Red Tape Ties Up D.C.'s Unemployed

Some of the individual programs, such as D.C. Central Kitchen, have achieved strong results, but the lack of coordination has kept the job training efforts from having a significant impact on unemployment. "Everything is too fragmented," said Charlene Drew Jarvis, president of Southeastern University and a former D.C. Council member who has long been active in economic development matters in the District. "There is too much support for overhead of multiple nonprofits that are doing training and not enough consolidation of programs."

'It Was a Farce'

Daniel M. Pernell, 55, retrieved documents at the Library of Congress for 23 years before retiring early for health reasons. In early 2005, his health problems were mostly behind him, but his retirement savings were dwindling. He needed a full-time job with better pay than his part-time work at a storage-unit rental facility could offer. His experiences reflect much of what is wrong with job training in the District.

In April, Pernell went to the One-Stop Career Center on Naylor Road SE. He said he sat down with a caseworker, told his story, and asked if he might get training in computers and administrative work so that he might land a better-paying office job. He said she sent him to a computer to search for job listings, ignoring his requests to pursue training.

In the ensuing weeks, he called the caseworker about six times, hoping to find out about any training opportunities. He said no one ever answered the phone or returned his voice-mail messages. He went back to the One-Stop Center a half-dozen times, he said.

"It was a farce," he said of trying to get training.

He served as an elected advisory neighborhood commissioner and found he enjoyed reviewing construction drawings of proposed buildings. Pernell knew there was a lot of building work going on in the city and decided he wanted to be part of it. He figured there would be a big demand for building inspectors and others on the administrative side of the construction business.

Months passed with no word from a caseworker. Then one day, in his capacity as an advisory neighborhood commissioner, he received a mailing from the National Capital Revitalization Corp., a quasi-public development group, asking for help recruiting people for a construction program. He joined it himself.

In December, Pernell graduated from a construction pre-apprenticeship program at Goodwill of Washington, where he received a safety certification and learned such things as how to read blueprints and do construction math. Pernell decided to apply for jobs doing administrative work for construction firms, among other positions. Late last year, he tried calling his career-center caseworker again to find out if any such jobs were available.

She didn't call back, Pernell said.

Asked about Pernell's case, Irish responded: "I'm not going to tell you one person doesn't have a valid complaint. I'm just saying look at the overall satisfaction results." He noted that a survey the agency conducted found that 70 percent of One-Stop users were satisfied.

Besides the full-service One-Stop Career Centers on Naylor Road SE and Franklin Road NE, there are six smaller satellite facilities around the city. Each full-service center employs about a dozen people, including caseworkers, who generally have a college degree and are paid $39,000 to $47,000 a year. These caseworkers are supposed to help unemployed District residents get unemployment benefits, find a job or get into a federally funded job training program.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, The Post obtained a database of 655 people who received training through One-Stop centers from 2001 to 2003. The database showed that the average trainee needed 3.4 meetings with his or her caseworker before getting into training. On average, 341 days passed between the time when the applicant first registered at a One-Stop center and when he or she entered a program.