The recent economic downturn has made job training programs vital for people looking to move up in their careers, or to, more importantly, find jobs.

The DeKalb County job training program, which has been short-staffed for more than a year, has been unable to help workers find employment.

DeKalb County Board Chairman Bob Pritchard said that the Illinois Employment Training Center program is not working because the federal and state levels are imposing too many bureaucratic restrictions on its actions, which hampers any positive initiatives the group may take.

The federally funded program aims at providing job training for three types of people: high school graduates looking for their first jobs, people who have lost their jobs recently and require retraining, and training for people to gain higher-paying jobs, Pritchard said.

DeKalb County is grouped together with Kane and Kendall counties to form a conglomerate whose aim is to work together to meet the needs of the three counties’ people.

“There is an intergovernmental agreement between the three, but those counties are very different from DeKalb, so it makes it hard,” Pritchard said.

The board consists of 40 members, with DeKalb County holding seven of the slots of which only five could be filled, Pritchard said.

Evelina Cichy, one of the five active workforce investment board members, said the IETC wanted to move its operations to Malta’s Kishwaukee College to better serve its DeKalb constituents.

Cichy, who also represents Kishwaukee College on the board, said that the college already focuses on educating adults and the move would be natural.

“We wanted to be the site for the IETC, but the relocation ended up being more costly than we anticipated,” Cichy said.

The fear of penalties from the federal government has made Kane County, the lead county in the group, reluctant to try a lot of measures that could truly help the people, Pritchard said.

“If [the federal government] view[s] after the fact that dollars were not spent in the way the law and regulations were set out, they can ask for the funds back,” Pritchard said.

If one student benefits from the program later is found out to be ineligible to do so, the federal government could ask for certain funds back, thus making some ventures unprofitable.

Sometimes programs are limited to people based on income requirements, Cichy said.

In spite of the situation, which involves DeKalb’s section of the board not being fully represented, and the fact that when new members are found they quickly become frustrated with the red tape, Cichy remains optimistic.

“We’re on our way to resolve some of those things,” Cichy said.