City Employee Child Support Withholding Option Hailed

An innovative plan allowing Los Angeles city employees to make child support payments through payroll deductions took its first baby steps just two months ago.

Now the program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, is off and running like a curious toddler.

Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter and Controller Rick Tuttle said Thursday that nearly 100 city employees have enrolled in the payroll deduction plan since it began on April 6 and are making payments that will total more than $340,000 annually.

But what the two officials had not anticipated was the broad interest expressed in the program by both the private sector and other government agencies.

At a news conference held by Galanter and Tuttle, Transamerica Life Cos. spokeswoman Laurie Bayless said the San Francisco-based insurance firm will soon launch a voluntary child support payroll plan for its 3,500 Los Angeles employees. Bayless said that the company’s program, inspired by the city’s, “makes good business sense.”

Wallace Knox, a member of the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees, meanwhile, said that next week he will seek to establish a deduction plan for the 7,000-employee district.

Additional Participants

Long Beach and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, employing a combined 16,000 workers, also have agreed to set up child support deduction plans similar to that of Los Angeles. And Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce President Ray Remy promised Tuttle in a letter to urge the chamber’s 2,800 member companies to strongly consider following the city’s lead.

Susan Speir, president of Single Parents United ‘N’ Kids (SPUNK), a child support advocacy group, said the city’s voluntary plan is unprecedented and could help solve a growing problem in Los Angeles.

“A lot of people don’t like paying their ex,” Speir said. She said, however, that while the city’s voluntary program is “a good idea for a start, as for solving the problem, no way.”

What apparently has attracted the response from city employees to the Galanter-Tuttle program is a combination of carrot and stick.

On the carrot side, participants reportedly have found the deduction plan more convenient and less confrontational than paying their ex-spouse directly.

“One . . . parent called to tell us her ex-husband hadn’t paid child support in nine years until he signed up for the city’s voluntary payroll deduction program,” Tuttle said. Tuttle said he had no way to determine how many of the participants had been making payments all along and how many others had been recalcitrant.

The stick in the payroll deduction plan is that those city employees in arrears in their payments risk being discovered by prosecutors, who could pursue them in court. For the last two years, the city has provided the district attorney’s office with a list of employees to determine if any are ignoring court orders to make support payments.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Wayne D. Doss said there may be as many as 200,000 active cases in the county in which parents are either ignoring their child support payments or are months in arrears.

Court-ordered payroll deductions for child support have existed for years, but child support advocates said the problem has become so acute that attaching wages is often a difficult process. Employers, for instance, are not often willing to become involved in what they consider a dispute between an employee and a former spouse, advocates say.

Believed to Be First

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said that while some mechanism for voluntary child support payments has been established in scattered areas around the country, Los Angeles is apparently the first municipality to implement such a program as a city ordinance.

The City Council and Mayor Tom Bradley adopted Galanter’s proposal last February.

“This program is simple and effective,” Galanter said. “It should become the model for every government agency and every business. We know it works and we know it’s needed. We also know that 80% of California’s poor could be removed from the welfare rolls, or at least have their payments reduced, if they could just get the child support that is due them.”