MORGANTOWN – The Senate Finance Committee approved on Thursday a bill aimed at fixing the problem of hiring and retaining Child Protective Services workers across the state.
SB 273 would allocate CPS workers based on county population and worker caseload. It also allows the Bureau for Social Services to provide merit-based and locality pay.
The bill previously passed out of Senate Health and received further massaging on Thursday in a Finance subcommittee that includes the Health chair. The full committee took up and quickly passed the bill shortly after the subcommittee approved it.
SB273 includes a number of observations called findings. “The Legislature finds the state of West Virginia is experiencing a child welfare crisis.” From 2016-2020, the CPS vacancy rate rose from 9.7% to 33%. “
“This significant lack of staffing has caused a delay in response times to begin investigations,” the bill says. “This significant failure to begin the investigation can and has cost lives.”
It notes that the bureau is having trouble recruiting and retaining not only CPS workers but also youth service workers, adult protective service workers, and necessary casework support personnel and managers.
As said above, the bill requires the bureau to allocate and station CPS workers based on county population and caseload.
The bureau will also develop a special merit-based system to hire CPS, youth service and adult protective service workers, and necessary casework support personnel and managers. The system may include compensation adjustments, retention incentives, and hiring approval by the bureau commissioner.
The pay rates and employment requirements would take by Jan. 1, 2024.
This special merit-based system would apply to new employees and to any existing employees who choose to opt in.
The system will be exempt from the Division of Personnel and any DOP requirements. Committee counsel said DOP rules hamstring the bureau paying workers at a higher rate and offering locality pay to account for regional market rates and demands for positions.
With that DOP exemption, the bill says there is no right to a grievance for any regional pay disparity by an employee of the merit-based system or any employee of the classified service.
The bill also included a technology component: a redundancy system to compensate for any outages in its 24/7 phone system for receiving abuse and neglect reports. The system must be in place by July 1. If a redundancy system is already in place, the Department of Health and Human Resources must explain to the Legislature why calls went unanswered.
DHHR estimates the cost of implementing a new phone system at $1.3 million initially, then $879,000 annually thereafter to maintain it.
Discussion was minimal. Health chair Mike Maroney, R-Marshall, complimented the work Finance did to improve the bill after it left his committee. He also said DOP rules have been a persistent problem in his seven years in office and the department needs to develop some flexibility regarding locality pay.
The voice vote was unanimous and the bill now goes to the full Senate.
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