State Fights Order to Restore Clinic Funds

The Deukmejian Administration, warning of “fiscal chaos,” has asked the state Supreme Court to block a lower-court order requiring the restoration of $24 million in funds for family planning clinics for the poor.

Attorneys for the state Department of Health Services told the justices that the restoration order, made last month by a judge in San Luis Obispo County, violated the constitutional separation of powers. If the order is upheld, the department said, the state will be required to take funds from other programs to support the clinics.

At issue are state-provided funds for local clinics that last year served about 470,000 people--mostly women--providing services for birth control, gynecological examinations, pregnancy tests and screening for venereal disease and AIDS.

Gov. George Deukmejian, citing concerns over a tight state budget, last August trimmed two-thirds of the $36 million appropriated for the clinics. As a result, more than 40 clinics in California were closed, 17 of them in Los Angeles County, and services were reduced in other facilities.

In a petition filed late Thursday with the high court in Los Angeles, attorneys representing Health Services Director Kenneth W. Kizer, the official named as defendant in a suit challenging the cutback, asked the justices to block restoration of the funds pending further appeal of a ruling issued Dec. 8 by San Luis Obispo Superior Court Judge William R. Fredman.

The state lawyers argued that the decision represented an unconstitutional judicial intrusion on the budgetary authority of the governor and the state Legislature, violating the separation of powers doctrine.

If the order is upheld, the department will have no choice but to take funds from other programs to pay for the family planning services, thus creating a “situation of robbing Peter to pay Paul,” the attorneys said.

Taking funds from other programs will “destroy the rational management” of public welfare programs, resulting in “fiscal and administrative chaos” for the state, the department said.

The Administration lawyers called the governor’s cutbacks “prudent” in light of his duty to help maintain a budgetary reserve. In fact, the attorneys said, the governor’s budget reductions “may not have gone far enough” because of new demands on the reserve caused by the massive Northern California earthquake last October.

The legal battle began last July when Deukmejian, exercising line-item vetoes in the 1989-90 state budget, made the $24-million cutback in funding approved by the Legislature for family clinic services. The Legislature then failed to override the veto.

A suit, challenging the budget cuts as illegal, was filed in behalf of a group of taxpayers and a family planning clinic in San Luis Obispo by lawyers for California Rural Legal Assistance and the National Health Law Program.

In his ruling last month, Judge Fredman upheld the challenge, concluding that state law requires family planning services to be provided to the poor--and that without a change in the law, the governor may not reduce those services by cutting the budget.

State lawyers then went to a state Court of Appeal, asking for a stay blocking release of the disputed funds while they contested Fredman’s ruling. On Dec. 27, the appeals court granted the stay, but on Wednesday lifted it, concluding that further delaying in restoration of funds risked a violation of the rights of family services recipients.