Red Tape Ties Up D.C.'s Unemployed

When members of the Workforce Investment Council, a federally funded group of public and private executives, tried to fulfill their mission of coordinating job training in the District, they realized they had a big problem: Nobody knew exactly what programs were out there that needed to be coordinated.

It took three staff members more than six months to come up with the answer: There are no less than 61 government programs designed to help District residents prepare for the workforce. Those programs are administered by 24 federal and city agencies and cost about $164 million annually. But the research could not answer another obvious question -- how many people had actually obtained jobs through these programs?

That lack of information, along with poor management and a dysfunctional bureaucracy, has crippled efforts to provide District residents with job training and placement, according to an examination by The Washington Post. This helps explain why, in a place with the strongest job growth of any large city in the nation and a business community hungry to hire even entry-level employees, unemployment is higher now than it was five years ago.

Some 17,700 District residents were unemployed in December, for a jobless rate of 6 percent. That's up from 5.7 percent five years ago and more than double the unemployment rate for the Washington region as a whole. Joblessness is lower in wealthy Ward 3 in Northwest than it was in 2000, but in Ward 8, east of the Anacostia river, joblessness rose to 15.8 percent in December from 11.1 percent in December 2000.

"With all of the employment programs we have and the number of jobs being created, we should not have the level of unemployment we're seeing in the city," said City Administrator Robert C. Bobb, who gives the District's job programs a "D at best."

"It's beyond shameful," he said.

To help residents navigate the maze of job training programs, the District operates eight One-Stop Career Centers, the first of which opened in 1999. Nonetheless, negotiating one's way to enrollment in a job training program through those centers takes an average of 11 months, according to an analysis by The Post of a Department of Employment Services database obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Agency officials disagree with this analysis, saying they start their calculations at a later point in the process, by which measure it takes 81 days to get into training.

Under the federal government's primary job training program for adults, 172 District residents completed training and found work in the year ended June 30, 2004. The city spent $5.4 million from that program during the period when those people were trained. That rate of spending per successful training recipient, $31,204, is almost double the national average and more than in any state.

A federal official who oversees job training programs described those costs as extraordinary. "That is higher than it should be. That's something we need to take a look at," said Emily Stover DeRocco, an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Labor.

D.C. Department of Employment Services officials said the money was also used to provide other services, such as job counseling. They also said the city should be compared with only other urban areas that have similar problems of concentrated poverty. Eight of 15 other large cities The Post analyzed had lower levels of spending per successful trainee.

"I'm not going to yank your chain and say that everything's working," said Gregory P. Irish, director of DOES. "What we have is a system designed much like every system in the country. But one size doesn't fit all. We're finding that we need a different system."

Besides the 24 government agencies with job training programs, Workforce Organizations for Regional Collaboration, a nonprofit group that seeks better coordination among government, nonprofit groups and others involved with job training, counts about 500 local schools, foundations, social service outfits, and other groups that help people get training and employment.