Legislature Reforming Child Support Laws : Divorce: Partly as means of reducing budget deficit, lawmakers crack down on parents who don’t pay up.

Spurred by a record budget deficit to find new sources of money, the California Legislature has embarked on a major revamping of the state’s child support enforcement system that could have a profound effect on divorced parents and their children.

After years of futile attempts to toughen one of the nation’s most lax enforcement systems, lawmakers have suddenly decided to crack down on absent parents--in most cases fathers--who fail to pay child support.

As a result, tough reforms that could never muster enough votes to get out of committees, are sweeping through the Legislature, receiving near unanimous approval from Democrats and Republicans, conservatives as well as liberals.

Supporters of the effort hope to target cases in which the failure to pay has forced ex-wives and children onto the welfare rolls. The growth in the state’s welfare caseload is considered a major factor in the state’s fiscal crisis. The California treasury could benefit from the crackdown because welfare law requires states to keep most of the back support payments they collect from parents of welfare recipients.

But while the legislation being acted upon is aimed at the welfare network, it would have an impact on virtually all divorced parents and their children.

Close to final passage are measures that would place heavy fines on parents who do not keep up with payments, make failure to pay child support an issue in the granting of professional licenses and do away with the automatic reduction in support payments given parents who keep their children at least 10% of the time, or about a weekend a month.

Following in their wake is legislation that would require district attorneys to set up separate child support offices and direct state bureaucrats to investigate the possibility of establishing a centralized child support enforcement system.

“There has been a lot written about the feminization of poverty and I believe that the biggest factor there is deadbeat fathers who don’t take care of their kids,” Assembly Republican Leader Ross Johnson (R-La Habra) said Friday as some of the measures came up for consideration in the lower house.

Then, in a remark that typifies the new legislative attitude toward recalcitrant fathers, he added, half jokingly, “We should go a lot further and we should in fact pull their thumbnails out with pliers.”

Other lawmakers predicted the legislation would erase California’s image as a state where child support obligations are largely unenforced and average payments are among the lowest in the nation. They cited statistics that show $2.4 billion in child support goes uncollected each year in the state,

“We have lousy child support enforcement and we have child support orders that are meager and as a result children are not getting the support they justly deserve,” said Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-South San Francisco).

A recent national study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation ranked California 49th among the states in the size of its average child support awards. It placed the average child support obligation in the state at $4,936 a year or $411 a month and compared it to a national average of $6,040 a year or $503 per month.

In a child support enforcement report card, a subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee placed California 47th among the states in the effectiveness of its enforcement program.

Kassy Perry, California Health and Welfare Agency associate secretary for public affairs, acknowledged that the state “has not been perhaps as aggressive as we could be” in collecting child support from the fathers of children on welfare. She also said California has a “unique problem.”

While the state’s average child support awards are among the lowest in the nation, its welfare payments are the second highest, she said. Even when a father pays up, Perry said, the payment often is not enough to offset the welfare payments that are being made to his children.

Ultimately, it is this ability of the state to use child support payments to offset welfare costs that has sparked the legislative interest in reforming the enforcement system.

Under welfare laws, the state is required to keep all but $50 of any monthly support monies it collects from a parent of a child who is receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The remaining $50 is given to the child’s custodial parent or guardian.

The idea to tie child support enforcement to the current budget deficit came from Assemblyman Tom Bates (D-Oakland). He presented the plan to legislative leaders just as they were searching for ways to break a budget impasse between Republicans, who wanted to eliminate cost-of-living increases for welfare recipients, and Democrats who wanted to keep them.

Bates suggested that by beefing up the child support enforcement system, the state would be able to collect more money from errant fathers whose children were on welfare and then use the extra dollars to provide cost-of-living increases for welfare recipients.

“It just seemed like this financial crisis gave us the opportunity to make fundamental changes that will basically benefit the state and also hopefully benefit families that are relying on absent fathers to make child support payments,” he said.

The idea immediately appealed to both sides and it became part of a budget compromise that would have worked this way: Cost-of-living increases for welfare recipients would be suspended for five years but in the fourth and fifth years of the suspension, they could be reinstated if enough money is collected from the fathers of welfare children.

That concept has since been abandoned, but once child support enforcement reform was tied to a budget compromise, measures which had been languishing in committees immediately began moving. Bates said the movement was so swift that opposition, which in past years had killed many child support measures, never had a chance to surface.

Speier said child support bills often have had a rough time winning passage because “we’ve got a lot of fathers in the Legislature who are paying child support.”

This year the only strong opposition has come from Sen. Charles Calderon (D-Whittier), who recently has gone through divorce and child support proceedings. Calderon, however, insists that most of the measures would not affect him because he shares custody of his children equally with his former spouse.

Calderon said he is worried the Legislature is approving far-reaching legislation so quickly that members are not taking time to examine the effect they could have on both parent and child.

“I don’t particularly think when we’re dealing with support guidelines, that we really ought to tie those issues to this locomotive we call the budget,” he said.

Calderon said the legislation they are passing would have an impact on virtually all divorced parents and their children.

In California it is easy to avoid child support, he said, because enforcement varies from county to county and with no statewide computer link it is hard to pursue errant fathers who move often. Nor, he said, is there much incentive for fathers to keep up with payments because penalties for failing to pay child support are usually small fines.

Sen. Gary Hart (D-Santa Barbara), has authored most of the child support legislation, including one measure that would impose fines against parents who have the ability to pay child support but do not. His proposal would impose progressively larger fines, beginning at 6% above the regular monthly support payments up to a maximum of 72%.

But Calderon said the proposal he most opposes is another bill by Hart, which would do away with the automatic deduction in child support payments for fathers who keep their children. Under guidelines adopted by the California Judicial Council, a parent who is obligated to pay child support can have those payments reduced by 20% if he or she agrees to keep the child at least 10% of the time.

If the measure passes, Calderon predicted that the courts will be clogged with parents petitioning to have support payments increased by 20%.

Hart argued that the 20% rule is the main reason California’s child support payments are low and its elimination will do much to help. He said no other state had a similar rule.