The Iowa Workforce /CIETC salary investigation has sent ripples all the way to Marshall County, and Iowa Valley Community College. Chancellor Tim Wynes says the school in Marshalltown set up a job training agreement years ago with Workforce Development. They shared a manager with Workforce Development, a person who took early retirement.

When that happened, he says Workforce division administrator Tony Dietsch, who was suspended this week, contacted the community college to tell them the agency would no longer share that position, and, the chancellor says, “They were doing a lot of things that weren’t going to be very cooperative.”

Chancellor Wynes explains the program was supposed to work through the community college for the benefit of local employers. Wynes says their mission is local response to local employment issues — working with Lennox, Fischer and other local employers to train workers and helping people who are underemployed become fully employed. He says that’s the mission of the department of labor, a “one-stop shop, and that’s what CIETC was supposed to be doing but they weren’t.”

Chancellor Wynes says it really hit a nerve to learn that CIETC Chief Operating Officer John Bargman was making a 360-thousand-dollar salary instead of some of that money going for job training. At the same time he says the program was being cut and told to scrimp and save. Wynes says for his north-central Iowa clients the money that went to Bargman’s salary could have served almost a thousand clients. “It costs 36-hundred dollars to get a client all the way through training and education, to get ’em up, employed and better than they were before. We could have served a thousand clients with the money that he was making.”

Wynes says the program through the college was subject to a critical audit each year. Wynes says the money that goes through the community college is audited “within an inch of our life every year.” He says they’re accountable to the public and have to tell where they spend the money and where it goes. He says they’re a shining example and quite different from what was going on in Des Moines.

Wynes says now he’s concerned that oversight will increase and it’ll hamper operation of the job-training program. He says they worry it’ll take away from the local ability to serve clients and businesses. “We want to be sure everybody knows that we’ve got a good model that’s working here.”