Iowa City Workforce Development office will remain open

Local lawmakers say they have won assurances the Iowa City Iowa Workforce Development office will remain open despite the agency's plans to close 37 of 39 regional offices in a cost-saving move.

“The office will remain open, as well it should given our population and the fact that some days it registers more usage than the Cedar Rapids office,” Rep. Dave Jacoby, D-Coralville, said.

The office will have about half as many employees as in the past, he said, and will be merged with a Kirkwood Community College office in the same Eastwood Plaza building.

The office in Iowa City, which is part of IWD's seven-county Region 10, was scheduled for closing with its operations shifted to the regional headquarters in Cedar Rapids.

“The problem is they were looking at things regionally,” Sen. Bob Dvorsky, D-Coralville, said, “but when you have two major metro areas in one region – Cedar Rapids, the state's second-largest city, and Iowa City, the sixth-largest – you have to look at things differently.”

The number of people served in Iowa City justifies maintaining the office, he said. It also would mean a 70-mile round trip for Iowa City-Coralville residents who needed a face-to-face meeting with IWD staff, Jacoby said.

Jacoby, who operated IWD programs during 23 years with Kirkwood, said he understands the agency's need to be smaller and more efficient, but he foresaw problems with replacing face-to-face assistance with computer terminals is at community colleges and public libraries.

“I get the need to be more tech savvy, but the problem is that some of the people Workforce works with, as well as some of the business it's serving, are not that tech savvy,” Jacoby said.

“It was a strange collection of bedfellows” that lobbied the governor and IWD to maintain the office, Jacoby said. In addition to Democratic lawmakers, the Iowa City Area Chamber of Commerce and Iowa City Area Development as well as individual businesses and agencies worked together to win the reprieve.

“We circled the wagons and said it's important to keep office open,” said Jacoby.

The Iowa City office, which is part of IWD's seven-county Region 10 headquartered in Cedar Rapids, serves the state's fifth largest county. It was slated to close along with 36 other offices as part of a cost-saving move. The closing would eliminate about 100 positions, the state agency estimated. IWD anticipates a $5 million shortfall in the current fiscal year, which began July 1.

Closing the office and eliminating about 100 positions would help IWD deal with an anticipated $5 million shortfall in the current fiscal year, which began July 1, according to an agency spokeswoman.

Lawmakers tried to block the closings proposed by Gov. Terry Branstad and IWD Director Teresa Wahlert. Democrats argued that with more than 100,000 Iowans out of work, those offices should remain open and staffing should be maintained.

Lawmakers approved legislation authorizing $8.7 million to keep the offices open and stating that the agency “shall not reduce the number of field offices below the number of field offices being operated as of Jan. 1, 2009.”

Field offices were defined in the bill as those with an IWD staffer present. Merely having a computer and phone line in a public library or at a community college, for example, would not meet that definition.

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