Job fund cuts seen as risky $5.6 million in grants targeted

AUGUSTA – It is rare when the Maine Chamber of Commerce and the Maine AFL-CIO agree. But both are sharply critical of budget cuts proposed by President Bush that would slash more than $5 million in grants to the state for job training during the next two years.

“This has to be viewed as a major setback,” said Dana Connors, president of the Maine Chamber. “This is hardly the time to be cutting back on our investment in the work force. We are having a hard enough time attracting employers to the state because of the lack of employees with the technical skills many of them are seeking in their employees.”

Ed Gorham, president of the Maine AFL-CIO, said the proposed cuts are shortsighted and come just when there may be an increase in demand for training with a softening economy.

“A lot of workers that need training will not get trained and a lot of the infrastructure that has been put in place to help them is going to disappear,” he said. “So we will end up having to re-create the wheel when this is all over.”

Both Gorham and Connors said the cuts, totaling $5.6 million over the next two years, would hurt Maine’s ability to compete in the global economy.

Gov. Angus King is asking the Legislature to make up some of the federal cuts. He has $3 million in his proposed supplemental state budget for the next two years, but Labor Commissioner Valerie Landry said that will not maintain current levels of training services.

“No, it will not maintain what we are doing now, but we hope to maintain core services by making other internal cuts in our departmental budget,” Landry said.

Landry said adding to her immediate budget worries is information coming from federal officials that her department may face additional cuts in key training program grants in the federal fiscal year 2003 budget. Maine’s budget is for two years, while the federal government budgets a year at a time.

“We have been informed to expect a 20 percent cut in Workforce Investment Act money in the next budget,” she said. “That’s over $2 million in that account alone, and there may be cuts in other programs.”

In addition to the broad program cuts, a number of specifically targeted job training programs have been proposed for elimination or major cuts. For example, a program aimed at fishermen is cut by more than 20 percent in the proposed 2002 budget and eliminated in the 2003 budget.

“Some of these we knew were coming because they were planned to be for a limited time,” Landry said. “But we were not expecting cuts in the core training programs and the job centers.”

Some specialized programs in the agency also face federal cuts. For instance, a 5 percent cut is proposed in funding for the Disabled Veterans Outreach Program.

However, appropriations under the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act, for workers who lost jobs because of federal trade policies, would be increased by 25 percent – to $3.1 million – under the proposed budget.

“One of the problems we have always had is so many of the programs are targeted to specific groups of workers,” Landry said. “We often do not have the flexibility we need.”

The state Legislature has yet to consider the supplemental budget request.

Members of the state’s congressional delegation agree that the cuts will hurt Maine and pledge to seek full funding in the federal budget negotiations that will occur through the summer on the federal budget that starts Oct. 1.

“It is a real mistake to cut back on training programs,” said U.S. Rep. John Baldacci, a Democrat. “Investing in our work force is a key to all economic development, and we should be looking at ways to expand training opportunities, not decrease them.”

Baldacci said Maine will not be able to “catch up” with the economic prosperity in other regions of the country without a skilled work force that gets updated training when needed. He said while it was important to streamline the administration of job training programs at the federal level, it should not result in cutting funds for training.

“I was surprised the administration targeted these programs for cuts,” said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican. “They have broad, bipartisan support. I will work to restore these cuts because they are very important to Maine.”

Collins said she is optimistic most of the funds will be restored in the budget. Nationally, the Labor Department was cut by more than $500 million. Collins noted some programs key to Maine, such as Job Corps, were not cut in the president’s budget plan.

A White House spokesman said the budget cuts were proposed as part of an effort to streamline the various training programs in the U.S. Department of Labor, and referred specific questions on the cuts to the office of Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

A spokesman for Chao referred any questions to the regional office in Boston. Attempts to reach a spokesman at that office were unsuccessful Friday and the office was closed over the long holiday weekend.