Welfare Aid for Single Adults to Be Cut by 10.4% : Social services: New state legislation requires reduced payments to match those made to families under the AFDC program.

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors is expected next week to cut welfare aid to single adults by 10.4%, the single largest cut to public assistance that the county has seen in 10 years, a welfare official said Thursday.

The supervisors must make the cut to reduce general-relief payments for single adults so they match aid for poor families under the state Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, said Helen Reburn of the county Public Social Services Agency.

The move was required by state budget legislation passed this summer, said Reburn, deputy director of the agency’s income maintenance division.

“In Ventura County, there’s about 460 cases of recipients receiving general relief,” Reburn said Thursday. “Currently, the maximum grant is $341 a month, and if the board adopts these recommendations . . . the single-person grant for general relief would be reduced to $306.”

Although general relief used to go to mostly single men, about half the recipients now are single women, Reburn said.

The cuts will hit hard, said Fred Judy, an Oxnard advocate for the homeless.

“It’s going to be devastating,” said Judy, chairman of the board of directors of the Zoe Christian Center. “Thirty-five dollars for some people will be the electric bill or the water bill or the gas bill that they were just barely having enough to pay for it now.”

The cuts, effective Nov. 1, and the faltering economy will probably push more people onto the streets, he said.

“It’s unfortunate that every time we take a cut, it always affects the lower-class people,” Judy said. “Really, when we look at it, they don’t vote, they don’t create any noise, and where the system is set up for them to get any type of help, they have to accept whatever’s thrown at them.”

Supervisor Susan K. Lacey said the cuts will hurt people on general relief, even though it is a short-term program, geared to help people for six to nine months while they try to get work.

“Things are going to be very difficult for those who are on general relief,” Lacey said. “It’s a very short-term program, but fewer dollars with the winter coming has got to make it more difficult.”

Reburn said that as deep as the general-relief cuts are, they are merely matching cuts already made to AFDC for families statewide, including about 9,000 families in Ventura County.

Last year, the Legislature cut AFDC by 4.4% and county aid to families by 1.5%. This year, the Legislature cut AFDC payments by 4.5%, effective Oct. 1, Reburn said.

Other mid-sized and large counties in California are in the process of approving cuts to general relief for single adults that are almost as deep as Ventura County’s 10.4% cut, or slightly deeper, she said.