INSIDE OKDHS - COMMISION REPORT: AUGUST 2011

Dir. Howard Hendrick: It’s been a busy few weeks since last we met. I am still trying to get out around the state. I went to Jay and Pryor up in the Northern part of the state and went to Tulsa for a couple of visits there, just getting around. I think it’s really been good.

I had some meetings with our providers at Greer, the Liberty Healthcare folks who operate Greer in Enid. Went to our regional meeting, I’ll talk a little bit about this, our tri-regional meeting for our partners for the United States Department of Agriculture. 

Had a very nice meeting with the National Governor’s Association on best practices for Family and Children Services. I got to see a little bit of our Skyline Building in Tulsa which is still partly under construction, partly being occupied. People are doing a really good job there.

We had a really nice event last weekend which I’ll show you right here.

NO AUDIO: Slide entitled “Sixth Annual Military Foster and Adoptive Family 
Appreciation Event - OKC Zoo” with pictures of children enjoying the zoo.

At our Sixth Annual Military Foster and Adoptive Appreciation event at the Oklahoma City Zoo. As I said earlier, this is the sixth year we’ve done this. We have Foster Parents or Adoptive Parents who are employees or who have family members who are employed in the military, mostly from Tinker, some from Fort Sill, some from Enid, some from Vance - Vance in Enid and also Altus. 

So we do this every year and it’s kind of a nice way for these Foster Parents to get à  have a day away and we get to recognize them at the zoo.

NO AUDIO: Slide entitled “Oklahoma wins top USDA Region Award - Fifth Consecutive year”

This is the fifth consecutive year we went to this, really kind of odd that we won this one again. I say that because we were not the best at anything this year.  We were kind of like the second best at everything and so the folks who were best at accuracy were the worst at something else. 

So when you look at the overall performance, we were the best in our region in overall performance but we weren’t the very best in any one of the categories but in the cumulative categories, we did the best. So this is the fifth year in a row we have won the top award for our region which includes Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana and Arkansas. For the administration of the Food Stamp award. I really enjoy this because I get to talk smack to the director in Texas.

(laughter) 

I really like talking smack to the director in Texas. But he kind of got the better smack of me this year because he said, “Even though you guys won the trophy, we won the money.” Which they did, they had a really good year with accuracy so they got a big bonus from the Federal Government for accuracy...

They’ve done a really good job in Texas. Their legislature approved several hundred new staff for them in a downturn budget, they got a lot of new staff to
take care of their Food Stamp problemsà because they really had, especially in Houston.
If you went into Houston 18 months ago and tried to get Food Stamps, it’d take you six weeks to get an appointment. Just to get Food Stamps. To their credit, their legislature has given them new staff and they’ve done a good job to really turn their program around. And they deserve what they got.

We’re really, really, really proud of our Child Support people. This is being announced today, nationally.

NO AUDIO: Letter from the NCSEA (National Child Support Enforcement Associations) citing that Oklahoma Child Support Services 
has won the 2011 Outstanding Program of the Year Award.

We won the outstanding program in the Nation for our Child Support program for 2011. Gary, stand up on behalf of all your co-workers,  we’re just really proud this is being announced today nationally and à

(applause) 

Great job! We really couldn’t be more excited about what’s happening 
in our Child Support program. This is part of the letter from the Executive Director: “The Awards Committee was impressed with the outstanding achievements of the Oklahoma program over the past several years and the strong commitment to improvement and quality with a sustainable governance structure. In addition, the solid, consistent training and continuous development of staff and the commitment to customer service which is reflected in the numbers of your results is highly commendable. The committee was impressed with your involvement and partnerships with the justice community and with the great metrics in your call center. The accomplishments and innovations of your program are commended and is the type of national model the Outstanding Program Award is meant to highlight.” 

Our folks have really done a great job and they have a lot of new initiatives even beyond the placement of this, they’ve started a number of other things in the Division even to keep their improvement, so they’ve done a great job. 

Anotherà good news for folks that got this help, we’ve distributed approximately $22 million in our Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program for this year. We had many of the families pre-certified but we were only open for three days, I mean that’s just how quick the money went. The benefits were $200 for a one-person household and $250 for a two-person household. It went really, really fast in terms of gettingà people are going to have a lot of high energy bills this summer with all the heat that’s going on.  So it’s very important.

The numbers for June in our SNAP Program are up again over May. This is the fourth consecutive month with another increase. It’s not a large increase but it is some increase. We’re up 4% over last year, same month last year, but we’re up 24% over the same month two years ago. We’re up 45% over where we were three years ago. So quite a bit of increase overall. By the way, 30% of all the children in the state, in May, 30%, 274,000à 275,000 kids almost, of all children in the state were on SNAP during the month of May. Nine hundred twenty thousand kids in the state.

This is kind of a follow-up to our 2012 budget. The budget is in place. You have one agenda item on your budget ... on the agenda today to talk about the 2012 budget which is a ratification and approval of the co-pay. I’m asking that you defer the effective date of that co-pay increase until November first.

We have a difference of opinion as to whether or not we have the power to do this, I think we do. We have a legal opinion that says we do. But I think, just out of deference to those people who are involved, we’re going to go get another opinion.  And so the recommendation that will come to you today is that we make this effective November first and that’ll give us some time to go get whatever authority we need to do to verify the accuracy of what we’re doing. So that’s coming up today.

2013 budget: I want to talk a little bit about that because at the next Commission Meeting, you’ll get a budget request recommendation that will be developed through the Budget Committee and also from staff going through division by division to talk about what our budget request should be to the legislature.

This has to be filed with the Office of State Finance by October 1st. The challenge we really have in finishing up ... in putting together 2012 budget and looking at 2013 budget is: we have in round numbers about $47 million of one-time funds in our 2012 budget so, you know, and we have on the horizon all these risks of loss of federal funds given the things that are happening in Washington.

So, we’re going to go through the regular process of constructing a budget request, but one of the main things that will be there is the replacement of one-time funds. Just so you can kind of see what’s coming. I don’t know, it’s a lot to request just to replace one-time funds. But those funds are being used to fund recurring costs and that’s what we’re looking at. 

It’s also going to be less likely that we’ll have much carry-over going into 2013 because, as budgets contract as they are from ‘11 to ‘12, there’s probably going to be less carry-over because there’s less time to ramp down the cuts that need to be put into place for 2012. That’s what we’re looking at there with 2013. 

We also have a significant à this is a thing that I think you’ll also see in the request we have a lot of pent-up demand for rates for lots of services. Employees haven’t had pay increases in four years now. We haven’t given raises to DDSD providers in several years even prior toà we have the same rates today for DDSD and ADvantage Waiver providers that we had when the minimum wage was $5.15. We haven’t increased their rates since, you know, since before that time.

So, we have a lot of pent-up demand: foster parent raises, child care rates raises, lots of raises in terms of rates that really need to be addressed. Of course, the State’s budget is somewhat better than it was in 2012, I mean, 2010, I’m sorry, 2011 is looking better than 2012, - than 2010 - but we’re still not back to where we were in 2007 and ‘06.  

So we still have a lot ofà we have, as I said earlier, we have the fewest number of employees we’ve had since I’ve been here. So, the demand is high, the caseloads are pretty significant, especially in the Family Support area. So, you’ll see the overall request. If there’s anything that any of you have, a special interest to be sure that it gets covered, just letting the staff know, or the Chairman, or any of the Finance Committee know, and we’ll try to incorporate as many of your concerns as we can, as we put together the budget recommendation for 2013.

NO AUDIO: Slide entitled “Family Strengthening Initiatives in Oklahoma - Two-Parent Families as a Child Poverty Reduction Strategy.”

I want to go through a few slides here on a presentation 
I gave to the National Governor’s Association on best practices for two-parent families. This is not the whole presentation this is about seven minutes probably of a twenty or twenty-five minute presentation. But basically I shared with them our Family Expectations Program and talked about the benefits of what we hope to see from family strengthening initiatives and the challenges we’re trying to face - this is true for all states - we’re trying to face with the challenges in families today.

Talking about some of the problems for children of not getting the benefit of getting both their parents. Of course, Family Expectations is primarily focused on trying to give newborns the benefit of both of their parents whether married or not. 

NO AUDIO: Slide titled “Outlining of Family Strengthening Initiatives” with the following bullet points: What is Family Expectations? Some of the problems for children of not getting both parents (Biological Parental abandonment as an Adverse Childhood Experience, Childhood Poverty Rates, and Explosion of Non-martial Births.  What we are learning.

So we talk about some of the problems for children not getting their parents and we talked a little bit about the ACE study, The Adverse Childhood Experience study.

NO AUDIO: Picture of a gentleman who struggled with the loss of his father, underneath it reads “Patient has lost 158 lbs in Weight Program.”

And one of the guys in the ACE study that, this guy right here, I won’t show you the whole video clip but he talks in this video clip about when his father left him when he was five years old. And all the efforts that he took to get back with his dad. And he finally found his dad and spent two weeks with his dad when he was a senior in high school. And during that time, he lost a bunch of the weight that heà over the years he’d over-eat and gained a bunch of weight. During that two weeks period of time he lost a lot of that weight, went back to live with whoever he was living with at the time of the interlude with his dad, goes back to his other home and gained all the weight back.

So if you’re familiar with the Adverse Childhood Experience research and Dr. Anda was actually at the same conference and he was very excited about what we’re doing with Family Expectations. Especially, I think, he was interested in what health benefits there might be for pre-birth children in utero for brain development whose mothers have a healthy relationship with their partner.

Because a lot of times when those mothers experience pre-birth paternal abandonment, they see a lot of the chemical reactions, even in utero, of that adverse relationship they may be having with their father.

NO AUDIO: Slide entitled “2009 Census Child Poverty Rates”

So we talked a little bit about those things, we talked about poverty rates and rates, what we’re learning at Family Expectations. If you want to know more about Family Expectations you can got to this web site and get more information on it. I shared with them these childhood poverty rates.

These are the 2009 Census data on child poverty rates. And I know this is an eye strain but the highlights are these: the child poverty rate for all married couples with children is 8.3%. This is 2009. Poverty rates for kids who get in married couples’ households is 8.3%. Poverty rates for children who have all male-headed households are 23.7%. Poverty rates for children with female-headed households is 38.5%.

The lowest poverty rate for female-headed households is Asian women who have a poverty rate of 22.5%. The highest poverty rate for children who are living with married couples are Hispanic kids with 19.9%. The obvious point here is that the worst poverty rates for kids who have both their parents is better than the best poverty rates for kids who only have one parent. So the effort to get kids the benefit of both their parents is really a worthy effort.
And I think we have a lot to learn about it yet but I think the effort is still very worth it. Here’s some more of the data on differences on non-martial births by mothers between 1968 and 2008. Differences in education, differences based on ethnicity.

You can see non-martial births were less than 5% for all births back in 1960 and as you go forward you can see the non-martial birthrate for women who don’t finish high school continues to be the highest. The non-martial birth rate for women who have a college education still is below 5% even though we’ve had all these increases over the last 40 or 50 years. Still, the non-martial rate for the women with college degrees is still less than 5%.

Ethnicity differences, you can see African American, Hispanic and White birth rates all have gone up dramatically over the last 40 years or so and we’re seeing a little bit of tapering off. Our preliminary numbers actually - I don’t trust these numbers yet - but our preliminary numbers actually show that our out-of-wedlock birth rate in Oklahoma, which is very near the national average and has been all along for the last decade. The last decade the national out-of-wedlock birth rate has grown from about 30% to about 40%. We’ve gone from about 30% to about 41% or 42%. But the last couple of years, we’ve seen a very sharp flattening, and maybe our preliminary numbers actually show a slight decline and that’s not consistent with the national trend.

Now, we don’t have all the data in that I trust yet, even on that determination.
So I’m not claiming any kind of victory yet untilà it takes a couple of years, for some reason, at the Health Department to get birth certificate data cleaned up, I don’t understand why, you’d think that a birth certificate would be pretty straight forward. 

But it takes them a couple of years to get all of that done so. You can see the percent of children living in single-parent households has continued to go up from about 11.9% in 1970 to now 26.6%. And this is just point in time data. If you looked at all children who spent some part of their childhood in a single-parent household, of course, this number would be much higher.

This number is reduced because of some re-marrying features of some partners.
What we’re really focused on here is child well-being and health. That’s the real focus of all this effort. And if you look at the history of the research here, of the Abecedarian research on early childhood, the adverse childhood experiences I mentioned earlier which is the Centers for Disease Control research. 

“The Fragile Family” study, which is the big national study that involves tracking out-of-wedlock births of about 5,000 children. Those kids now are probably eight or ten years old, maybe twelve years old, time flies. 
And then our focus group is really, we’re in two studies here, Family Expectations program is in the unmarried study called Building Strong Families and they’re also in the married study called Healthy Relationship and Marriage study. 

So we’re really just continuing a long line of probably 30 years’ worth of research to stay focused on child well-being and figuring out what we can do to keep children in the best situation possible. Here are some of the beginning theses and findings that we’re developing in Family Expectations: Pregnancy is a teachable moment.

Pregnancy should not be considered primarily a medical procedure, which is kind of what may be wrong right now with pregnancy. Sometimes we think pregnancy is mostly just about a medical procedure.  Really pregnancy should be considered a family creating event and there’s more social value to pregnancy than medical value to pregnancy when you look at the long-term value of what’s really happening during pregnancy.

We know from Fragile Families study that 80% of the low-income, unmarried pregnant couples really want to have a healthy family but there’s just not à don’t seem to be able to figure out how to get it done. That’s what we hope to be able to teach these couples in Family Expectations. I’m not going to run through all this but this is kind of the intervention that is part of Family Expectations.

NO AUDIO: Slide entitled “What We Are Learning: The Family Expectations Intervention” which details all of the elements of the program itself: Couples get a “life coach” or “case manager” until child turns one.  Employment; substance abuse; etc.  30 hours of class for moms AND dads, whether married or not, taught in cohorts of 12 to 15 couples.  Ten week nights of three hours or six weekends of five hours. “Makeup classes” liberally available. “Dose” matters. 12 hours of PRET (the Prevention, Relationship Enrichment Program) the only MRE curriculum designated by SAMHSA as a “promising practice.” Curriculum fidelity is monitored.  Child Support services explained.  Fatherhood explained. On site child care. Family Budgeting. Infant care for dads.  Supporting your partner - understanding the post partum experiences including depression and planning the care of the child.

The key things are the 30 hours of class with a number of these topics in it and then they kind of get a Case Manager that helps the couple work through employment, education, substance abuse or whatever they may need until the child turns age one. These are randomized studies. If you want to go to the website and see the first results of the first report that’s out on the Building Strong Families, unmarried couples, you can go to this web site.

NO AUDIO: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/project/strengthFamilyProjects.jsp

All this is funded through HHS in Washington. Our site is the only site in the nation that’s in both studies and we have 500 unmarried couples in a control group and 500 unmarried couples in an intervention group, 500 married couples in a control group and 500 married couples in an intervention group, and then 2,000 children. All these kidsà 6,000 total people just in Oklahoma City in both of these studies combined.

We hope to learn some stuff that will help us figure out how to better keep two-parent families together. This is again, the executive summary ofà you can go to the website and look at the executive summary of what has been found of the first assessment.

NO AUDIO: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/strengthen/build_fam/reports/unmarried_parents/15_impact_exec_summ.pdf

And we expect a couple of other reports out, probably in January or February. Probably the first report on the married couples should come out in January or February and probably the second report on unmarried couples. Initial findings after 15 months: from enrollment on the unmarried couples, 82% of the intervention group are still together. 75% of the control group are together. Much higher quality of relationship quality among the couples who got intervention.

The key will be what happens in the next one because we reallyà most couples who are not married tend to split between, according to Fragile Families anyway, in between about 18 and 30 months. So when we get this next report back we should know whether or not the intervention has some lasting value or not. We feel pretty good about hopefully learning that question.

NO AUDIO: Slide showing bar graph of 2011 being the highest monthly average ever for SNAP participation.

Okay, Initial Performance Results: Here’s our monthly average for Food Stamps the last fiscal year - 609,000 people in the last 12 months, in an average month were on SNAP. This is the highest average monthly SNAP participation in the history of the state. It’s higher by about 40,000 people, I guess, over last year. And over two years ago ... what is that, 170,000 people almost? More than two years ago. So, that’s just the average month.

Remember if we looked at the unduplicated count that means the number of different people served in the course of the year. This number in 2010 was 820,000 different people in calendar year 2010 received these benefits. So we’re probably looking at 850,000 or so different people. In round numbers, what we can say about this caseload is about half of these people about 300,000 of the 609,000 people - if you look at the national data - about half of these persons who are on SNAP, were on SNAP all year long. The other half, the people were on and off and on and off with another couple hundred thousand people. 

So there’s quite a bit of activity for our workers to do each month in terms of re-determining eligibility or removing eligibility for people who find employment.

NO AUDIO: Slide showing bar graph of 2011 being the highest year for Child Support Collections ever.

This is the highest Child Support collection we’ve ever had, $317,993,000. This is up about 6.2% over last year and these numbers may change a little bit at the end of the day but these are our initial findings.

NO AUDIO: Slide showing a bar graph of Child Welfare Adoptions.

We had 1,141 children who had finalized adoptions here in 2011. It might look like a drop, and it is an absolute drop, but if you look at the number of different children that were in care at the beginning of the year it might give you a little bit of appreciation for, really, the good work that is done to get that level of adoptions. If you go back to 2007 when we had 1,152, we started that year with 11,941 children in care on the first day of 2007. We started 2011 with 4,000 less children in care and still received almost the same number of finalized adoptions in 2011. 

So staff have done a really good job of getting kids to permanency and continue to have oneà if you go back and look at the last, I think it’s three or maybe it’s five federal fiscal years, add up all the adoptions for the last five federal fiscal years, divided by the number of kids in the state, we would have the number one adoption rate of any state in the Nation per capita. Our folks have done a really good job of getting kids to permanency here. We’ll get a more detailed review of a lot of the other programs when we meet in September.

I want to run through a number of the organizational issues. IT is continuing to beà things that we’re having to work through, we’ve been in negotiations with the CIO and a number of issues are still not where we need to be in terms of trying to get some clarity about shared expectations. 

The law that was passed actually transfers assets and personnel to OSF unless an exemption is granted. We’re working on what the scope of that kind of an exemption might look like but that hasn’t been granted yet. We also have a lot of concern that the way in which we finance our IT gets us a lot of federal financial participation and keeps our state dollar costs down and our concern is that if some of these assets are transferred outside the agency the Federal Government is not going to participate in financing the IT services delivered to other agencies.

One of my biggest concerns right now is our loss of hot site capacity due to our budget reductions. I think we were in hopes that we would be able to get some hot site capacity from OSF. We have kind of a warm site environment right now,  we back up data but we can’t bring the data back up as quickly as we need to if we had some kind of a crash. While we wouldn’t lose any data the fact that if you’re down for a day your ability to keep data going is very challenging.  So we’re working to try to figure out what we’re going to do about this, this is a veryà this is one of my biggest concerns.

Even though we went many years without having hot site capacity. Once you get it you really hate to lose it. And that’s kind of where we are, I mean, we’re not losing any data with this, we’re backing up data and all those kinds of things but your ability to be immediately redundant is impaired if you don’t have some kind of capacity like that, so that’s a concern for us.

NO AUDIO: Slide entitled “Organizational Issues” which reads “Some pending IT initiatives are moving slowly due to shared uncertainty internally, DCS and at OSF: Fingerprinting service, Child Care monitoring information service, Completing the family support imaging initiative, Personnel guidance, Maintaining network equipment, etc.”

Other IT issues: because of the legislation, there’s a lot of questions that are still unanswered and that’s probably the uncertainty, really, is really what’s a big challenge also is. We have a number of initiatives that we really need to get completed out and working through all these things it’s not clear whether DCS or OSF or who all has to approve, depending on what kind of service is involved. 

And so the language of the statute is broad and could also be interpreted differently. I mean, it depends on what kind of service you’re trying to buy.  So I think that uncertainty is slowing us down a little bit in terms of getting things done that we really feel like we need to get done. 

And it creates some anxiety for personnel. Who’s going to really go? Are we really going to leave people in our agency or are people going to become employees of the Office of State Finance? So, we’re trying to get some clarity here is really important for us. So that’s just going to be something we’re going to have to deal with, that uncertainty for a while. It’s just kind of the nature of what we’re having to deal with. 

We have uncertainty also, I guess, in terms ofà but we have a road map in terms of plans of what we’re trying to do with SORC and NORC. We have developed an internal process to secure the statutorily-required input from parents and employees we feel good about. The plan that’s been developed is to talk to those folks, get an outside person to come in and sit down and talk with the families and talk with the staff and develop the input that we need from those folks. We’re already beginning the assessment of where our property lines and all the titles to the property involved so we can develop a comprehensive plan to present to the legislature by January the first. The legislature will have until March first to reject the plan if they don’t like it.

We won’t implement any plan until after March the first. But we’ll have a plan put together, we hope, by... we will have a plan by January first and we hope to get the input from our stakeholders completed by the middle of October. Also the new law that requires the Health Care Authority to put out an RFP, Requests for Proposals, for the operation of the Administrative Operations Unit for the ADvantage Waiver. There are other parts of that same legislation that talk about presumptive eligibility for the ADvantage Waiver.

They will probably seek some guidance from CMS on what CMS will and will not pay for with presumptive eligibility. That may slow down this process a little bit. The law does permit our employees, if they want to, to develop a bid to respond to the RFP.  So that’s another bit of uncertainty, we’ll have to wait and see how that RFP process works out at the Health Care Authority. There’s about 55 - 60 employees in that unit.

Other organizational issues, we’re already in the middle of our second voluntary out benefit offer reduction to get our staff sizes down to the budgeted levels.  So we will continuing to reduce staff through voluntary departures or through retirements. And so that’s necessary to meet our budget targets. We have a number of key people who have announced their retirement.

Mike Fairless, is Mike here? I don’t know if Mike’s here or not. Raymond Haddock and Paula Hearn have all announced their retirements in these different dates. 

NO AUDIO: Slide reads “Several key staff persons have announce their pending retirements: Inspector General Mike Fairless - 10/11/2011.  Chief Coordinating Officer Raymond Haddock - 10/11/2011. Chief Administrative Officer Paula Hearn - 1/1/2012.

Raymond, you have one more meeting with us don’t you? Where’s Raymond at? Yeah, OK, good, yeah. All right. Paula’s got a few moreà if you’re nice you have another meeting with us. (laughing) No, shoot.

That’s really à I mean these are really valuable people, I mean, how long have you been with the agency Raymond?

Raymond Haddock:  Forty years.

Dir. Howard Hendrick: Wow. 40 years. Man. Lot of value. In all these positions, Mike’s been here a long time and Paula as well. We’ve been very blessed to have their help and other people kind of on the horizon, I’m not sure how publically announced they are but we have a lot of key people that are nearing the age of retirement or retiring.

Another big change that’s on the horizon here is how we determine eligibility for different benefit programs. We’ve been working now for about 18 months on OKDHSLive.org. You can go out to the website even now and go look and see the look and feel experience of how OKDHSLive.org works.  But what’s nice is that we’ve actually test driven this for a few months in a limited population of our clients and our initial experience is very good. About 50% of the families who were given the choice  to use the site actually used the site for their renewal the first time they were given the  opportunity. 

So that’s a pretty good pick up rate from day one. So, we haven’t rolled it all out state-wide but our initial acceptance by the families who were given the opportunity to use it is very high. So we do think this will cut down on a lot of the traffic in our offices. People can just come online and then they may have to email us or bring us documentation in but a lot of the basic information, they can pull up from their account and then give us whatever they need to do to continue or renew their benefits.

So, and eventually, probably by the end of the year, maybe by the spring it should be able to take new applications online through this same website. So, what’s nice about this process is this is not like a lot of states who’ve just gone out and put a form on their website. You fill it in a PDF and send it in and someone has to re-key it in. This is data that’s out there that when it’s fed in to the computer it does not have to be re-keyed by our staff.
It actually populates our computer system internally.
That’s probably one of the reasons that it’s taken a little bit longer to get all this up because we’ve really taken our initiative to a whole other level. 
So hopefully our staff won’t beà we won’t have any of the keystroke errors that you might have with transposition and other things like that.

So, this is coming and that’s going to change a lot of the way in which frontline workers experience work over the next six to nine months. 

Other major issues ahead: We have new staff to select. We’ll get a budget request for 2013 to you. We’ll continue our roll-out of Live, we’ll work with the CIO on the exemption and then we’ll finish our distributive processing for imaging, which is almost done. Probably 80% or 90% of that’s done, in terms ofà and that’s really, let’s talk a little bit about that just so you’ll know.

That’s a key, important part of making OKDHS Live work is, we probably have 80%, maybe 90% of the state now, rolled out in a paperless environment for benefit eligibility determination. If you were to go to our offices two years ago every Food Stamp, Medicaid case and eligibility case would all be paper. We’d have paper files everywhere. If you go to some of our offices today, there are no paper files for Food Stamps and benefits. And everything is entirely electronic and imaged.

So, we have a ways to go to get all of our offices there. And we probably may be done by next June, I don’t knowhow long it’ll take us to all of that rolled out. But eventually all those records will be paperless environment. Now that’s very valuable because since that work is all paperless, all of our auditors can then review those records online, they don’t have to go get paper files to do their audits. 

And also it’s very valuable cause if we get jammed up in some other office we can take those electronic records and have some staff in different offices work those cases. So, it’s really a nice thing for us to be continuing to push with the technology out there to continue toà 

Another big thing, I think, for me, the reason why I’m very happy about where we are and I’ve been kind of sweating, you know, kind of where we are right now. We don’t know where we are economically as a country. And, I think we can teeter either way. We all hope that we’re going to pull out of this thing
economically and we’ll be fine and things will be alright.

But, statistically there’s not a lot of new jobs in this recovery and if we have a double-dip recession I think we’re going to be in a very good shape, even with less staff, to try to at least get ramped up for another round if things do go South. So we’re not where we need to be yet but we’re close to where we need to be. That’s a lot of good progress.