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DWD Secretary Frostman explains delays in unemployment claims

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Some people in Wisconsin who are waiting on an unemployment check could be waiting until October.  The Department of Workforce Development says it could take that long to clear the backlog of people waiting to have their jobless claims processed.

The agency says the current unemployment claims backlog stands at 112-thousand cases. State Senator Chris Kapenga says D-W-D needs to figure out how to erase that backlog as quickly as possible.

“I am completely confused as to why someone who filed for unemployment insurance eight weeks ago has not had their data put into a batch to be processed by COBOL.”

The state’s unemployment program has been struggling to handle all the claims that have been made since the state of the pandemic, and there’s a good reason, according to DWD Secretary Caleb Frostman.

He laid out just how hard the unemployment system was hit at the start of the pandemic. “Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyways, our call systems were not built to handle 5.8 million calls a week which is a 20-000 percent increase over last year’s busiest week.”

Frostman says his office has already made fantastic efforts to handle the massive influx of claims. 

“We increased the capacity for our Help Center by 200% in 10 days by adding two additional session border controllers and performing load balancing.  Ordering processes that normally took one month were reduced to 28 hours, and we’re now able to accept 160 calls per second, and handle 690 simultaneous calls.”

“Once we stop accepting new calls each evening, our staff still completes hours of work to clear the call queues, process claims, call back claimants, and issue payments ahead of the nightly ACH deadline,” he told a committee panel on Wednesday. 

Frostman says the bottlenecks in processing are entirely down to not having enough people who are properly vetted under state and federal statutes to do the work of actually processing claims.

Evers announces $200 million grant program for local & tribal governments

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Governor Tony Evers is directing 200 million dollars of federal CARES Act money to Wisconsin’s local and tribal governments.

Evers announced the “Routes to Recovery” effort on Wednesday. “Of the 200 million dollars, ten million dollars will be allocated to Wisconsin tribal nations, with the remaining funds being distributed to every Wisconsin county, city, village and town.”

The money is to be used for unexpected expenses associated with the pandemic that haven’t already been covered through other state virus response efforts. How much a local government gets will be based on its population. The Wisconsin Department of Administration is administering the grant program. There’s a guaranteed minimum $5,000 allocation.

Wisconsin Elections Commission agrees to mail absentee ballot applications

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The Wisconsin Elections Commission unanimously backed a proposal to send roughly 2.7 million voters an absentee ballot application.

WisPolitics reports that commission staff anticipates just 10 percent of recipients will respond to the mailing, which will cost around $2.3 million, but that the anticipated response rate was a “crude estimate” based on experience with past mailings.

The final mailing is set to go to all registered voters in the state — with the exception of those who’ve already requested an absentee ballot or who may have moved and have not confirmed their address.

The commission also approved a grant program that would send each municipality $200 plus $1.10 for each registered voter to cover upcoming costs.

Advocates want state to act for homeless

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The coronavirus could make things much worse for Wisconsin’s homeless people. The Wisconsin Coalition Against Homelessness has a new plan to spend $70-million to help find jobs and homes for the homeless.

Spokesman Joseph Volk told the Wisconsin State Journal that with unemployment pushing 15 percent in Wisconsin, there could be a surge of homelessness. He says he hopes lawmakers act before it’s too late.

DMV estimates 250,000 may renew licenses online

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It’s estimated that nearly 250,000 Wisconsin drivers could renew their licenses online this year. The Department of Motor Vehicles started a program earlier this month to cut back on the number of in-person visits to state offices during the coronavirus pandemic.

To renew online, drivers must have a regular Class-D license with no medical restrictions or further deterioration of their vision. The DMV has also extended the expiration date for about 80 thousand drivers who haven’t been able to renew their licenses while the governor’s Safer at Home order was in effect.

Wisconsin continues to ramp up unemployment processing amid unprecedented jobless numbers

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The Department of Workforce Development says they’re working to untangle the backlog of unemployment claims.

Chief economist Dennis Winters says DWD is doing the best they can right now, and that they’re already scaling up their service. 

“We’re doing everything that’s possible, handling millions of phone calls and hundreds of thousands of claims on a system that wasn’t prepared for the manner in how sudden that this all happened.”

At 14.1 percent unemployment, Wisconsin still has a lower unemployment rate than the national average. 439-thousand people lost a job in April.

Winters says the state’s unemployment system was never built to handle as many claims as have come in. 

“We’re doing everything we can to ramp up on that side, and for those that are having difficulty we apologize but the vast majority are being handled as well as we can, and all of them are being handled as well as we can, given the circumstances.”

Jobless numbers like this have not been seen since the Great Depression.

Unemployment rate skyrockets amid pandemic shutdowns

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The unemployment rate in Wisconsin has reached a level not seen since the Great Depression. The state’s jobless rate rose, from just over three percent in March, to just over 14 percent in April.

The Department of Workforce Development said preliminary estimates show that a loss of 385,900 private-sector jobs from March to April, and a total loss of 439,400 total non-farm jobs.

“Today’s report shows the significant impact that the COVID-19 global pandemic has had on the Wisconsin economy, and underscores the importance of rationally and safely reopening our state,” DWD Secretary Caleb Frostman said. “A strategy based on science that reduces the likelihood of additional outbreaks and further economic instability is the only way to get Wisconsin back on the path of historically low unemployment rates that the state was experiencing prior to COVID-19.”

April was the first full month of the Safer at Home order imposed by Governor Tony Evers due to the coronavirus pandemic. That forced most nonessential businesses to close, and led to crippling unemployment.

The state’s unemployment rate is just below national average of 14.7 %.

Wisconsin announces assistance for farmers, renters and landlords

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Wisconsin farmers and processors will be eligible for a direct payment program from the state, for coronavirus relief.

Governor Tony Evers confirmed Wednesday he will take $50-million from the $1.9 billion given to the state in the CARES Act to use for the direct payments, plus another $15 million dollars to assist food security efforts.

Eligible farmers will be asked to apply for the aid through the Wisconsin Department of Revenue, which is working in collaboration with the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection.

Farm support payments could begin arriving as early as June. The $50-million is exactly what eight Wisconsin farm organizations requested from Evers in an April 21st letter.

Also on Wednesday, Evers announced a $25 million Wisconsin Rental Assistance Program for residents who are struggling to pay rent and landlords struggling to collect amid the pandemic.

Brownfield

Senator Baldwin introduces new bill to offer more pandemic relief to farmers

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Senator Tammy Baldwin is looking to increase relief funding to farmers being harmed by disruptions in the nation’s food supply chains.

Baldwin says her new Farming Support to States Act would directly help farmers whose main sources of sales are cut off during the pandemic response. She cites the examples of dairy farmers who usually sell to outfits that supply large food service partners.

“And these large-scale buyers, because of the pandemic and stay-at-home orders, their orders have dropped off at least like a cliff.”

Since dairy farms are always producing milk, being unable to sell that product has lead to milk dumping, among other issues. 

“Many farmers in Wisconsin are finding they have to dump milk and there’s nothing more heartbreaking than that for somebody who worked hard to produce a high-quality nutritious product.”)

Baldwin says that even the smallest bump in the supply chain can cause massive disruptions, when the food industry is tooled to be as streamlined as possible.

 

Testing and tracing remain key components of state’s COVID-19 response effort

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The Evers administration has announced a $1.17 billion statewide effort to support the state’s pandemic response. It clarifies how money from the federal CARES Act is being allocated in Wisconsin for things like community testing, according to Department of Health Services Secretary Julie Willems Van Dijk.

“Recognizing that this is the funding that we have until December 31 of 2020,” Willems Van Dijk said. “And knowing, particularly in the fall, we may face a surge of COVID-19 patients if this epidemic follows a similar course to prior epidemics, we want to make sure that we have funds in reserve for any future surge that emerges.”

Community testing is a role currently largely being fulfilled by the Wisconsin National Guard, headed by Adjutant General Paul Knapp.

“We’re in a lot of different discussions on a daily basis, projecting out additional community testing sites across the state,” Knapp said on Tuesday. The National Guard is currently operating 25 field testing teams. “In terms of the community testing sites, we’re always looking for areas where we can assist the local authorities, wherever they might have a requirement.”

“It really has been in the last month or so, as we’ve built our testing capacity and had this great partnership with the National Guard, that we’ve been able to initiate these community testing sites,” Willems Van Dijk said. “They’re both giving us really valuable data about the prevalence of the virus in communities across the state, and also helping identify patients who need to be in isolation and their contacts in quarantine.”

But as Willems Van Dijk pointed out, the Guard can’t do that indefinitely. “We know that National Guard won’t be able to continue to provide this service for two years of the pandemic, if it takes that long to get to a vaccine,” she said.

The state has allocated approximately $260 million dollars for testing efforts, and another $75 million for contact tracing. Wisconsin’s goal is capacity for 85,000 tests per week.