Board Grants Seniors’ Group No Favors : Social services: Supervisors deny $10,000 for South County home-sharing program when doling out $4.4 million in federal block grant funds. But it still might get another chance.

Orange County supervisors on Wednesday denied an acclaimed South County senior citizens group its request for $10,000, and as a result the organization may have to drastically curtail its services.

“I’m coming to the county to ask for some help in keeping this program going,” Susan Gattis, coordinator of the South County Senior Citizens Homesharing Program, told the supervisors. The program, which officials rank among the best in the state, matches senior citizens with housemates to help them defray housing costs.

“We don’t want to lose ground, but we will if we can’t find some help,” Gattis said later.

The supervisors, while sympathetic, did not respond to Gattis’ plea. Without considering any amendments, they unanimously approved the staff version of the 1990-91 Community Development Block Grant budget, which doles out $4.4 million in federal money to Orange County groups but leaves the seniors program far short of its needs.

Senior citizens may feel the pinch of the budget, but at least one group will not: Among the organizations that made the county’s cut was the Don R. Roth Child Care Center, named for the chairman of the Board of Supervisors, who described the center’s work with deep emotion Wednesday.

The center, in El Modena, is operated by Orange Children and Parents Together Inc., which received $14,500 through the block grant program. The center’s director said the money was needed to pay for a community aide who will serve as an outreach worker in the neighborhood.

Later, Roth said the center did “wonderful work” and blamed the senior citizens’ exclusion from the budget on their poor lobbying effort. “You can’t just sit back and make a plea,” Roth said. “I’d never even heard of this program before.”

Neither the seniors group nor any other observers quibbled with the child-care center’s financial need or with its work. Indeed, Wednesday’s meeting was marked by citizen after citizen rising to commend the supervisors and the county government for the management of the block grant program, which shrinks every year as available federal funds dwindle.

The grant allocation, one citizen said, “satisfies our needs and represents the best possible use of the federal funds available.”

Gattis was less enthusiastic.

“We’re always aware of the tightness of the money that’s out there, but we think we have a genuine need,” she said. “I think there was a misunderstanding, and they thought we were sufficiently funded when we were not. . . . I mean, they could have just taken $1,000 from 15 of the groups they funded, and we could continue.”

The home-sharing program matched about 300 senior citizens last year, helping them to afford housing in expensive Orange County.

But after Gov. George Deukmejian rejected a wide-ranging housing bill in December, house-sharing programs were axed from the state budget, ending the South County group’s $34,000-a-year grant. San Clemente chipped in $10,000 of its federal grant money to help the program stay alive; the county added $5,000, but that still leaves the program far short of its need.

In an interview later, Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, who represents much of South County, said shorting the home-sharing program “may have been an oversight. I was told there was no opposition to the proposal,” he said. “We’re going to check on that right away.”