Workforce Training Boards Face Budget Cuts | As feds trim the budget, resources for the unemployed could dwindle
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BUDGET CONSTRAINTS: Jeffrey Turgeon, executive director of the Central Massachusetts Workforce Investment Board, says that with stimulus funding gone, there will be little cushion left for local training offices.
Workforce training programs and career centers around Central Massachusetts are facing budget cuts and an expiration of federal stimulus funds this summer that will mean a reduction in both staff and programs, workforce officials say.
As millions in stimulus funding for Massachusetts workforce centers is set to expire June 30, Congress has also entered into budget-cutting mode, recently voting to strip $182 million from the Workforce Investment Act program that funds the majority of budgets for workforce centers. Those cuts, which local workforce boards say amount to about 10 to 20 percent, will take effect July 1.
It Could Have Been Worse
The House of Representatives had voted in February to zero out Workforce Investment Act funding all together. In April, Congress agreed on a continuing resolution that largely spared workforce funding, but still represented the largest cut in recent history.
Tim Sappington, who’s been executive director of the North Central Massachusetts Regional Employment Board in Leominster for the past 13 years, said he’s never seen cuts so drastic.
“In my time here, I’ve seen 5 percent, 10 percent, but never 21 percent,” Sappington said. “They’ve never tried to zero it out. That was a little scary for all of us.”
Jeffrey Turgeon, executive director of the Central Massachusetts Workforce Investment Board (CMWIB), said that the expiration of stimulus funding is bad enough.
But he said that the budget cut that takes effect July 1 will likely amount to a 10 to 15 percent cut for his board. He said Central Mass. officials were still coming up with a budget strategy to balance employee and program cuts.
Turgeon said that his staff would be less equipped to handle the thousands of displaced workers that walk through the doors at the employment centers the CMWIB oversees in Worcester, Milford and Southbridge. In the most recent full fiscal year, more than 17,000 people came to those three centers seeking assistance with finding jobs, getting training and filing unemployment insurance claims.
Turgeon said that when a worker is laid off, oftentimes there is just a bit of training that person needs to make him more viable in the labor market.
“It might be a short-term certificate program or a specific sort of software they need background in,” Turgeon said.
Sappington said he feels that the cuts don’t make sense because unemployment is persistently high right now and his staff aims to get people back into the workforce.
Investing some money into training a displaced worker if it gets them off of unemployment, which the government pays, is a worthwhile investment, he said.
“This investment is the third leg of that stool that is economic recovery,” he said. “It’s a huge piece of the road that takes us out of this.”
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