On his Blackberry, Roderick L. Bremby, the state's new commissioner of social services, keeps photographs he took on visits to field offices to illustrate what his agency is dealing with.
They show rows of file cabinets so full that papers get stored on top, files for long-term care patients that are several inches thick, and boxes of mail returned by the post office as undeliverable.
"This is a conference room that is now used for storage," he said while scrolling through them. "Those are more files. Those aren't trash, but those are files that need to be stored somewhere."
Actually, Bremby wants the department's eligibility workers to see them as something else. "Don't look at that as a file. Don't look at it as paper," he says. "It's a person. It's a family, and they're needing you."
The Department of Social Services serves close to 750,000 people--more than one in five state residents. Its $5.7 billion budget represents more than 28 percent of state spending, and 88 percent of it pays for medical assistance programs. Bremby, who began the job in April, hopes to modernize the department's technology, make its work "client-centric," and change the way the agency communicates with those it serves.
For now, he faces challenges that few would envy.
Caseworkers are overworked, and rely on technology that is outdated and inadequate. The department's staff is down nearly 30 percent since 2001, while demand for its programs has soared.
The department doesn't have the capacity to digitize documents, so nearly everything is done on paper--lots of it. The department processes some 3.7 million pieces of paper a month. And relying on paper documents means that if the caseworker handling your application is out sick, it doesn't get processed that day.
Isabel King, an eligibility services supervisor in the department's Danbury regional office, said earlier this year that some of the workers she supervises stay up at night thinking about the applications they're supposed to process but don't have the time to handle.
"I've never seen so many people do so much with so little," Bremby said during a presentation to state agency commissioners Tuesday, which, like other presentations he gives, included some of his field office photographs.
The phones, meanwhile, get 879,000 calls a month--an average of more than 28,350 a day. The voicemail boxes can't be resized, and in some offices, they fill up at least twice a day.
"I've said it's easier to get cable services here than it is to get access to a caseworker," Bremby said. "You stand in line behind all our other calls, whether they are urgent or whether they're simply looking for directions to get to the office."
And the job could get even more challenging. If state employee unions do not ratify a concession deal in the coming weeks, the department stands to lose 206 positions and cut more than $130 million over two years, including the regional offices in Middletown and Stamford.
"I think that DSS is an agency that has the capacity and the willingness to serve people better. I've seen the commitment, I've heard people say they really want to do more and do it better," Bremby said. "But we really need to accelerate the deployment of the proper tools, technological tools, so that we can serve people better."
The department is on the path to getting there, he said, but added, "I'm just going to be honest, it will take some time."
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