Fix it. Or shutter it. That is our unsolicited advice to the city in regards to the Atlanta Workforce Development Agency.
We believe this recommendation has merit, given the AWDA’s lengthy history of ineptitude and waste.
As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported earlier this month, a succession of Atlanta mayors and a host of city councils have not been able to conquer the problems of this profoundly dysfunctional agency.
And that is sad, given that many thousands of people stand in need of exactly what the AWDA should be offering – competent assistance and training provided with the end goal of helping the jobless find gainful work. That’s needed in a city where the Georgia Department of Labor estimated the unemployment rate at 8.8 percent for March, well above the 6.8 percent of the 10-county Atlanta region.
So the need is real. What is unreal are the problems presented by the AJC and a succession of auditor reports, including a 2013 version by the city’s own auditor that suggested – and not subtly – that the AWDA be considered for closure.
The auditor’s letter to Mayor Kasim Reed and the city council noted that, “AWDA has no systematic information on performance outcomes for the majority of clients entered into its client tracking database and registers only a small percentage of its clients into the state system that allows the state to monitor employment outcomes. Neither AWDS nor the state’s system ties clients to expenses or enables AWDA to reliably track employers.”
Perhaps least among the woes was that that the agency’s records stored clients’ personal information, including social security numbers and birth dates, in risky, unencrypted form.
AJC reporting found that much of the job-training money wound up with companies connected to political insiders. This newspaper found payments made to “train” workers already employed full-time. Firms were paid to teach skills they weren’t even licensed to provide. A trainee allegedly paid to learn construction skills instead says he was used for such tasks as evicting tenants, cutting grass or acting as a go-fer for a participating businessman.
That this boondoggle of an agency was allowed to misuse federal dollars for so long speaks loudly to the weaknesses in accountability that auditing agencies complained about – with little result, until now.
That’s begun to change. Two days after the AJC’s reporting began, Mayor Reed’s office announced the hiring of a new Interim Executive Director at AWDA. The top job opened because Deborah Lum, who’d held the job since 2003, announced her retirement that same day.
The new interim leader, Michael T. Sterling, was Reed’s senior advisor and has worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago.
This move is welcome news. Overdue, but welcome nonetheless.
Now the hard work really begins of fixing the agency by any legal and moral means necessary. We hope and expect that changes will occur quickly under Sterling. His experience in Chicago, a city that put a capital “P” in old-line political patronage, should serve him well in his new job. He should be able to quickly identify what outdated practices and behaviors should be the first to go.
The wasteful, old-fashioned way of big-city politics as practiced at the AWDA should have been consigned to history long ago. It does no one any favors, especially not today when distrust of government, especially big, entrenched government, is so pervasive and powerful.
The city of Atlanta, its taxpayers and the jobless deserve better. As does this region.
For it’s not wishful thinking that, to a great extent, our core city is inextricably linked to the greater fortunes of this 28-county metro. This whole is collectively referred to as “Atlanta” by both the rest of the world and the other half of Georgia’s population.
For those reasons, we need much better from city government. Mayor Reed has shown a willingness to wade into tough work before. Addressing the city’s outdated and overly expensive pension system is a good example.
Atlanta’s workforce deserves the best the city and region can muster in terms of providing quality assistance and training to enable people to gain the jobs that are, yes, out there today, even in a still-tepid economy.
And quickly righting matters at AWDA will enable Mayor Reed to continue important hands-on work that he has proven adept at doing – that of working across boundaries and ideology to help get some needed things done around this region and state.
The sooner the AWDA’s fixed, the faster Reed can get back to such tasks.
