MORGANTOWN – The House Health and Human Resources Committee on Friday enhanced the Senate bill changing how Child Protective Services workers are allotted across the state, and it will head to the full House.
As it came from the Senate, SB 273 would allocate CPS workers based on county population and worker caseload. House Health added referrals to the priority list, and a proviso that no county will have less CPS workers than it does now.
Unchanged in the bill, it allows the Bureau for Social Services to provide merit-based and locality pay.
The Bureau will 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.
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. It’s been said that DOP rules hamstring the Bureau’s ability to pay workers at a higher rate and offer 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 includes 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.
There was no debate and the bill passed in a voice vote with no audible votes against. The full House will have to adopt the committee amendment when the bill reaches second reading. If the bill then passes on third reading, it will return to the Senate for concurrence with the House changes.
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