Unemployment office in Culpeper closing

The Virginia Employment Commission will close its Culpeper office Sept. 8.

The news comes less than a week after the announcement that Orange County’s American Press plant in Gordonsville would close after nearly 40 years in business, leaving more than 100 workers jobless.

In existence for more than 25 years, the Culpeper VEC Office, located in Meadowbrook Shopping Center for about 10 years, serves Orange and Culpeper as well as Fauquier, Madison and Rappahannock counties.

“It’s terrible timing,” acknowledged Del. Ed Scott, R-Madison. “It is disappointing to learn that folks that need assistance from VEC will not longer be able to get it in Culpeper.”

The area’s unemployed will now have to go VEC offices in Charlottesville or Fredericksburg to get face-to-face assistance. There is also a satellite office in Louisa County.

The decision to close the Culpeper office was due to budgetary issues, said Joyce Fogg with the VEC in Richmond.

The office lease expires Sept. 30, she said, and will not be renewed. Staff at the Culpeper location will be transferred to other VEC offices in the area, and there will be no reduction in those jobs.

The closing of the Culpeper office will mark the second major vacancy in Meadowbrook in as many months – Matt’s ACE Hardware closed abruptly in late June.

The VEC closed its South Hill office in March, according to Fogg. In addition, most of the temporary VEC offices opened around the state with stimulus funding have also closed.

Factors considered as part of the decision to close the Culpeper site included the regional unemployment rate and office workload.

“It was a tough decision, but we looked at all the factors and decided Culpeper would be the office to close,” Fogg said.

As of April, the five county region’s average joblessness was 5.2 percent – Culpeper and Orange had the highest, however, at 6.3 percent.

Fogg said a majority of VEC customers process their unemployment claims online or over the phone. She said the VEC would activate a “rapid response” team to assist displaced American Press workers, providing on-the-ground aid at a local community college.

The publisher of catalogs and specialty publications told its approximately 130 employees that the plant would close because of a “significant downturn in business and a resulting inability to meet obligations as they come due.” In a letter to employees, American Press said layoffs would likely come in stages, beginning June 30 and ending August 31.

On a related note, the Orange Workforce Center opened in May on Belleview Avenue in the town of Orange, a collaboration of the Piedmont Workforce Network, the Culpeper Career Resource Center and Orange County.

The center, open two days a week, is looking into expanding the number of computers on site as well as its hours to accommodate the American Press closure.

The Culpeper Career Resource Center downtown could serve as a VEC satellite of sorts, but that possibility is still being explored.

Federal dollars fund VEC operations while a state unemployment trust fund, paid into by employers, provides for unemployment benefits. State money does not fund the VEC, according to Fogg.

As unemployment in an area decreases so do the federal dollars, she said.

“It’s a catch-22. If you do a good job, your funding goes down. They are hard decisions to make,” Fogg said. “We are encouraging people to file and do job searches online.”

Scott said the VEC has worked hard to automate their systems in the name of efficiency.

“It seems like there are times when personal contact could be valuable for my constituents,” he added. “I am very sorry to hear this is happening.”

Though the economy has shown signs of improvement, Scott said, there are still too many people unemployed.

“The last couple of years, with the job losses, the (unemployment) trust fund has taken a big hit and it has been a real challenge,” he said. “At the same time … the focus needs to be on providing benefits to people who need them as opposed to maintaining some big office structure.”

In 2007, the VEC considered closing the Culpeper office as part of a statewide reduction in jobless sites.