County Fails to Spend Millions in Drug Funds

Officials in Los Angeles County, where thousands of addicts wait for treatment, have been forced to return millions of dollars in state and federal drug funds because the county could not spend the money fast enough.

The county’s Alcohol and Drug Program Administration has failed to spend $9.2 million allocated for drug abuse programs since 1987, according to state records.

More than $3 million in funds allocated last year to help pregnant addicts kick their habits was returned.

“This county, with all its needs, has actually returned money to the state,” said state drug chief Andrew Mecca, whose office administers federal and state drug funds distributed to local governments. “I think there’s something structurally wrong (in Los Angeles County) because they can’t seem to move the money out to (treatment) providers.”

State and local officials said the county might be able to recoup some of its losses by reapplying for the forfeited funds.

Mecca said it is not unprecedented for counties to have surplus drug funds. But he said the enormous need for services in Los Angeles County--and the significant amounts of unspent funds--have focused his concern on the county.

Mecca said he is coming to Los Angeles on Wednesday to discuss the problem with local health and drug officials.

Rochelle D. Ventura, outgoing head of the county’s Alcohol and Drug Program Administration, denied last summer in an interview that the county had returned any funds to the state. “Since I’ve been here, we have not returned a dime,” said Ventura, who assumed her post in 1989.

When asked this week about the state’s figures, Ventura said that her administration had returned some “restricted funds”--drug money earmarked for specific projects. She blamed the loss of funds on cumbersome state and federal regulations and on unreasonably strict deadlines for spending the money.

Ventura, 55, announced this month she will leave her post in January after 25 years of county service.

Her department has been under fire by state officials not only for the funding problems but also for failure to supervise the establishment of hundreds of “sober living” homes in the county.

In October, The Times reported that many of the unlicensed homes for recovering addicts were in violation of health and safety standards and that some residents allegedly were exploited by operators. Although Ventura’s department does not regulate the privately run homes, it has promoted and sometimes funded them.

Los Angeles County’s drug and alcohol programs, with an annual budget of $88 million, receive almost a third of the federal and state drug treatment funds allocated to California. The cost of treating an addict in a 96-day residential care program averages about $4,900; outpatient services for the same period average $687 per addict.

Some studies have estimated that as many as 2,000 people are on waiting lists for the county’s drug treatment programs. The average wait for methadone programs, for example, is about six months.

“Considering the enormity of the (drug) problem there, the time it takes to get money to programs and get the programs up and running is crucial,” said Peter Dufour, spokesman for the state Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs.

The county’s civil grand jury addressed the problem in its 1990 report, saying that the cause might be a combination of county inefficiencies and the inability of treatment providers to gear up quickly enough to spend the money. Providers have complained for years that they are not given sufficient time to apply for funds.

During the past five years, the county Alcohol and Drug Program Administration has closed its books on every fiscal year with money in the bank:

* In 1987-88, the county returned $973,000 to the state out of a total of $40 million in state and federal allocations.

* In 1989, more than $1 million of the county’s $43 million in state and federal funds went unspent.

* In 1990, nearly $700,00 of the $52 million in state and federal funds was not spent.

* In 1991, the county returned more than $2.42 million of the $67.8 million in state and federal allocations.

2 For the 1991-92 fiscal year, the state projects that the county will not spend $4.1 million of its $72.5 million in state and federal funds. That figure includes money for recovery services for parolees as well as $3.37 million for expanding a network of perinatal services for pregnant and postpartum addicts.

Because of delays in sending contracts to counties, the state has agreed to roll over some of those perinatal funds for use this year. But Los Angeles and some other counties will pay a 25% penalty for failing to spend the money in the year they received it.

For Los Angeles County, that means a loss of about $840,000. However, state officials said the money would be used to help the county overcome the obstacles to spending the money. “The state will (help) fix whatever it was that prevented the county from spending the money in the first place,” said one official.

Drug-exposed infants and children pose a crucial public health problem. The number of drug- and alcohol-exposed infants reported at county hospitals has soared in recent years, from 543 in 1985 to more than 3,000 by 1990. Officials estimate that there actually may be as many as 20,000 drug-exposed children born each year.

In the last two years, the county failed to spend $2.2 million of $6.4 million awarded under the federal Target Cities project aimed at the nation’s most drug-plagued cities. But state officials said the county will be allowed to spend the money in future years.

Other funds that have gone unspent since 1987 include hundreds of thousands of dollars in Medi-Cal matching funds. Medi-Cal helps pay for programs that use methadone to detoxify heroin addicts.

According to the county’s Alcohol and Drug Master Plan, the public cost of drug-related problems in Los Angeles County exceeds $1.5 billion annually. An estimated 20% of the homeless population abuses drugs, particularly cocaine and heroin.

Studies have shown that 80% of arrestees have drugs in their urine. Only 5% of them are in treatment programs, although as many as 30% said they would like to be.