BUSINESSENTERPRISEPROGRAM OFOREGON MEETING
Date:Thursday May 25th,2017
Time: 3:30pm
OREGONCOMMISSIONFOR THEBLIND
535 SE 12thAvenue(Portlandoffice)
Conferenceline:404-443-6397
Participantcode: 943611#
Agenda
•Any of theagenda itemslisted belowmaybecomeanactionitem.
•Anyof theseitems maybe aconflictofinterest.
1. Call toOrder
2. Adoption ofMinutes from April 26th, 27th, May 15th, 2017
3. PublicComment
4. Training andEducation
- Standardized Invoicing-Monthly BE Report
- Fly In Update
- Legislative Update
- Susan Gashel's Involvement-Rule Making/Other
- New Trainees Update
- Administrative Support Needed
5. Director’sReport
6.Sub-Committee Reports/Business
a. Facility development
7.OldBusiness
- Medford, Vending Route Close-out Concerns
- Gordon Smith, LBV Status/Advocacy Assistance-BECC
- Fair Minimum Return-Update
- Scrip Vending
- Soda Machines-Procurement-Vending Project
- Edith Green Update
- Program Relevant Information Requests. Public record requests
- BE manager monthly set-aside reports – timely receipt
8.New Business
a. Youth Authority Concerns-Jerry Bird
b. Operating Agreement Concerns/OAH Ruling
c. Other
9.Clarifying Motions/Actions
10.OpenDiscussion
11.Adjourn/NextMeeting
VERBATIM
[Start at 00:00:00]
Hauth: Let’s go ahead and call the meeting to order and we’ll start by doing roll. We’ll start with the board. Do we have Art Stevenson?
StevensonA: Here.
Hauth: Derrick Stevenson.
StevensonD: Here.
Hauth: Jerry Bird.
Bird: Here.
Hauth: Steve Jackson?
Jackson: Steve Jackson’s here.
Hauth: Hey, welcome.
Jackson: Thank you.
Hauth: And Steve Gordon is… Steve Gordon is not feeling well. He called… His wife called and said he would not be on the meeting today. So, moving right ahead, Lin Jaynes?
Jaynes: Present.
Smith: Hi, Lin.
Hauth: Cathy Dominique?
Jaynes: Hi.
Colley-Dominique: Here.
Hauth: Cathy Dominique?
Colley-Dominique: Here. Present.
Hauth: Oh, thank you. Okay. Char Mckinzie?
Hawkins: Here.
Hauth: Do we have Salvador Barraza? [Silence.] Okay, Carole Kinney?
Miranda: Carole wanted me to let you know that she’s ill.
Hauth: Okay. Thank you. Do we have Harold Young?
Young: Here.
Smith: Howdy, Harold. It’s Gordo.
Hauth: Gordon Smith, I see you’re on the line.
Smith: Yes.
Hauth: And Lewanda Miranda?
Miranda: Present.
Hauth: Thank you.
Smith: Hi, Lewanda. Gordo.
Hauth: Celyn Brown?
BrownC: Here.
Hauth: Hi, Celyn. Did I… Tessa Brown. [Silence.] Okay, have I left anybody out? [Silence.] Okay. Any guests would like to announce themselves, please do so. [Silence.] Okay, hearing no guests, let’s go ahead and call the meeting to order. The first item is the adoption of minutes from April 26th, the 27th and May 15th. Do I have a motion to approve these minutes, as recorded?
StevensonA: I so move.
Hauth: Okay, a motion’s been made by Art Stevenson. Do we have a second?
StevensonD: Second.
Hauth: Okay, Derrick Stevenson seconds. Any comment on these? Any…? Okay. So, hearing a second and a motion I’ll go ahead and call for the vote. Art Stevenson, yay or nay? [Silence.] Art Stevenson? [Silence.] Okay, I’ll move on to Derrick Stevenson.
StevensonD: Yay.
Hauth: Okay. Jerry Bird.
Bird: Yay.
Hauth: Steve Jackson [Silence.] Steve Jackson?
Jackson: Yes. Sorry. Yes.
Hauth: Okay. And I vote yes, as well. Art, you were on mute. I don’t know if you want to vote.
StevensonA: Yeah.
Hauth: Okay. Yay? Okay. All right. And, for the record, I’m here, too. I guess I forgot to call on myself. Anyway, we… Thank you, board members for that. We have public comment. Is there anybody that would like to give a public comment? Now is your time. [Silence.] Okay. Going once, twice, three times. No public comment. Moving right ahead into training and education, we have… under a) we have standardized invoicing/monthly BE report. So what I can… what I can share is that I did reach out to Director Morris several weeks back. I know that there’s been some concern… or just maybe more unfamiliarity about the monthly report… not the monthly report, but the invoicing and how that had changed. And I’m not suggesting it’s a bad thing. However, I do think that it needs an explanation and so maybe why it’s being changed and also some guidance on how to do the invoice or how to read the invoice. I did ask for Gail Stevens to join us. I don’t know if Gail was able to get on the line or not. Is she able to get on the line, Eric?
Morris: I don’t think so, Randy.
Hauth: Okay. So, anyway, I guess that falls on your shoulders. Can you kind of step us through the monthly invoice… like, how that came to be? And, also, if there’s any managers that have any questions about the monthly invoice, maybe you can answer those as well.
Morris: Okay, Randy. So, just a couple quick questions. So, when you’re talking about the monthly invoice, you’re talking probably about the monthly statement that’s going out nowadays? Just so I’m talking about the…
Hauth: Yeah. Yep.
Morris: Okay. So, the monthly statement… I think we’ve talked about this a couple times in the past. We started doing that earlier this year so that everybody could see, like, similar to a car payment or to your credit card payment or your home loan, that you could see what… what you’re sending in, how it’s being applied to your set-aside bill and if… if you sent a check and it doesn’t show up on the invoice then… or, the monthly statement, then you can know either, you know, it didn’t make it or you didn’t send it or something happened to it. So it gives people a better… a better idea of what’s happening with their set-aside account. So I think for many years people were either, you know, sending checks and they weren’t being applied correctly or they weren’t sending checks or some combination thereof. So this provides a… basically a statement of what’s going on with your set-aside account. And I know there’s been some… some questions about it. I mean, it takes a little while to sit there and kind of understand it 'cause it’s definitely written by the accounting department and takes into account all of the things that they do. And there is a cut-off. They generated it, like, today. Today’s the 25th, so statements were done this morning. So, if your payment came in… I’m not sure, I think it’s after the 20th, then they’re not… it’s not going to be listed on there, it’ll be on the next month’s report. So, yeah… that… that’s the monthly statement.
Hauth: Okay and I do have somebody here. Linda Haseman, I know she’s been involved in assisting some managers in trying to work through some of, I guess, the projected past-dues or the invoicing or how checks were applied. And, being Gail’s not here, maybe if Linda can just update everybody, go ahead and turn that over to Linda. Go ahead, Linda.
Haseman: Yeah, hi everybody. I wanted to let you know that I did sit down with Gail Stevens, and Mark Riesmeyer took some notes, and I was with a licensed blind manager at the time. And through that conversation it developed as to the statement and then about the 15th being the cut-off, there was a misnomer I guess in the accounting department that the 15th was still the cut-off so I had to explain about the 20th. And then the question arose about the postmarking because the Operating Agreement clearly talks about postmarking and there was supposed to be some research done on that. So I’m not sure exactly all where that’s at. But in that… in that entire discussion it also developed or ferreted out that the individuals who were… who postmarked their payments on the 20th show up now on the statement that’s been generated as being past due. And so that became a very big concern for me and should be for the managers as well because of the fact that being past due could also, I believe, exempt you guys out of bidding on any locations coming up. And so I questioned all of that as far as how that all came to be and so I think it needs to be really cleaned up as to what’s going on and what’s being shown on those statements. Because another part of the discussion was that the statement was being developed as a way to notice employees… or, I’m sorry, licensed blind managers to… because, as part of the debt collection for the state, individuals have to be noticed before they can actually be turned over to collections. And so the statement becomes the new way of possibly debt collecting on you guys. So just be aware of that, even though Gail clearly explained to me that was not the intent, to terminate licensed blind managers or start debt collection. It was more of a communication tool. But she did say that there’s a… there’s a current bill percolating through the legislature about debt collections and so how… how they’ll have to adhere to that. The other piece of the conversation is, if you happen to scroll down, there’s now a new attachment as well that I don’t think was ever explained to anybody and it… and it… and it’s for you guys to actually fill out and send with your checks each month. Because what was happening on the agency’s side, I believe unbeknownst to most of you, is that they weren’t necessarily, even if you wrote a check out for a particular monthly invoice, they weren’t necessarily applying it to that monthly invoice, they were actually applying it to anything outstanding that they were tracking that you guys still had outstanding that you weren’t aware of. So it became this kind of confuddled accounting procedure of what you as licensed blind vendors thought you were paying for necessarily wasn’t the invoice that you were paying. And so it morphed into kind of a… a messy type of accounting system I believe that Gail is trying to clean up. The other thing that came up in my review of documents that I shared with Gail that became a big concern is that monthly reports were being changed. So, for instance, you guys were sending a monthly report and believing that that was the correct amount. However, they input it then into System 7 and System 7 on the agency’s side might generate out a different amount due. And so somebody was going in and manually changing your guys’ monthly report because of what System 7 was spitting out. But no one was communicating with you guys that there was a problem withyour report. And so, at times, if you went back to your monthly report to pay what you guys had submitted, versus what the y had invoiced you for, then again it became another messy, convoluted mess of what you were paying… what you thought you were paying versus what had been actually invoiced. So, in addition to the statement, there is now being sent, in addition to the invoice and the statement, make sure you scroll down and see that there’s now a form being sent where you’re supposed to fill that out with your payment and tell the agency what you’re clearly wanting your payment to apply to, as far as the invoice, so that they’re… so that some of this mess gets cleaned up. But the mess that I think’s still happening is: How are those being counted? What is being counted as past due? And I think you guys really need to problem solve that.
Hauth: Thank you very much, Linda. And thank you for all your efforts in assisting other blind vendors who have reached out to you. Eric, do you have any responses to that or do you have any input on that? I know the… I know the postmarking is going to be an issue that maybe you can also address. But go ahead, if you do.
Morris: No, I… I think that recapped it pretty well.
Hauth: Okay, Art, I hear you trying to…
StevensonA: Am I off… Am I off mute?
Hauth: Yes. Yes, you are.
StevensonA: Hey, Linda? When you were having this discussion about the System 7 did you get any details on why the system was doing that? And, obviously, it’s not kind of working correctly so has OCB… did they… did they say anything about how that’s been corrected or…?
Haseman: Well, what I was… what I was informed is… I had done a separate spreadsheet that I have given Mrs. Stevenson, Gail Stevenson [sic], on a particular vendor where what their invoice… what they had written on their monthly payment was, you know, what they had calculated on their monthly report versus what they had been invoiced. And where those were different and the number I times I could backtrack where they were different… and I did provide that to Ms. Stevens and she was supposed to go back and try and identify why that was occurring. As of today, I don’t have that information or a response yet on that. I do also know that, during that conversation, one of the reasons that somebody’s report – I think it was somebody that was submitting an electronic report rather than sending it in manually – I was informed by Ms. Stevens that somebody’s electronic reporting format, which I think has been in Excel, had a wrong calculation. So, of course, every time they were submitting it then, when it inputs into System 7 it would be calculated differently. So, in that case, it’s kind of like it was an Excel spreadsheet formulation, calculation error. But my other concern is that people weren’t being notified when those changes were occurring and whoever were making the changes were not noting their initials or anything on the OCB side as to who was making those changes. And so there wasn’t even a clear connection or tracking method to go back and talk to that person as to why those changes were being made or what it was. So that… Gail was going to go back and look at all that and try and ferret it out and she was going to give me, I thought, an answer as to why that occurred. Maybe Eric knows on those. But I haven’t received an answer to that yet. But it is being looked at.
Hauth: Thank you, Linda. Any other questions? Comments?
StevensonD: Yeah, this is Derrick.
Hauth: Derrick, go ahead.
StevensonD: Yeah, I think… Well, the only time any numbers should be… should be changed is if… if, of course, there’s an error in the calculation of set-aside. Otherwise, you know, there should be… there should be no… no difference. And if there is a situation where they punch in the numbers and it comes out different they should… they should immediately get on the phone and contact the manager and let them know, “Hey, we have a discrepancy here and you need to go back and check your calculation and stuff because, according to us, it’s wrong.” And that’s, to me, the simple way to do it. To just let the same error go on month after month after month and nobody ever really saying anything that, to me, is just ridiculous.
Hauth: Yeah, thank you, Derrick. And I think that’s what happened.
Haseman: Yeah, I do have an email from Gail where she had concurred that, if the accounting department now determines that there’s a difference on a monthly report submitted by a manager, that they will contact the manager. ‘Cause I, like you, Derrick, felt and shared with her that how is anybody supposed to correct a wrong if they don’t even know that there’s a wrong. And if it’s a perpetual wrong, that helps no one… so, until it’s been told.
Hauth: All right. Thank you. Any other questions? [Silence.] Eric, I have a question for you. So, the 20th: I know we’ve had a couple of email exchanges back and forth. As I recall, and correct me if I’m wrong, but as I recall, years back when Ray Milojevich was Director of the program the intention, and I believe it was discussed and acted on in a BECC Meeting, was to allow the 20th instead of the 15th and that…
Jaynes: Yep.
Hauth: … [inaudible]. And so that was supposed to carry forward from the 15th to the 20th, postmarked on the 20th, unless it was on a Sunday, then it fell to the next day. And then I remember a few years back, when Steve Gordon became a subject of concern relative to set-aside and I believe the agency threatened his license. We went before the Elected… or, we went before the Commission for the Blind board. And I know I had some discussions with you, also. And I believe it was Commissioner McQuillan who identified in the record that the 20th … postmarked by the 20th would be the date that would be the practice. Also, you know, so can you respond to that? Because, apparently, I’ve been filing late too because I file on the 20th and then I send my check on the 20th and it’s postmarked on the 20th. So, is there a way for us to get some clarity on that or resolve that? Or… What’s your… What’s your thoughts on that?
[00:14:09]
Morris: Well, thanks for the question, Randy. So the 20th, since I’ve been around – and I wasn’t here when Ray was here and stuff – but, from my perspective, the 20th… when we’ve talked about the 20th we’ve always talked about reports, not payments or anything but monthly statements, monthly reports coming to us for set-aside. So, quite frankly, the discussion came up about this topic based on why we weren’t getting the current quarterly report sent out in a timely manner. So here, we’re tracking when we get the reports, like the monthly state… the monthly report from managers. So, from my perspective, especially around generating, like, the quarterly statement, it doesn’t matter to me if it’s postmarked on the 20th but I get it on the 26th or something. So, from my perspective, I’m not counting people late or anything else on submitting their reports if they get it to me in a timely manner. So the 20th, or postmarked by the 20th … originally the Rules said the 15th… and we’ve given people time because I know the discussions that I had with managers when I first got here is that they couldn’t get it to me by the 15th because subcontractors weren’t paying them by the 15th. So I was, like, it seems reasonable that the 20th would make sense. And, to be quite frank, I haven’t been thinking of postmarked by the 20th. I’m, like, thinking, “Hey, we need to have it in hand.” So, you know, in the new Rules – and I haven’t looked in the new Rules in quite a while because, you know, you don’t want to get things mixed up. But I believe we addressed that very specifically, with the postmarked language and stuff, in the new Rules. So I think that clears it up but, you know, I know the conversation got started around the “Why is it taking so long for the quarterly reports to come out?” So.