HUNTINGTON BEACH : City to Maintain Aid for Social Services

The City Council this week agreed to maintain the current level of spending on social services, although the city must come up with $96,000 during the next two years because of a change in U.S. guidelines from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Social services now has an annual budget of $264,000. The council has not yet decided where the money will come from to pay the $96,000. City staff members are proposing that Huntington Beach dip into its reserves to spend $48,000 in each of the next two years to assure that social programs are fully funded.

If the city does not channel such money into the social services account, it will be forced to cut back contributions to community agencies at a time when those groups are already financially strapped because of the national recession.

The problem surfaced because of an accounting snafu in the city’s allocation of its Community Development Block Grant money, supplied by HUD.

Until last year, the city funded Project Self-Sufficiency, a program aiding single parents, through its block grant administrative account, rather than its social services account.

HUD officials, however, ruled that Project Self-Sufficiency can be funded only by the social services account. So HUD is billing the city $96,000 for overspending on social services in 1989-91.

Rather than pay HUD back directly, the city in each of the next two years plans to use $48,000 in social service money for housing and building rehabilitation programs, which are also paid for by Community Development Block Grant money.

Council members unanimously decided to restore that social services money from other accounts.

But two other problems remain: Council members will decide how to fund Project Self-Sufficiency next year and whether to reduce the number of agencies the city supports.

Project Self-Sufficiency has a budget this year of $111,000. If it were funded entirely out of the city’s social services allocations, it would account for nearly half of the total money available.

City staff members said they are studying alternative funding methods for the program. The city may either have to find new sources of funding or reduce the scope of the program, which serves 95 single-parent families and has a waiting list of more than 100 qualified families, said Ron Hagan, the city’s community services director.