Welfare Cases Surge as Recession Lingers : Economy: Increase in the rolls has caused backlogs in processing requests and has hit the county’s already tight budget.

The recession has spurred an unprecedented increase in requests for welfare and related aid, causing delays in the system and straining a tight Ventura County budget, officials said Tuesday.

In the 12-month period beginning in March, 1991, the number of clients receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children has increased by 12% to 8,589, and the number of General Relief recipients has shot up by 39% to 474.

Medi-Cal rolls have grown by 31.9% to 15,331 cases, and those receiving aid for emotionally disturbed children have increased by 40% to 26 cases. The number of people receiving food stamps is up by 20.5% to 11,631.

“We’ve never seen numbers like these,” said Richard Wittenberg, chief administrative officer for Ventura County. “This signals that the recession is far deeper and has lasted far longer than people have anticipated.”

It was the second year of dramatically increasing caseloads in the county, said Helen Reyburn, a deputy director in the county Public Social Services Agency.

“During the last recession in the ‘80s, we saw a caseload increase for six to nine months,” she said. “We’ve been experiencing increases for two years now.”

Heidi Blair, Alinda Marshall and Rosa Carreon--who were waiting for appointments or for their applications to be processed at the Ventura social services office on Tuesday--are part of the upswing in cases in the county.

Blair, a 20-year-old Ventura resident who is five months pregnant, said she has just been approved for Medi-Cal and AFDC benefits because she has been unable to find work and she needs prenatal care.

“I’ve tried for lots of jobs,” she said. “But they didn’t want to hire me because I don’t have much experience.” Her first prenatal checkup was scheduled Tuesday afternoon.

Marshall, a lifelong Oxnard resident, said she was laid off from her job as a word processor because of the flagging economy. She came to the county for help after being homeless for two months.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she said. “But I’m a worker. If I could get a job, believe me, I’d be there.” Her mother’s house in Oxnard, she said, is already crowded with her brothers and sisters and their children.

“People are already sleeping on the floor there,” she said.

Carreon, 22, said she arrived in California from El Paso, Tex., on Monday with her two small children and her sister.

“We came to look for a better life for our kids,” she said. “We want to rent a house. I want to study to get a career. I was a sewing machine operator in El Paso, but they say I can’t do that here.”

The welfare caseload is also rising throughout the state and nation, Reyburn said. Nationwide, the number of families receiving AFDC has increased for the 28th consecutive month. At present, she said, 9 million children--or one out of every seven--in the United States, are receiving public assistance.

“An average of 2,000 children have been added to the program every day for the last two years,” Reyburn said.

In Ventura County, the rising caseload forced supervisors in December to approve the creation of 71 new state- and federally funded positions, despite a hiring freeze for the rest of county workers. Sixty of those positions have now been filled.

The need for additional personnel had created a backlog of cases that put the county in violation of state and federal laws requiring benefits to be paid within 45 days of the time of application, Reyburn said.

In December the backlog had reached 900 cases, but by April 1 the number was reduced to about 140, Reyburn said.

On Tuesday, supervisors approved the transfer of $673,000 from the county’s general fund contingency account to help clear up the backlog.

Although the numbers can vary, the federal government generally pays about 50% of the cost of the programs and the state picks up about 45%, with the county paying less than 5% of the cost.

The county’s cost for four programs--AFDC, foster care, aid for emotionally disturbed children and General Relief--has been $6.2 million in the current fiscal year, a fraction of the total $72-million cost of the programs overall.

The state and federal governments pay all of the cost of the Medi-Cal and food stamp programs.

But the county must advance the benefits and salaries of county employees and wait about six months to be reimbursed, Wittenberg said. With the poor economy, and the county waiting to hear how much of the state’s $11-billion deficit it will have to absorb, the expenditures are another strain on the county’s tight budget, he said.