State Budget Cuts to Hit Hard in San Diego

The sting of Gov. George Deukmejian’s budget cuts will be sharply felt in San Diego County’s health clinics, social service centers, schoolhouses and courtrooms, local officials said Wednesday.

Deukmejian approved a $55.7-billion state budget Tuesday, but only after wielding his blue pencil to cut $753 million from the draft that legislators had passed to his office. Officials across San Diego County spent Wednesday crunching numbers to determine how much their programs stand to lose. Their preliminary findings are not optimistic.

The program that provides health services to about 25,000 indigent adults annually may have been hit hardest, according to Manuel Lopez, the county’s director of financial management.

That program could lose somewhere between $8 million and $14.5 million, depending on how state leaders spread out the $175 million cut from the budget to treat indigent patients, Norman Hickey, the county’s chief administrative officer, announced Wednesday.

Unless another funding source is found, the program might be dissolved, said William Cox, the county’s director of health services.

“It’s going to be devastating to people who depend on this program,” Cox said. “It’s a travesty against one of the most vulnerable segments of our society.”

Cox estimated that the governor’s cuts could leave his program with as little as $17 million. With that amount, the county could continue to fund treatment for some indigent patients at primary-care clinics but would be forced to cancel its contracts with private hospitals that provide more-extensive care for the poor, Cox said.

Some money would be left over, Cox said, but the reimbursement to private hospitals could amount to as little as 10 cents to 20 cents for every dollar that the hospitals spend on indigent care.

Also, health care for the mentally ill may face large reductions, Cox said.

Deukmejian cut $61 million from the statewide budget for mental health, but the director of the state’s Department of Mental Health will make the decision on how much individual counties stand to lose, Cox said.

According to Hickey’s estimates, that could mean no cuts--or it could mean cuts as large as $5.2 million.

Cox called the cuts “a disaster in the making.”

“They have chopped into the bone of county health care programs.”

Elsewhere, judges, court clerks and all of their supporting staff members will also have to tighten their belts under the governor’s spending plan, according to Sandy Smith, a budget analyst for the county.

Funding for the trial court system will be reduced about $4.3 million, Smith said, adding that rather than getting a 5% increase as a cost-of-living adjustment, the system must instead deal with a 10% COLA decrease.

Officials have not determined how that change will affect the system, but Smith said it could mean cuts on everything from office supplies to judges’ salaries.

“It’s a pretty hefty cut,” Smith said. “I think the euphemism is that ‘creative thought’ is needed to solve the problem.”

Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN), a program designed to wean people from welfare, will lose about $1.8 million of its $20.2-million budget this year, said Ray Koenig, the program’s director.

Although the cut in GAIN’s funding is relatively small, it will mean that the program can accept only about half the number of new participants its directors hoped to serve, Koenig said.

GAIN provides services to qualified welfare recipients, including remedial education, vocational training and job searches, Koenig said.

The program ordinarily accepts about 1,000 new participants each month, but that number will be halved because of the cuts and a recently adopted federal requirement that program administrators provide child care for welfare mothers who participate, Koenig said.

Costs for providing the child care, along with the continuing costs of providing services for the program’s current 11,000 participants, make reducing the number of new participants unavoidable, Koenig said.

School administrators were also feeling the pinch Wednesday.

Because the cuts eliminated some special incentives, fewer school districts are likely to begin operating on a year-round schedule, which would involve rotating staff members and students to ease crowding, said Charles Ballinger, the county’s coordinator of year-round education.

Deukmejian reduced the amount of special incentives a school district can receive, making the year-round format a less attractive alternative, Ballinger said.

Both the city and county school superintendents were mourning the loss of funding for the California Assessment Program, a widely acclaimed procedure for measuring students’ achievement.

“We’ve got a $27-billion operation,” Tom Boysen, the superintendent for county schools, said of the statewide system. “We were spending $12 million for quality control (the CAP). And that just got cut.”

Times staff writer Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed to this report. New GAS TAX slowed business. B5