44News Exclusive With Gov. Beshear on Vaccine, Unemployment, Post-Pandemic Plans

Heads to the president's desk.

At the height of this pandemic -- more than 3- hundred 52 thousand kentuckians were unemployed.

The jobless rate -- jumping from 4 percent -- to nearly 17 percent in a span of weeks.

Nearly a year later -- the bluegrass economy has bounced -- but the state's ability to process those claims -- remains a point of frustration.

44news anchor jessica hartman spoke exclusively with governor beshear -- earlier today about the effort to close the gap.

For kentucky it has been one thing after another when it comes to the ability to process and handle the massive number of unemployment claims. you said tuesday in your press conference --*in hind sight you do regret*prior to the pandemic -- not investing in the office of unemployment insurance -- to get systems up to date -- and bring on more staff.

-- how do you make up for years of poor planning on the part of the state?

"i have been governor for about 3 months when this pandemic had been hit and was in the midst of my first budget.

Certainly going back in time you look at what did in good times.

We stopped investing in our safety net.

The state laid off or moved 90 employees that could have been processing claims right now.

They cut a significant amount of the budget.

They it system, my goodness, this goes back decades.

There is plenty of blame to go around, is pre-dose.

In other words the operating system for it is older than i am.

You put on top of that the largest amount of claims that we have ever seen in human history and what you get is what you see here.

But it is going on in every state.

Then you had on top of that sophisticated cyber criminals doing 10s of 1,000 of fraudulent claims that we have to weed through as well.

That is where we have a challenge.

But we have processed claims in this period of time than ever before by a significant number.

We have been able to approve more people.

To say yes, to more people by percentage than we were able to pre-pandemic."

"it also shows, this system is mean.

The whole system is set up in the wrong way.

It is set up to tell you no.

It is set up to make it difficult and they did that in pre-pandemic times to try and get people to quit, who were eligible for unemployment and trying to get it.

Now take all of that in the course of this pandemic and it makes it incredibly challenging.

But we are committed to getting through every single claim and making sure this will never happen again.

We have the rfp process done and are evaluating different vendors to upgrade that system.

We are doing the work right now to start opening our regional offices.

We have got to make sure we learn the lesson from this so when the next major problem happens, people don't suffer like they have suffered here."

The state is standing up a call center -- that should be in- place by the end of april.

Why has it taken until now to find a workable solution to giving kentuckians with unemployment issues*a better option*better way to feel heard?

"kentuckians need to be heard, but they also want to talk to somebody that can help them.

So there was a very large call center at the beginning at the pandemic, but the people weren't trained and/or authorized to see certain information.

What we saw was a huge frustration that i get my call answered, but nobody can help me.

Then we moved into a period where what we wanted to do was make sure every contact was with someone that could fully help them.

Now we think that we have a new set of training where we can get a number of issues completed.

A lot of what that call center is going to be able to do is help people that have been approved and their claim has been processed, but they have had issues since then.

All of this is a challenge.

It takes about 6 months to train somebody in that system to get up to speed.

Again, this is happening all over the country.

We want to help everybody.

We are going to continue to work to help everybody out there.

Every day that people have to wait, that are eligible, that are going to get those dollars, is one