SLATE to end employment contracts June 30
By Meliqueica Meadows
Of the St. Louis American
In his recent State of the City address, Mayor Francis G. Slay said the SLATE Career Center has “improved dramatically under Tom Jones’ leadership,” indicating that he also wanted to increase staffing as well as the number of city residents who find employment through the agency.
That will be difficult, given new cuts to the funding for SLATE and the vital community partnerships that helped to place over 1,200 citizens in jobs.
Funding for the St. Louis Agency On Training and Employment (SLATE) comes from the U.S. Department of Labor through the Missouri Division of Workforce Development. The city of St. Louis manages the funds.
Tom Jones, executive director of SLATE, said the cuts stem from a reduction in domestic spending in Washington. Detractors say they are a reflection of the mayor’s prioritizing staff positions over funding for community contractors who actually deliver the services. Meanwhile, a state official contends that the city and these programs will eventually benefit from the changes in funding.
Jones said, “There have been significant cuts. Adult community contracts were cut by $528,000, and youth contracts were cut by $611,000.”
Jones said SLATE maintained contracts with five community-based groups charged with finding employment for adults and between eight and 10 such contracts to work with youth. The Division of Workforce Development works with other agencies to provide skills development and job placement at 40 career centers in the state.
Roderick Nunn, the director of the Missouri Division of Workforce Development, said the cuts may not be as bad as originally thought. Nunn said that his department is not conceding that there have been significant cuts in the city’s Workforce Investment Act allocation.
However, “The FY 06 preliminary allocation for the adult and youth programs were based on a 90 percent hold-harmless methodology since the United States Department of Labor was late in getting allocations to states. Final allocations to Missouri and its local workforce regions can only increase over this preliminary amount.”
Hold-harmless provisions protect areas from large funding decreases from one year to the next with a guarantee that the area will receive a large percentage of the funds they received in the previous time period regardless of their inputs for the current time period, which helps in the undertaking of multiyear fiscal obligations.
In fact, Nunn said the agency should gain from the current situation.
“The city and the region stand to gain from current negotiations with the department to fund several discretionary projects designed to address critical labor and skills shortages,” he said. “This amount will be over and above the funds the city will receive for it’s formula programs.”
With the downtown center and community-based contractors, Jones estimates that the center places some 1,200-1,300 people per year in jobs.
“We project that this year, we’ll make about 844 placements just out of the center downtown,” Jones said.
However, the cuts caused a reduction in the number of community-based contracts for youth, down to six. The contracts with the Fathers Support Center, MERS/Goodwill, Productive Futures, Connections to Success and Provident Counseling will end June 30.
“We will continue to place individuals who need our assistance,” Jones said adding that the organization would still continue to serve the adult population without the help of the community-based contracts.
“Mayor Slay has said he will ask the Board of Aldermen for some additional funding to add five additional career-placement persons to make up the difference,” Jones said.
Jones said SLATE will be looking at performance by the agencies that have been receiving funding and that it may make some changes in staff.
Performance is indeed the issue for many of those community-based contractors who now find their funds drying up.
Cecilia Nadal heads Productive Futures. Since its inception in 1984, the company has placed some 8,700 people in full-time employment, about 300 individuals per year. Nadal said she wants to know, “How can a town that is in a supposed redevelopment phase cut a cost-effective, successful program?”
Some say the budget cuts were made based on preliminary numbers, leaving many to question the logic of slashing community-based contracts while promising to add more staff, potentially five full-time staff persons, and increase the number of citizens served by SLATE.
Nunn said that SLATE is a locally operated program with formula-driven allocations defined by federal regulations.
“However, (the U.S. Dept. of Labor) has granted a waiver to Missouri that allows local workforce regions to transfer funds between three programs (dislocated worker, adult, youth) since the allocations are based on year-old data and do not necessarily reflect current labor market demands.”
If the cuts were based on productivity, then the cessation of programs with proven track records is even more puzzling. Nadal’s Productive Futures has been publicly lauded by the mayor and other officials. She said that for the past 20 years, Productive Futures has consistently been a leader in direct job placement and its “cost to do business” is well below the norm for SLATE vendors.
For Fiscal Year 2005-2006, the average per person cost for providing adult job placement for the four other vendors under contract with SLATE is $2,471. However, the cost per person for Productive Futures is just $2,055 or 17 percent less.
The numbers are equally impressive for youth services, as Productive Futures’ cost per person for the Out-of-School Youth Program in the same Fiscal Year is $3,242 or 18 percent less than the other SLATE contractors.
“A lot of poor people are not going to have quality programs,” Nadal said.
“We tell clients that hard work pays off, but how can we say that when at this point all of our hard work is pointless?”