Judge Delays Plan to Cut Welfare Rolls : Law: County’s effort to purge ‘employables’ from General Relief program to be taken up by court panel next month.

A state appellate court judge halted a San Diego County plan to discontinue welfare payments to 2,000 able-bodied adults Friday, just hours before the first 200 recipients were scheduled to lose their $291 monthly benefits.

Justice Howard Wiener’s order extends benefits for the 1,940 so-called “employable” recipients of General Relief payments until at least March 12, when the controversial county attempt to remove them from the welfare rolls will be argued in yet another courtroom.

“I’m very happy, and the clients I talked with are very relieved,” said Anson Levitan, the Legal Aid attorney who represents 10 welfare recipients who have filed suit to block the county plan.

“I really feel as though there’s been some recognition of our clients’ legal position and the recognition of the real harm that termination of these benefits would be,” Levitan said.

Deputy County Counsel Ian Fan said county officials “generally expected” the 4th District Court of Appeal to issue the temporary halt.

“A stay is an easy thing” to win from a judge, Fan said. “It maintains the status quo. They just want to keep everything in place until they make the decisions.”

On Feb. 14, Superior Court Judge Judith Haller cleared the way for the county to begin removing “employables” who had received three months of payments, in accordance with a plan finalized Jan. 14.

But at the same time, Haller extended a temporary restraining order until Friday to allow for the Legal Aid appeal that proved successful at the 11th hour.

According to Fan, the county Department of Social Services would have held up checks to about 200 recipients Friday, when the temporary ban was set to expire at 5 p.m. Instead, the checks were mailed.

General Relief is a last-resort welfare program for indigent adults without children who qualify for no other form of public assistance except food stamp payments. More than 6,000 people receive the monthly payments. About 20% of them are homeless.

Faced with an ongoing fiscal crisis, the county finalized a plan Jan. 14 to save more than $2 million this fiscal year and $6.2 million annually by removing the employable adults from the program after three months of payments. Recipients would be allowed to apply for benefits again a year later.

The program was at the center of a political controversy earlier this week, when an internal memo from County Supervisor Susan Golding’s campaign revealed that a pollster had urged a strong stand against continued payments to employables in order to garner publicity.

Legal Aid lawyers argue that state law and a 1971 California Supreme Court decision specifically prohibit the denial of welfare benefits to an entire class of people, those able to hold jobs.

County attorneys say they are limiting recipients to three months of payments--not denying them benefits completely. They also contend that the state law and the court decision are obsolete in the post-Proposition 13 era, when governments have lost the power to raise taxes as their spending requirements increase.

When the three-judge panel hears arguments March 12, Legal Aid lawyers will have to prove that Haller, the Superior Court judge, “abused her discretion” in allowing the welfare cuts to be carried out, Fan contended.

He said that will be a more difficult task than winning the temporary halt in the cuts that was approved Friday.