(Updated to include governor’s comments from Tuesday media briefing)
Gov. Laura Kelly on Tuesday turned within the Labor Department to name a new acting secretary until a permanent leader is named.
Kelly named Deputy Secretary Brett Flachsbarth as the new acting labor secretary until she finds a permanent replacement for Delia Garcia, who resigned last summer.
Garcia left after it was revealed that the agency made about $7 million in duplicate payments to more than 4,500 people.
The Labor Department, without consulting the governor, began trying to reverse the duplicate payments.
The attempt to reclaim the money caused some recipients’ bank accounts to be overdrawn.
Ryan Wright, who had worked in the governor’s office as deputy chief of staff, had been serving as acting secretary.
However, he was limited by state law to serving as acting secretary for six months, a time period that was set to lapse Tuesday.
Wright took the helm of an agency that was buried in claims after the pandemic hit and the economy shut down leading to a 40-year high in unemployment.
The agency has paid out more than $3.4 million weekly claims totaling over $2.4 billion in unemployment. She said the agency has paid 3.2 million claims since March.
“Taking over this department was no easy task,” Kelly said in a statement.
“There is still a lot of work to be done – but under his leadership, KDOL has made immense progress and has largely been stabilized,” she said.
The Kelly administration had blamed the agency’s inability to handle a large volume of claims on a 40-year-old computer system.
The governor said the Labor Department has seen some successes, such as reducing a backlog in unemployment claims from 25,000 in June to about 1,800 currently.
The governor said the backlog should be eliminated by the first of next year.
“Clearly, there’s a lot of working going on there and a lot of effort being made. Tremendous progress has been made,” the governor said at Tuesday’s news conference.
“Are there problems still? Yes. Will there be problems tomorrow? Yes,” she said.
Kelly acknowledged anecdotal complaints about the Labor Department.
“Things are not as bad as the anecdotal information presents to you,” she said.
Flachsbarth joined the Kansas Department of Labor in 2005 as a member of the agency’s legal team.
He was appointed deputy labor secretary in January 2019.
During his time with the agency, he has worked in a variety of roles including director of unemployment insurance, chief of appeals, counsel to the Employment Security Board of Review and counsel to the Public Employee Relations Board.
The change in leadership at Labor comes at a time when Republican lawmakers have complained about the inability to get answers from the agency, primarily with problems related to fraud claims and a delay in making unemployment claims payments.
Kansas, like many other states, has failed to meet the federal standard of getting benefit payments out within three weeks for 87% of applicants.
The 87% standard, set in 2005 by the U.S Department of Labor, doesn’t impose penalties, but states must have a plan in place to address the problem.
As of Nov. 30, 77.9% of Kansas applicants were getting their benefits within three weeks, which was an improvement from 53% on Sept. 30 and 43% on Aug. 30.
Stateline reported that as of Nov. 1, only three states — North Dakota, Rhode Island and Wyoming — were meeting the federal standard of paying benefits within three weeks for 87% of applicants.
While Kelly noted that the Labor Department has stopped more than 200,000 fraudulent claims under Wright’s leadership, legislators have pushed, without success, to find out how many fraudulent claims have been paid and who would cover those claims.
Republican Sen. Rob Olson, the incoming chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, promised that lawmakers would hold the governor accountable for the agency’s performance.
“We need a permanent secretary,” Olson said. “She needs to appoint someone permanently over there, someone who’s got a game plan on how to fix this.”
Kelly said at her media briefing she hopes to have a permanent secretary in place within a couple of weeks.
“We hope to be able take care of this pretty soon,” she said.
“We’ve been working hard and looking far and wide. We think we’ll be coming to some resolution in the next couple weeks,” she said.
