Consolidated Welfare Adds to Nightmare of Destitute

These people say they don’t need more problems.

Maeola Campbell, 39, who spends nights on a park bench at Long Beach City Hall, says it is tough enough to walk 19 blocks to the welfare office twice a month to keep her relief checks coming.

Veronica Ruiz, 21, must gather up her four small children and trudge several blocks from a central city apartment to stake a place in line at the same office.

Rodney Matson, a 31-year-old disabled welder, also has no car, so he walks to the crowded Long Beach Boulevard facility.

“There’s just too many problems already,” an exasperated Matson said last week as he paced in front of the welfare office at 1917 Long Beach Blvd., one of four in the Long Beach and harbor areas to be moved this year into a single building near Compton.

“Right now you can’t survive on the $300 they give you, and now we’ll have to find this other place,” he said. “How much does the bus cost? A dollar?”

Replacing Four Offices

It will cost $1.35, including one transfer, for Campbell, Ruiz, Matson and thousands of other welfare recipients without automobiles to reach the new office when it opens in December. And another $1.35 to get back to their low-income neighborhoods of Wilmington, San Pedro and central and downtown Long Beach.

The county says the high-tech office--planned at a former wheel-making plant on Santa Fe Avenue at the 91 Freeway--will replace four shabby and cramped welfare offices that serve about 30,000 people who live from Torrance to the Orange County line.

“It will be easier, more economical to do what we do at one place as opposed to four separate locations,” said John Zarcone, director of administrative services for the county Department of Public Social Services.

In the new facility, the county plans to install “a brand-new modular furniture approach that will facilitate the use of computer terminals by the workers,” he said.

The consolidation will make services harder to reach for the needy, he acknowledged, “but service will be better when they get there.” The county expects no drop in the number of recipients reporting to the new office, he said.

20% More Office Space

The new, 133,000-square-foot regional headquarters will have about 20% more space than the old offices combined.

This means that poor people, whose numbers are steadily increasing in the area, will have a place to sit while they wait for hours for interviews and counseling, Zarcone said. Now, they often straggle onto the street at the large Long Beach Boulevard facility, angering auto dealers who are the closest neighbors.

Thirteen administrative jobs and a few clerical positions will be eliminated as a work force of 660 is moved to a single location, saving more than $600,000 a year, he said.

However, Zarcone said, “in terms of actual money,” the new building will cost more than the old ones: about $2 million a year to lease instead of $1.1 million; or $1.29 a square foot, up from 82 cents.

Critics say that even if money is saved, the county’s arguments for the consolidation are unconvincing. They maintain that people who desperately need help will not get it when the four local offices are closed.

“It’s a disaster waiting to happen, because those people who can’t get there will end up not having the benefits they need to survive. Those in the worst condition . . . will be least likely to get there,” said Toby Rothschild, executive director of the Legal Aid Foundation of Long Beach.

The current offices--in San Pedro, the Long Beach westside near Wilmington and in downtown and north Long Beach--are probably as well located as possible, Rothschild said. Welfare hotels, cheap housing and homeless shelters are near them.

Distances Criticized

But the new office is about eight miles from downtown Long Beach and 12 miles from central San Pedro. Rothschild said he can hardly imagine a worse site.

“Santa Fe and the 91 Freeway is a long, long way from downtown Long Beach,” he said.

Gertrude Kopczak, a longtime clerk supervisor at the San Pedro office, agrees.

More than half of the people who come to the small harbor-area office get there on foot, many referred by nearby detoxification and homeless shelters, she said.

“This means that everybody from here to the far side of Long Beach will have to get to Compton the best way they can,” she said.

Pointing to a faded Department of Public Social Services logo, she said: “That sign should say Department of Disservice, because we are not serving our clients.”

But county officials involved in the consolidation say it is justified and necessary, a goal they have pursued with the approval of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors since 1986. It is part of a policy to combine county facilities that has reduced the number of welfare offices overseeing general relief and dependent-children cases from 30 to 15 in recent years.

Other factors also argued for a single office in the southern part of the county, they said.

May Lose Site

For example, the lease at the 10,000-square-foot San Pedro office is retained only month to month because its owner, the Port of Los Angeles, wants the site for construction, county leasing official Claus Marx said.

“Trying to relocate something like that in San Pedro is a little tough,” he said.

The lease on the Long Beach westside office expires in about a year and the city Redevelopment Agency is interested in the property, Marx said.

Tom Poe, area aide to Supervisor Deane Dana, said crowding at the Long Beach Boulevard office and at a nearby Department of Children’s Services center has been a problem for years. Since both need more space, welfare will move out of its 70,000-square-foot office and children’s services will move in.

That way, Poe said, the county will keep its bargain, 50-cents-a-square-foot lease on the facility.

Recent history also argues against assertions that the needy will not find their way to less convenient offices, said Zarcone. The number of recipients has not dropped as the county eliminated half its general relief offices, he said.

But those statistics may be of little comfort to Maeola Campbell, who said of the new office one recent early morning, “I won’t have no way to get there.”