Per Peter Hirschfeld via the Rutland Herald and VT Press Bureau:
Under a court ruling from the early 1990s, the state must process applications for food stamps and welfare benefits within 30 days. However the state’s own data indicate that more than a third of Vermonters applying for food stamps (now called 3SquaresVT) have been forced to wait longer. Waits have exceeded the 30-day threshold for about 30 percent of people seeking access to health-care programs; 28 percent of applications for Reach Up, a program that provides cash assistance for basic needs, are past due.
“The problem is that thousands of Vermonters are turning to the state at a time of serious economic crisis and the state has an obligation to process their applications for assistance,” says Christopher Curtis, a staff attorney for Vermont Legal Aid. “It’s absolutely essential that the problems be addressed. These families can’t afford to wait.”
And:
Steve Dale, commissioner of the Department of Children and Families… attributes the problem to an increase in the number of Vermonters seeking assistance and some logistical logjams in a $3 million modernization program intended to make the application process more efficient.
[…]
“The primary driver for the timeliness issues is first and foremost sheer numbers,” Dale says.
So… here’s the thing about those “efficiencies.”
There are good and bad ways to design the sort of system we’re discussing, and none of them should cost anywhere near $3 million dollars. But even if they did, they should be done right.
It’s easy to make big broad claims about efficiency and implement new systems to review applications, but if the people staffing those systems aren’t properly trained to use them, if the systems themselves are designed in a fashion which is clunky and burdensome and if the state servers themselves are not up to the task of handling the workload, you’ve end up with a system which is no more efficient than the original, but has managed to eliminate personnel who can help when the machines fail and removed the human support face from the process.
Note: if I seem ranty about this, it’s for a reason: it intersects two of my major pet peeves. Screwing the poor is one. Bad technology is another.
If you design a database structure properly (and this is not rocket science), it is easy to use. I don’t mean that it’s acceptable or functional. I mean easy. I mean, application review takes two minutes in a properly handled system. But let’s grace it out and say five minutes to make room for the complicated applications. I mean that follow-up requests from those reviewing get automatically sent to a server which generates a point of contact for the people who submitted the original (whether it’s via e-mail, postal mail or phone).
I mean that a team of ten well-trained people, should be able to process 600 applications in a single day without any issues whatsoever. If, and this is a big if, the technology is done properly and implemented well.
There’s a number listed in the piece above– 24,000 people between July 1 and November 15. That’s just under 140 days, and just under 100 working days.
That’s 240 new applications per day that we, as a state, are apparently incapable of handling, despite our efforts to become more “efficient,” all because we rushed to implement a new structure that was not ready to go, was not fully functional and was properly vetted.
This isn’t just frustrating, annoying and pathetic.
It’s obscene.
…at least according to Steve Dale: “Dale argues that legal action against the state could complicate efforts to solve the problem. Vulnerable Vermonters, he says, are better served if the state is focused on fixing the problem, not fighting litigation.”
Right, because litigation to get them to fix the problem couldn’t possibly motivate them to fix it, but would, instead, motivate them to… what? Fight the litigation by refusing to fix it?
This reminds me of the arguments management uses against unions: if you have a union, you’ll lose the flexibility to work the way you want to and everything will have to go through a power dynamic instead of us just being able to hammer things out informally. Right, because, the existing power dynamic in a fire at will state is so beneficial to employees.
DCF has contracted with an outside consultant to tell them how to fix this mess. Throwing money at a problem created by not having enough money in the first place is probably not the course of action lawmakers envisioned when they gave their blessing to the Challenged by Change program.
.. that companies and individuals in the private sector get paid for making government NOT work.
Great fortunes can be made by handling and mis-handling government transfer payments and systems – the great private-sector “entrepreneur” of the 1990s, H. Ross Perot, made his billions from EDS, whose core business was financial and payment systems and processing for state, county, and municipal gummints, including their benefit and retirement systems.
It should be no surprise that this system is a mess, and that more private-sector “partners” will be able to profit from helping to fix the systems that they helped design’s weaknesses.
While VT’s needy are ill-served, we can all be happy at this opportunity to see trickle-down economics work here in the Green Mountain State. Perhaps as I type this some auto salesman on Shelburne Road is delivering a new Audi or BMW to a happy president of a systems technology company, which may help save an auto-detailing position in the state… not to mention the multiplier effect from the flat screen TV that the salesman might buy at one of our box stores!
current governor could take some time away out of his schedule and attempt to address this.
After all he is still Governor Jim Douglas.
He has shown some sensitivity for the hungry.
I recall in Sept, Douglas was being honored by the Poultney Rotarians (I think)and had them laughing in the aisles joking about perhaps in his retirement having to take a part-time job at Wal-Mart to pay for meals.