State Plans to Lay Off 75% of Liquor Board Agents

Nearly three-quarters of the investigators for the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control--including 10 of the 13 in Orange County--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 the department popular with local police agencies and groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

“There’s definitely going to be a decrease of service to the public,” said Dale Rasmussen, administrator of ABC’s Santa Ana office, the largest in the state. “If people are calling in and wanting us to check out an establishment that sold alcoholic beverages to their kids, we are not going to have anyone to send out.”

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 ground 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 203 to 52, or fewer than one investigator for each of the state’s 58 counties.

“People are very upset, obviously, because a number of them will be laid off,” Rasmussen said. “They have mortgages to pay and families to care for, so morale is at an all-time low.”

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.

In Orange County, the department monitors 5,000 alcohol beverage licenses, Rasmussen 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.”

The announcement also was bad news for the city of Santa Ana, which has the highest concentration of ABC licenses in Orange County.

Lt. Bob Helton, a Police Department spokesman, said the layoffs could especially hurt the city’s attempts to close down bars after numerous complaints.

“They (ABC) are the only entity which can step in if we can support findings and remove the licenses from licensees,” Helton said. “How (the layoffs) are going to impact that, boy, I don’t know.”

And Rasmussen conceded: “It will take a long time for us to get a problem bar out of business.”

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.

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

Janet Cater, administrator for the Orange County chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said the local group had long complained that there were not enough investigators to monitor the increasing number of applications in the county.

“Now, there will be no agency that will be actively policing them,” Cater said. “It sounds to me like people will be able to over-serve (drinks) with impunity.”

Kellie Mattson, the state chairperson for MADD, called the cuts outrageous.

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.”

Times staff writer Gebe Martinez contributed to this story.