and those two, I would appreciate it. 

Representative Mary Bentley Great deal. All right. Well, I will say that it’s been a great session. Thank you all again for traveling here to Arkansas to give us this today. I look forward to the final report in two weeks and really excited about today. Did you guys want to give any final closing statements as we close out the meeting? 

Rachel Barkley I will just say it’s a privilege to be with you all. And I’m grateful that you are thinking big. I think we’re in a moment. So the One Big Beautiful Bill implementation, we didn’t talk a lot about, but this is going to force a lot of changes upon your state administration of programs. So you have a lot of provisions in SNAP and Medicaid in that bill and workforce dollars. 

And I think being forward thinking about creating a holistic system that works is huge in the implementation of this. Because your state is going to be implementing a lot of new things over the next two years. So you might as well use this moment to really help people get into the workforce to turn some of those numbers on that original slide around and have those 200,000 people who are chronically unemployed think about what that would do to your culture if they got back into the workforce. 

So thank you for this opportunity to present to you all, and we’re here to help, and, amongst all these options we provided for you, find a path forward with you. 

Representative Mary Bentley Awesome. Great. Thank you all so much. And we are adjourned. Oh, Les, did you want to say anything?

Les Ford Just thank you for having us. 

Representative Mary Bentley Thank you.