Welfare Workers’ Fear Grows : Bureaucracy: Frustration with benefit cuts and confusing forms is turning some food-stamp and welfare recipients violent.

A series of physical assaults and threats of violence directed against Ventura County welfare workers has prompted county officials to lobby Washington for help in simplifying the paper work needed to qualify for welfare and food-stamp programs.

County officials say the attacks and threats--which have included a threat to machine-gun welfare workers in Simi Valley--appear to stem from frustration over welfare bureaucracy and the complexity of sometimes contradictory welfare and food-stamp application forms.

The string of recent hostile acts, which have also prompted county efforts to simplify welfare and food-stamp procedures locally and to take other steps to reduce tension at the county’s welfare offices, has caught county officials by surprise.

“The threats are tied to the end of the month when they have run out of food and are desperate,” said Nancy Nazario, a homeless advocate employed by the county.

In one recent incident, Nazario said, a father of two young children who became upset in the Simi Valley welfare office threatened to return and “machine-gun” the eyes of all the caseworkers in the office.

“When his family goes hungry, he just goes nuts,” Nazario said.

Five months after initially applying for assistance, bureaucratic snags continue to delay the father from receiving all the benefits for which his family qualifies, she added.

In other incidents in recent months, workers in the county’s Oxnard welfare office have received bomb threats and have had clients try to burn them with lighted cigarettes.

Relinda Prado, a caseworker in Oxnard, still shivers from the memory of a welfare mother slamming her against the wall. The woman reached the breaking point after an exasperating experience with food-stamp forms, Prado said.

“It was very scary,” Prado said. “I was crying and everything. I even went to the hospital.”

Threats are more common. In the Santa Paula office, one client came in holding a gun. Another client, with a checkered history, told his caseworker, “I have something to take care of you in my knapsack.”

In Oxnard, where the problem is described as most serious, interview rooms are now equipped with backdoors so caseworkers can slip away easily. A panic button is placed next to each desk.

“Our alarm system goes off once a day,” said Maria Older, district manager at the Oxnard office of the Public Social Services Department. “The client has become so agitated that the worker is afraid for her safety.”

In some cases, officials said, police have been called to remove threatening welfare clients. In the Simi Valley incident, the man who threatened to machine-gun office workers was told by letter that his threats were being reported to police.

Ventura County Supervisor Madge Schaefer, a Republican from Thousand Oaks, has led the county’s lobbying effort in Washington and says the county’s goal is to deal with the increased violence by trying to reduce the causes of clients’ frustration.

“Some people might say, this is public money, and if they are going to act this way, we shouldn’t give them anything,” Schaefer said. “But we wanted to find out what is making them so frustrated. It is because the system is complicated and the forms so extensive.”

The county recently approved more money for additional security measures. And Schaefer traveled to Washington as head of a delegation of county officials lobbying for improvements in the foodstamp program.

To apply for food stamps, welfare payments and medical benefits, an applicant in Ventura County has to wade through half a dozen explanatory pamphlets and fill out 48 pages of complex forms.

“I’d have a hard time filling out all the forms,” said James E. Isom, the county’s director of social services who accompanied Schaefer to Washington. Many of the applicants, he notes, cannot read or write, in English or Spanish.

Federal and state rules require the applicant to produce a variety of documents, including rent receipts, utility bills, vouchers from any source of income, birth certificates and Social Security numbers for every family member.

Paycheck stubs must be produced every month to qualify for food stamps and welfare. If income changes, the benefits are adjusted retroactively. If a family’s income goes down, for example, the caseworker can increase its benefits. If income goes up, the caseworker is sometimes put in the indelicate situation of trying to reclaim overpayments from the poor.

“Congress has heard about the frustration among clients,” said Betty Jo Nelsen, administrator of the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service, which runs the nation’s food-stamp program.

Nelsen said she senses a renewed concern in Congress and the Bush Administration about reducing paper work and bureaucratic red tape. “With this interest from the administration and Congress, I believe that this is the year it is likely to happen.”

While in Washington in February, the county delegation met with the deputy administrator of the food-stamp program and the staff of a congressional committee that oversees the program. The House Agricultural subcommittee on nutrition invited Schaefer to return the following week to tell the county’s story in testimony before the panel. She did.

On March 22, the subcommittee approved the Mickey Leland Hunger Relief Act, recommending that a commission study ways to simplify application forms and rules.

One subcommittee member, Rep. Dan Glickman (D-Kansas), wanted more certain action to reduce the paper work. Waving an inch-thick application packet he obtained from Schaefer, he vowed to raise the issue again in the full House Agriculture Committee.

“In many cases, we require people to fill out forms 50 to 60 pages long and do things we wouldn’t require of defense contractors who come to the government for large sums of money,” Glickman said in an interview.

Glickman and other critics of the food-stamp program often blame changes brought by former President Ronald Reagan during his years in the White House.

Almost since its inception in the mid-1960s, the food-stamp program has been caught in the political cross-fire between those wishing to feed the poor and those trying to eliminate waste and fraud.

Congress revamped the program in 1977 and has continued to tinker with it during annual budget reviews, gradually tightening eligibility requirements. President Reagan’s administration cut the food stamp budget, limiting the program to the “truly needy.”

To qualify for food stamps in Ventura County today, for instance, a family of four cannot have an annual income that exceeds $12,100. For welfare payments, officially known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a four-member family cannot earn more than $9,888 a year.

In its campaign against waste and abuse in the mid-1980s, the Reagan White House prodded Congress to rewrite the law with new requirements on verifying income and poverty levels before a family could qualify. These extra rules are now carried out by state and local governments.

“We wanted to penalize states for making errors,” Glickman said of the legal changes. “But the pressure was so great on the states that we have increased by tenfold the amount of paper work.”

One of the most stubborn problems is that the food-stamp program is administered by the Agriculture Department and welfare is run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Each of these agencies is a huge bureaucracy with its own agenda. Each requires separate applications from recipients; each has its own set of requirements that a family must meet before it qualifies for aid.

A review board assembled by Ventura County caseworkers cites dozens of examples where these rules fail to mesh or conflict.

For example, on July 1, the beginning of the state’s fiscal year, recipients are given a cost-of-living increase in their welfare checks. Since welfare is calculated as income by the Agriculture Department, the increase automatically triggers an offsetting reduction in food stamps.

On Oct. 1, the beginning of the federal fiscal year, food stamps get their cost-of-living increase.

“When the AFDC goes up $15 and then food stamps go down $15, we get calls all day long,” said Relinda Prado, the caseworker in Oxnard. “Try explaining that one to someone who has hungry kids at home.”

One hopeful sign to program managers is that Catherine Bertini, recently an official of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is now an assistant secretary of Agriculture overseeing the food-stamp program.

Bertini has contacted her counterpart at Health and Human Services who runs the nation’s welfare program to see if the two agencies can conform their applications and other requirements to reduce workloads and make it easier for clients.

“Those two are tremendously well-positioned to pull this off,” said Nelson, who works for Bertini administering the food stamp program.

Although Bertini was unavailable for comment, her recent testimony shows that such an effort is her top priority, but she warned against hastily tinkering with the law. Even a well-intentioned effort, she said, could set in motion another round of changes that could make the bureaucracy more, rather than less, complex as it trickles down through federal, state and ultimately, local agencies.

Ventura County’s social service director agrees. “I started 15 years ago, and every president has had some type of welfare reform,” Isom said. “Every year we have to cope with the changes.”

Those changes are reflected in bulging case files kept at the county offices. Inactive cases fill one large warehouse and two missile bunkers at Camarillo Airport, formerly the Oxnard Air Force Base. Arthur E. Goulet, the county’s director of public works, estimates that the county spends $30,000 a month for the leased space needed to hold these files.

The complexity of the system makes the job more difficult for the 250 caseworkers juggling the county’s 7,000 welfare families and 7,700 families receiving food stamps. The number of welfare and foodstamp families has increased by about 1,000 in the last year.

New caseworkers must undergo a five-week training course to become familiar with a shelf full of rules and regulations. Turnover for welfare and food-stamp workers is twice as high as for those county workers handling the heartbreaking cases of child abuse and molestation.

“We have stressed workers dealing with stressed clients,” said Nazario, the homeless advocate who intervenes in difficult welfare and food-stamp cases. “When you add the pressure from all this red tape, serious problems start to appear.”