Child Support Office Dedicated : Encino: The facility is expected to collect $27 million of $138 million in payments bureau projects it will recover this year.

District Atty. Ira Reiner dedicated a new regional office of the Bureau of Family Support in Encino Monday, part of a five-year plan to revamp the countywide child-support operation.

The 40,000-square-foot office, which will handle child-support cases from Santa Monica to the Kern County line and from Glendale to the Ventura County border, is more than twice the size of the facility in Reseda that had been housing the bureau’s regional operations.

The new building provides additional space for a law library, a training area for employees and private interviewing rooms, and will facilitate the division’s goal of being fully linked to the bureau’s new $16-million computer system by spring, officials said.

Reiner said the opening of the Encino facility--one of four regional offices--marked the culmination of a “massive turnaround” in the county’s family support services, once castigated as being among the worst in the nation.

“There is nothing, nothing that has given me more satisfaction than to work with others to turn around family services,” Reiner said. “We’ve become a model for this country.”

On hand for the ceremony was Chong Kojima, ex-wife of Michael Kojima, dubbed the “most wanted deadbeat dad” by the district attorney’s office earlier this year. The Bureau of Family Support has helped Chong Kojima collect more than $150,000 in child support owed by her ex-husband.

“This is really a wonderful opportunity for single moms,” Kojima said of the new facility.

But the office opens at a time of fiscal woes for the county, and officials acknowledged that their efforts to improve child support services could be hindered by budgetary limitations.

Thad Young, deputy district attorney in charge of the Encino office--which currently handles about 70,000 of the county’s 420,000 child-support cases--expects to lose six of his 120 staff members through an early retirement program. Although the new computer system will pick up some of the slack by automating many tasks that are now done manually, the court system is already backlogged with about 2,000 child-support cases and is likely to become further congested by budget cutbacks, Young said.

Opening the new office “is like dropping a pebble in a pond,” Young said.

Nonetheless, officials voiced optimism that services would improve. The Encino office is expected to collect about $27 million of the $138 million in child-support payments the bureau projects it will recover this year.

Wayne Doss, director of the family support bureau, said his organization is on target to collect $200 million by 1995. That is the level it must reach to continue receiving federal funds amounting to 90% of the cost of the new computer system.

All but approximately $3 million of the bureau’s total costs are paid by federal and state programs, Doss said. By improving efficiency and increasing collections through the new computer system, he hopes to turn the department into a revenue-generator for the county.

Doss said the computer system, developed by Lockheed Corp., will allow bureau staff members to update accounts quickly and to immediately determine the status of a case. The system will also help case workers find delinquent parents and their places of work, and determine what assets they own, he said.

The opening of the Encino office mirrors similar efforts throughout the county. In the past several years, all the family support operations have moved to new facilities, including a new headquarters building in the City of Commerce and regional offices in West Covina, Torrance and El Segundo.

A separate bureau of the district attorney’s office since 1975, the county’s family support office is now the largest local child-support program in the country and handles about one-third of the state’s total caseload.