LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said Thursday he inherited a “starved” unemployment insurance system from his Republican predecessor, Matt Bevin, which partially explains why thousands of Kentuckians have descended on Frankfort the last few days to wait in line for hours in hopes of interacting with a person who might straighten out their claims for jobless benefits.
Beshear said he hopes to restore employees who can navigate the aging unemployment system to employment offices around the state after the Bevin administration removed those workers entirely.
In early 2017, when the number of Kentuckians claiming jobless aid was a fraction of today’s level, the state removed workers who could deal with unemployment insurance from 31 of the 51 employment offices around the state. That resulted in 22 of those offices closing, and 95 state employees who could handle unemployment insurance claims being moved into other roles in state government, according to information Beshear presented Thursday.
Beshear said Bevin’s administration removed unemployment insurance staffers from the remaining state employment offices, meaning jobless claimants could no longer get in-person help even at the 12 regional “hub” offices where the Bevin administration consolidated employment services.
“A lot happened in 2017 that we are feeling the brunt of today,” Beshear said during a news conference in Frankfort.
The Bevin administration consolidated unemployment customer service into a call center staffed by 12 people, Beshear’s Education and Workforce Development Cabinet said Thursday.
Beshear said he placed 12 unemployment workers back into the employment offices in February. He closed those offices amid the pandemic, citing risks of spreading the coronavirus, and has not said when they will reopen.
The pop-up unemployment offices established this week in Frankfort have been the only opportunity for the roughly 900,000 Kentuckians who have filed jobless claims to deal with problems in person.
Hal Heiner, who served as Bevin’s secretary of the Education & Workforce Development Cabinet, told WDRB in January 2017 that his goal was to upgrade the technology behind the unemployment system so that claims could be handled by phone and online and few, if any, people would need to visit what are commonly called “the unemployment office.”
“We’re redesigning career centers really to be focused on careers, not unemployment,” Heiner said at the time.
But the computer system behind the program remains coded in a 1970s programming language that takes specialists to navigate. Asked if technological improvements were made following the 2017 staffing changes, the Beshear administration listed only a request for proposals that it released in February for a contractor to overhaul the system.
Heiner told WDRB in 2017 that the “reorganization” that removed state employees from smaller employment offices and forced them to apply for other work in state government was necessary to close a budget gap.
Heiner said the previous governor, Democrat Steve Beshear (Andy Beshear’s father), added employment office workers using Great Recession-era stimulus funding that the federal government would later reduce. The cabinet had to scrape together one-time funds to keep the employment workers on staff, Heiner said.
“The previous administration had the opportunity to do something about it two years ago and they didn’t,” Heiner said in 2017. “A large deficit was run up and now we have to face that reality.”
