By Natalie Bazinet
Staff Writer
While few people know how the Workforce Development Department (WDD) through NMDC affects their day to day lives, odds are that the program has impacted them directly if, for example, they’ve utilized the resources at the Career Center in Presque Isle or received childcare or transportation assistance through the Aroostook County Action Program (ACAP). From tuition assistance to job training, the WDD aims to provide residents of Aroostook and Washington Counties the skills they need to find good jobs and create the highly-skilled workforce that draws in large companies (and the employment those companies create).
Aroostook and Washington Counties have been benefiting from the Workforce Investment Act program for about twelve years, which was managed in part by the Aroostook County Commissioners. About six months ago, the commissioners of The County and board members of the Northern Maine Development Commission (NMDC) agreed to transfer responsibilities of being the WIA fiscal agent from the county to NMDC in order to tap into the program’s full potential. Responsibility for the WIA officially changed hands on Feb. 15 after being approved by the Department of Labor and Ryan Pelletier, former town manager of St. Agatha, was hired by NMDC as Director of the Workforce Development Department (WDD) for Washington and Aroostook Counties; Pelletier has been growing the WDD ever since.
There are four Workforce Regions in Maine, of which the paired region of Aroostook and Washington Counties has the smallest population.
Ninety percent of the $1.1 million in government funds received by the WDD goes right back out through local providers — ACAP in Aroostook County and the Maine Department of Labor in Washington county. Services through these agencies are primarily provided through career centers, in Presque Isle, Machias and Calais, where employees provide employment and training services to individuals who are either laid off, looking for a job, or entering the work force.
The fiscal agent for the WIA program “basically to handle the funds that come from the U.S. government down to the state government down to the local level to do Workforce Development activity,” Pelletier explained.
Though NMDC is guiding the WIA project to new heights and fiscally, Pelletier thinks the program has reached it’s potential, he was adamant in expressing that the growing success of the program is not indicative of a shortcoming by the county’s previous management.
“”It’s not that the county of Aroostook did a bad job of managing or fiscally administering the program, it’s the matter of the county being a government entity and when you’re dealing with grants and federal funds, it just makes much more sense to have a non-profit accounting system in place,” Pelletier explained. “That’s what we have here at NMDC — we have a fund accounting system that tracks all the grants that come through these doors — so it just makes much more sense to manage that, from a grant perspective, with a system that’s very expensive to own and maintain [but pre-existing at NMDC] and we already have the staff on board that’s trained to operate it.”
The WDD has grown tremendously under Pelletier, who has been and continues to iron out a framework for the program to operate under.
Under the advisement of the Local Workforce Investment Board (LWIB) members, in the past six months Pelletier has:
• developed an intergovernmental agreement between Aroostook and Washington counties which is basically an inter-local agreement between the two counties which establishes that they share services of the WDD, establishes two Chief Elected Officials from each county and
• developed and established a memorandum of agreement between the two Chief Elected Officials, the LWIP and NMDC. “It sort of spells out who’s responsibility it is to do what, how, where and when,” Pelletier surmised.
He is also creating a comprehensive support services policy for both counties that would “spell out what support services we have — like child support services and transportation support services, identify what the support services are that this WDD region feels are a priority to pay for and what level this area is willing pay up to in order to support those key services,” Pelletier explained.
Pelletier has also been occupied seeking out grant funding beneficial for the local workforce and was recently earmarked $500,000 just for Aroostook and Washington Counties through congress.
Pelletier, with cooperation for the Chief Elected Officials and the LWIB, has build a solid foundation for the project to expand from and estimated the program is about halfway to reaching it’s full potential. One thing he would like to see as the project moves forward is greater involvement from the business community in assessing their workforce needs and creating opportunities.
“Workforce development and economic development are a very logical fit,” Pelletier explained. “If you have a highly-skilled well-trained workforce, that’s more attractive to companies that want to relocate to your area than anything else you can offer, including infrastructure.”
“We’re probably halfway to where we want this project to be and there’s plenty to do and there’s plenty of resources out there the make that happen, but I think the most important thing is having that link between economic development and workforce development,” Pelletier stated, adding that the link between the two components has allowed the program to develop light years ahead of where it was six months ago.
