State Plans to Lay Off 75% of Liquor Board Agents : Alcohol: Cuts will end enforcement of drinking laws and slash income from fees and fines, critics warn.

Nearly three-quarters of the investigators for the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control face layoffs under Gov. Pete Wilson’s budget-cutting plan, a move that investigators warn will drastically curtail the agency’s enforcement of drinking laws.

ABC officials said their activities--including aggressive enforcement of laws against selling alcoholic beverages to minors--make it popular with local police agencies and groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Critics say that the budget move could also backfire on the state financially because the agency has an annual budget of $23 million but generates $33 million to $35 million annually in fines and license fees.

The proposed layoffs are designed to save the state an estimated $5 million in salaries. A spokesman for Wilson justified the cuts on the grounds that they are part of the agreement between the governor and the Legislature last summer to close a $14.3-billion deficit.

Morale in the agency suffered a predictable drop when word circulated that about 170 investigators, supervisors and clerks on the ABC payroll face layoffs, in addition to the 63 who have already left this year through attrition or transfers.

That would leave the department down 233 jobs out of 426 positions budgeted for this fiscal year. The number of investigators will drop from about 197 to 55, or fewer than one investigator for each of the state’s 58 counties.

Despite earlier warnings, many ABC workers had brushed aside layoff threats as part of Wilson’s negotiating strategy to get state unions to accept a 5% pay cut. Now they are taking them seriously. ABC Director Jay Stroh said the layoff notices are the real thing. “It’s not a dry run,” he said.

One ABC investigator, based in Southern California, predicted that the state, in effect, “will become the only state in the nation with an unregulated alcohol beverage industry.”

Carl Covitz, secretary of the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency and a member of Wilson’s Cabinet, said the cuts “are now a fact of life that we are going to have to deal with.”

Covitz said the “ABC is taking its fair share of the budget cuts along with everyone else.” He said the slimmed-down ABC will concentrate its efforts on licensing liquor establishments first, and put secondary importance on enforcing laws against selling alcohol to minors or to bar patrons who are already drunk.

“It’s a difficult situation,” he said.

Stroh said the state is counting on local police agencies to pick up some of the slack.

Last year, ABC officials said, the agency processed 14,108 applications for liquor licenses and conducted 5,200 investigations. Out of that it filed 2,768 actions for sales of alcohol to minors and ABC agents made 1,619 arrests.

Among the arrests made last year were arrests of 422 so-called “B-girls,” women who hang around bars, often on bar owners’ payrolls, getting men to buy overpriced drinks.

But with far fewer personnel, that record of enforcement will fall way off, many ABC officials said.

“Essentially, the department is pretty much going to be out of business,” said Dean Rewertz, an ABC agent assigned to the San Francisco office and an officer of the California Union of Safety Employees.

As for the suggestion that local agencies will pick up some of the slack, Wendell Phillips of the California Council of Police and Sheriffs, an organization representing rank-and-file officers, said flatly: “No chance.”

Phillips, a Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy, said local police agencies are forced to deal with their own budget cuts as well as an escalation in violent crime and gang activity. “What will happen if they cut that agency is there will not be any enforcement of the laws that ABC is responsible for, except on a haphazard basis, like if you catch a 16-year-old walking out of a liquor store with a six-pack of beer.”

Formal layoff notices reportedly will go out in the next few days.

Agency officials said everyone with less than at least 10 years seniority has already been told informally to look for another job.

“We have people who will lose their homes. They don’t know what they are going to do,” said one supervisor. Supervisors will be reduced in rank by two steps, bumped from their current positions down to lower-level investigator jobs, and will have to take the reduced pay that goes with their new status.

One San Francisco Bay Area investigator for ABC said Wednesday, “All we’ve been told is the ax fell and we will be getting notices in the next few days.”

As the word spread, various groups around the state expressed alarm.

Kellie Mattson, the state chairperson for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, called the cuts outrageous. She said her organization already has written to Wilson protesting the cuts.

Shaun Mathers, president of the 6,500-member Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, said his organization is “extremely concerned that this is going to stress the already overextended resources of local law enforcement and . . . take away from our efforts to deal with some of the more serious violent crimes out in the streets.”