County Will Revise Rule on Cutting Off Welfare

Under pressure from a judge, lawyers for Los Angeles County agreed Wednesday to rewrite a controversial rule that cuts off general relief benefits to employable recipients who fail to try for work 20 times each month--regardless of whether they willfully violate the rule or merely goof up.

The agreement came after Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Norman L. Epstein voiced concern that the present regulation imposes an automatic 60-day cutoff of welfare benefits “across the board, regardless of degree of culpability.”

“In the case of these rules, as I understand them,” the judge said, “if the individual just doesn’t have an adequate excuse why he completed 19 job searches instead of (the required) 20 or is one day late, that person is out on the streets in the most brutal way.

“(Yet) the person who callously refuses to do anything at all, a scofflaw if you will, that person is treated exactly the same,” Epstein said.

Epstein spoke during a hearing on a petition by poverty law firms for a preliminary injunction to halt the 60-day penalty period as presently applied by Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Social Services.

In a civil suit filed last February, the poverty law firms claimed that the penalty throws 5,000 recipients onto the street every month in violation of their constitutional rights to shelter and due process of law.

The county’s $90-million General Relief welfare program, which acts as a safety net to aid people who cannot qualify for other forms of public assistance, requires employable recipients to perform 70 hours of minimum wage work for the county for their $228 monthly grants and to present verification of 20 job search interviews each month.

Failure to fulfill these requirements results in the 60-day loss of benefits.

Deputy County Counsel Nancy O’Hara argued that in practice, Department of Public Social Services field eligibility workers already exercise considerable discretion in distinguishing between willful violators and those who are merely negligent, inadvertently slip up or lack the mental or physical capacity to comply.

Modified Version

“Then it doesn’t seem to me to be a great leap for the county to articulate (in the wording of the regulations) what you say has been the case anyway,” Epstein said.

The county department had already drawn up a modified version of its regulation to allow for a two-day grace period for individuals to come up with required documentation of job search interviews or work completed, but Epstein clearly thought more was needed.

“If your rule is drawn in such a way so that the person who is going to be caught is the scofflaw, then it is a much harder case for the petitioner to make (for a preliminary injunction),” Epstein told O’Hara.

He asked the county to come up with a revised version of its regulation by May 1 and further ordered issuance of an administrative bulletin by Friday to field workers advising them of the proposed modifications. However, Epstein did not say precisely how he thought the rule should be modified. The hearing on the injunction request was recessed until May 8.

‘Make Mistakes’

Outside the courtroom, Gary L. Blasi of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles said that “until now, regulations haven’t given eligibility workers any discretion at all in (discriminating) between violators and (those who make) honest mistakes.

“The judge basically realized that poor people are like all people. They do make mistakes.”

Welfare department estimates of the program caseload hover around 25,000. The numbers of those deemed unemployable fluctuates between 6,000 and 12,000.