Battle Over Child Support Heating Up : Law: O.C. opponent of state-mandated higher payments tells difficulties in making ends meet.

Less than a year after a new state law boosted child-support payments borne largely by divorced fathers, the Capitol is being flooded with the complaints of disgruntled dads from Orange County to Eureka.

Although the law has been praised by women’s rights groups and divorced mothers struggling to make ends meet, a growing contingent composed mostly of fathers and their new spouses contend that the inflated payments are ruining their standard of living. Some say they have been pushed precariously close to poverty.

Today they will continue to make their voices heard as the Assembly Judiciary Committee considers legislation that would ease the additional child-support burden, which went into effect last July.

“The whole thing has just been pushed too far,” said Linda Riley, Orange County chapter president of Coalition of Parent Support, a statewide group that formed to fight the changes. “We’re not talking here about people who have boats and Rolls-Royces. We’re talking about people who make it from paycheck to paycheck.”

Although boosters of the changes promise to fight any attempts to rescind the increases in child support--which were designed to boost payments an average of 25%--they don’t discount the plight of divorced parents.

“Lots of people did things like buy houses based on their financial situation before the new guidelines were in place,” said Drew Liebert, legislative aide to state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), who authored the 1991 bill that raised the payments. “We’re sympathetic to what they’re going through.”

Some legislators have already taken steps to ease the burden. Assemblyman Trice Harvey (R-Bakersfield) is sponsoring a bill, which will be heard in committee today, that would phase in child-support increases gradually so non-custodial parents aren’t pushed into the poor house.

Another bill winding through the legislative process is a proposal by state Sen. Charles M. Calderon (D-Whittier) that would rescind a longstanding rule that the salary of a divorcee’s new spouse be factored in when child-support payments are calculated.

Orange County’s Riley faces such a predicament, which is made particularly galling because her husband’s ex-wife doesn’t work. “It doesn’t seem right,” she said. “I’m putting my own child into day care so I can work to help support my stepchildren while their biological mother does nothing to support their well-being.”

When talk turns to rolling back the increases in child-support payments, boosters dig in their heels.

The extra cash is needed, they say, to reverse a troubling trend: Divorced women with children make up the largest group in the nation living below the poverty line. Census studies have demonstrated that just one year after a typical marriage breaks up, the custodial parent and child are living at 70% of their former circumstances while the absent spouse--usually the father--is actually at better than 100%.

They also suggest that some critics have exaggerated the severity of the financial burden and largely ignored the reason for the boosted payments--to improve the lot of their own children.

“Many absent parents pay more in monthly car payments than they do in child support,” said Wayne D. Doss, director of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s bureau of family support. “As expensive as cars are, there’s something wrong when someone thinks they should spend more money on a set of wheels than their own flesh and blood.”

So far, the two sides can’t agree on how bad the situation in California is. Advocates of boosted child support contend that the average payment in California was among the lowest in the nation before the new rules, but it now sits in the top 10. Critics, meanwhile, say California was in the top 10 states for child-support payments before the changes, and is at the top of the pack with the new provisions.

Riley, for one, says the inflated payments are blatantly gender-biased. If the tables were turned and the dominant breadwinners in a divorce were women instead of men, the rules for child-support payments would be far different, she said.

“So much money has been taken away from one parent, there’s just no fairness in this,” she said. “They’ve swung the pendulum from one end to the opposite end.”

The new rules most severely affect low-wage earners and divorced parents of large families. But even in those cases, child-support advocates contend, the parents should be willing to accept the responsibility of providing for their children.

Increased Support

A recent state law imposed higher child support payments on non-custodial parents, who typically are fathers. Here are four scenarios in which a father has custody of two children for two days a week:

If father makes...* And mother makes* New payment Old payment $2,000 $0 $728 $600 3,000 1,000 936 743 4,000 2,000 1,144 882 5,000 2,000 1,508 1,095

* Monthly net income

Source: California Senate