Cutbacks Plague Welfare Centers : Strife on CDC Board Adds to Problems of Social Agencies

At the Friendly Center in Orange, budget problems are beginning to wear on director Mary Garcia.

“It’s frustrating,” she said in a tired voice last week. “We have to cut something--and there are so many gang members who go by here daily, but it’s got to be the youth program (that gets cut). Every year it gets worse.”

At the Independencia Community Center in the heart of an Anaheim barrio, budget cuts this year have forced director Gloria Lopez to drop one of four staff members. In addition to administrative duties, Lopez now answers telephones, handles interviews and serves as a part-time translator.

“We need a janitor, but we can’t hire one,” she said. “I want to increase our child-care center, which only has 17 kids a day--which is a drop in the bucket for day-care needs here. And now with the immigration reform act, our immigration counselor is overloaded and hardly has time to go to lunch. We really need another amnesty counselor.”

For Garcia and Lopez, faced with dwindling funds and increasing demands on their agencies’ resources, recent strife within the leadership of Orange County’s largest private, nonprofit anti-poverty agency has exacerbated already pressing budget problems.

Last week, the board of directors of the Community Development Council announced that the employment contract of the council’s president will not be renewed when it expires next month. The day before, a member of the board had publicly accused the council of failing to help the poor become self-sufficient.

And as the controversy continues, $150,000 sits untapped in a council bank account because the board has been unable to agree on how it should be distributed.

In December, council President John Flores proposed distributing the $150,000, which the council received through a Southern California Edison Co. program, to United Way agencies in the county with annual budgets of less than $500,000. But that proposal, under which eligible organizations would have applied to share in the fund, was rejected by the council board.

Many believe the rejection and Flores’ contract dispute are symbolic of severe problems within the agency.

The council, which marked its 20th anniversary in 1984, has a stormy history of high staff turnover, fighting among board members and accusations of mismanagement.

When Flores took over in May, 1984, he replaced Thomas Dolan, who had been named interim director after Norine W. Miover left the agency amid allegations of mismanagement and improperly receiving $1,500 in agency funds for personal use.

Established in 1964 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, the CDC has existed in relative anonymity since its beginning.

At the time of the CDC’s inception, Ray Villa, a founder and one of the first board members of the agency, said Orange County supervisors philosophically opposed federal aid and refused to believe poverty was an Orange County problem. Supervisors had to be persuaded, Villa said, that a vehicle to receive and spend federal anti-poverty funds was needed.

The numbers illustrate, however, that the need for financial assistance for Orange County’s poor has continued to grow. In 1980, according to census estimates, Orange County’s number of poor--those below the federal government’s poverty guideline of $7,412 for a family of four--was about 320,000, or 7.3% of the population. The state is expected to release new poverty figures for Orange County soon showing that figure has increased to 11% this year, according to a Community Development Council spokesman. The new poverty guideline for a family of four is expected to be about $12,000.

In retrospect, there are a variety of opinions about why Flores’ proposal for distribution of the $150,000 was rejected.

Council board member Fausto Reyes, who said he only has a “vague recollection” of the discussion, says the idea was not pushed hard enough.

“Although it was a good idea, we weren’t clear (about) CDC’s financial status at the time. We didn’t know for sure we could afford that,” he said.

Flores contends that the chairman of the council’s program committee, Russ Barrios, stalled the proposal in his committee and then failed to recommend board approval.

Barrios could not be reached for comment.

Board member Connie Jones, who is on the program committee, said the board felt that helping the smaller agencies that receive funds from United Way was “basically United Way’s responsibility and not CDC’s.”

“The board wanted to make sure the money was not just for United Way agencies but for all agencies who needed help,” Jones said.

Directors of some of the smaller United Way agencies in the county are angry at everyone involved in the CDC leadership dispute for allowing it to obscure the primary issue of funding for the poor. In addition, they question the motives of some board members who, they say, discriminate against them because they receive United Way funding.

An unusually bad fund-raising year for United Way has resulted in major cutbacks in allocations to the agencies it finances, they point out.

“We heard that CDC had $150,000 and was going to be helping the agencies that were hurt by United Way cutbacks like ours,” the Independencia Community Center’s Lopez said. “But we never received any requests for proposals, and since then we haven’t heard a word about it. What’s going on?”

Gloria McDonough, director of a Westminster community center known as Abrazar, said: “If the board rejected it, then where is the board’s alternative plan to use that money? It doesn’t help anyone sitting there in the bank.”

The Friendly Center’s Garcia said the United Way cutbacks hurt her agency badly, even though the dollar amounts are relatively small.

“For us, it meant $1,300 less a month,” she said. “When you do long-range planning and try to get everything organized, it’s really difficult. Our annual budget is only $136,000.”

In operation since 1924, the center has only four full-time employees and six part-time workers and must rely on volunteers, she said.

They help with emergency assistance, food vouchers, clothing and, in some cases, rental assistance.

Lopez said her Independencia Community Center, with a $140,000 annual budget, lost one of its four full-time employees to budget cuts.

She said she doesn’t understand how the Community Development Council can justify putting $150,000 that could be available to anti-poverty agencies into a bank account.

“If they have a surplus of money, they should at least give it to the community, especially when there are agencies out here that are really having financial problems,” she said.

For Lopez, Cinco de Mayo may be a day of worry rather than celebration. Amnesty applications under the new immigration act may be submitted after that date, and Lopez has only one immigration counselor to handle a tremendous volume of applications from primarily poor Latino residents.

“We’re overwhelmed,” she said.

Sally Urenda, director of the Gary Center in La Habra, said: “If I had known about the $150,000 and they made it available, I would have put in a proposal for some of it.”

The Gary Center has a nurse practitioner who, because of budget cuts, has to be careful ordering medicine, Urenda said.

“Before, our nurse practitioner was able to get on the phone and just order medicine. Now, she has to sit with me and we have to ask, ‘Can we order three bottles? Can we afford this?’ ” Urenda said.

She added: “The county and CDC have to understand that if our little agencies were to come to an end, they would have a problem. I don’t think they realize it. We’re the blood line to the poor of Orange County.”

For community-based organizations such as El Modena’s Community Center, making sure that people have enough to eat is a constant battle, said Margaret Reister, the center’s director.

She remembered a hungry man who came to her center one Friday wanting food for the weekend.

“He wanted to participate in the council’s grocery plan, but he didn’t have the $5,” Reister said. “Maybe it was a car payment that had to be paid, or a utility bill, I forget. But he didn’t have any cash.”

Because of a funding shortage, the Community Development Council had allowed only five emergency waivers that day for people who could not pay the $5, she said.

So Reister paid the $5, believing the man would return and pay the debt.

“You should have seen the gleam in his eye,” she said.