Metrics Subcommittee Meeting Notes
Economic Opportunity and Poverty Reduction Task Force
November 17, 2011
Present: Rep. John Kefalas, Tracy Stewart (CCLP), Kate Veeder (CCLP), Lizzy Stephan (Bell Policy Center)
This meeting was devoted to discussing Rep. Kefalas’ Poverty Impact Statements bill.
Last session, the “ranking minority member” language (re: who could request a poverty impact statement) seemed to upset people
Legislative Council informed Rep. Kefalas that in order to do these statements within existing resources, they would have to limit the total number of statements that could be requested. Six statements could work.
Want to be cautious messaging this bill because the idea of attaching business impact statements is also floating around.
Should the criteria for evaluating a bill be narrowed down more? What about the different ways of measuring poverty—which should be included?
Messaging could be tied into the Governor’s OEDIT plan—the Blueprint: when doing economic development, it directs people to consider the impacts on poverty. Everyone should read the Blueprint.
Criteria for when an impact statement can be requested: this could be narrowed. Definitely want to keep household income, assets, financial security piece. That fits into the frame from the EOPR’s Community Report (model includes consideration of the resources & assets that you start with). Also keep employment & workforce development, as this fits in the model as well—it also fits in with Hickenlooper’s economic development plan. It would be easy to get this data from the Department of Labor. Education is intervention and creates a pathway, but this could be taken out.
Poverty impact statement example: employment & felonies: the poverty impact statement would be high because many people with felonies are unemployed. Also a policy easy employment policies for people with felonies would increase the employment pool for employers. Pipeline to Prison already looks at this, they could do the numbers.
Another example: a pay equity program: do a projection based on the number of people in the workforce. Legislative Council could say: this is how much money would be in people’s pockets after this policy, because right now X number of women are making less than men.
Metrics: Which measurement to use?
Rep. Kefalas: We could use the Human Development Index. Also the people in the public health department already look at the social determinants of health, so we could use those indicators. Wants to create flexibility for Leg Council so that if they have the resources they could use the Supplemental Poverty Measure, Otherwise they could use the social determinants of health, or the self sufficiency standard…plus tie it into the Community Report. Giving them an array of tools would be useful.
Tracy: the bill as it is written makes it sound like Leg Council has to do an analysis using each of those poverty measurers.
Rep. Kefalas spoke to Natalie from Leg Council, who said that doing a statement that shows how much a bill moves people above or below 200% of FPL would be very expensive.
Tracy: What if we tried a qualitative statement? It could say something like “we understand that with the passage of this bill 54% of the workforce would see an increase in their earnings by 27% over the next year. We predict that this will make a different in X number of households.” Elizabeth Gardener in the state demographers office already does something like this. Maybe we want to work with the demographers? It could say X number of households would move from FPL.
We could use the scale from the community report and assign codes, and have a qualitative statement based off of that: “impact of 3”, moving 20,000 families for example from zone 1 to zone 3. The demographers office already knows the number of families at different levels of poverty.
Hardest sell is then how we chose the ratings, defining the zones. But it would take the pressure off of Leg Council.
Rep. Kefalas: we could test it for two years, even if the statement is just a paragraph like it is with tax credits.
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