Poor, Counties Hit Hardest by Budget Cuts

California’s worst budget crisis since the Depression has resulted in real cuts to a range of government services across the state, even as lawmakers wrangle over a budget that promises more reductions.

Nine months after last summer’s 63-day budget impasse ended, those cuts hit with the greatest impact on the poorest Californians, in services offered by county governments, particularly in rural California, and in higher education, a Times survey of the consequences of last year’s budget battle found.

In Orange County, the most visible sign of last year’s state budget cuts was the closure of a mental health clinic in Garden Grove, forcing some 1,500 low-income residents to seek help from clinics in neighboring cities.

Most of the cutbacks were absorbed in administrative changes, as county officials eliminated 258 positions last year--and ultimately laid off more than 30 people--to help save $30.6 million.

County residents complained of longer lines at local offices. Employees moaned over bigger workloads and scarcer raises. Private attorneys who handled public defense cases took a 10% pay cut. And the county in general tried to make do with less, said county budget director Ronald S. Rubino.

“The restrooms don’t get cleaned as often as they used to. They painting doesn’t get done as often, and unfortunately we’re on a downward spiral. We’re busting at the seams,” Rubino said.

Yet for much of state government, the 1992-93 budget caused few changes. Overall state spending rose by $1.2 billion to $57.5 billion. The state work force grew this year from 261,713 to 268,000, roughly keeping pace with California’s population growth.

State Department of Finance statistics show there are 8.6 state employees per 1,000 residents in California, up from 8.5 the year before, but down from the high of 9.9 in the 1977-78 fiscal year.

The state work force’s overall growth was fueled by increases in the numbers of prison employees. With new prisons opening in Delano and Lancaster, the Department of Corrections grew by 4,000 workers to 36,700. The growth will continue in the coming year as three prisons are being built, and ground will be broken for three others this summer.

To a large extent, such state spending was maintained at the expense of local governments. From San Diego to Crescent City on the far north coast, local officials tell of parks, mental health clinics, even jails that have closed.

At last count, five school districts were technically bankrupt, up from three the year before. One reason, school officials say, is that state funding increases have not kept pace with inflation.

In Riverside and San Joaquin counties, prosecutors have stopped charging people facing misdemeanors and some felonies. In Solano County, the district attorney scrapped his environmental crimes unit, laying off a prosecutor who spent 10 years handling high-profile cases in the Bay Area. San Diego County imposed a hiring freeze after the state took $66 million. The freeze left 1,000 jobs, out of a payroll of 17,000 jobs, unfilled.

For most Californians, the impact of these changes in government are subtle. Lines often are longer at local government offices. It costs more to use state parks. Green fees went up at Los Angeles municipal golf courses.

Professor Jerry Chapman, director of USC’s School of Administration in Sacramento, was among the many experts who warned last fall that the cuts would sweep across the state economy.

“I would soften it a little bit,” Chapman said. “I would say ‘pretty tough,’ but maybe not ‘Draconian.’ ”

But he said that welfare recipients, or those who need specific services that were trimmed, probably have found the cuts to be harsh indeed.

“There is no one screaming because the people who are hurting are the ones whose voices are not heard,” Chapman said. “If you don’t interact with government services, you don’t realize that services have disappeared.”

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

While overall state spending increased, the state general fund decreased from $43 billion to $40 billion in the current year, the first decline in 50 years. The single biggest loser was local government. In the budget, Wilson and the Legislature took $1.3 billion from local governments and gave it to public schools.

It comes, therefore, as little shock that the number of local government employees declined by 19,000 over the past year, according to the Employment Development Department.

Hardest hit were counties, particularly in rural California where economies already were depressed by high unemployment and a thin tax base.

In San Benito County, a short commute from Silicon Valley, librarian Jo Wahdan is busy collecting as many overdue books as possible in preparation for the final closing of San Benito County’s one public library.

She has a job only through the end of June, when the money runs out. Supervisors have laid off the parks staff, and four of San Benito’s 16 sheriff’s deputies were laid off, even as the sheriff began patrolling San Juan Bautista when that tiny mission town went broke and laid off its entire work force of 12, police included.

“I’ve been through the tears,” said Wahdan, the last paid person on the library staff. “It seems so unreal that this is happening in this state, in California.”

In fact, such cuts are happening all across California. In some rural counties, government offices are open for only a few hours a day, and a new acronym entered the bureaucratic lexicon--DOWP--as in days off without pay.

One such county is Del Norte in northernmost coastal California, where workers have gone four years without a raise. One sheriff’s deputy trying to support a family qualified for food stamps, Del Norte County Administrative Officer Ron Holden said.

“That’s just not right,” Holden said, although he cannot do much about it. Not only is there not enough money for raises, there may not even be money to keep the county afloat. State Controller Gray Davis issued a notice in January saying: “There is substantial doubt about (Del Norte) county’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

SOCIAL SERVICES

Most Californians can shrug off a closed library or longer lines at a county office. But for the poorest Californians, cuts in social services can inflict real hardship. The current year’s budget sliced $1.7 billion from health and welfare programs.

The ripples extend to places such as the Community Health Clinic of East Los Angeles. The clinic on Whittier Boulevard serves 125,000 people a year in perhaps the poorest section of Los Angeles County.

The clinic could have served 20,000 more people, but hours were reduced 15% because the state budget eliminated $10 million in funding for recent immigrants’ health care. Employees at the nonprofit clinic also took a 20% pay cut.

“What it means,” said clinic director Rudolfo Diaz, “is that people won’t go for health care until it becomes acute. Then, it will cost much more to treat them.”

Welfare payments for a family of three dropped to $624 a month, down from $663 a year ago. That family would be eligible for about $12 more in food stamps.

The state cut payments to the elderly, disabled and blind by 5.8%, or about $44 million. People who benefited from state supplemental payments lost an average of $37 a month.

The cut pushed some people off the program. By state law, anyone who received the state payments also has free access to health care through Medi-Cal. So as a side effect of the cut in state supplemental payments, 26,850 people also lost Medi-Cal benefits.

“We had people crying when those cuts went through,” said Debra Baldwin, attorney at Bet Tzedek Legal Services on Fairfax Avenue. “There was nothing we could do but hold their hands.”

One 81-year-old Tarzana man who spoke with The Times said he worked well into his 70s, even after he went blind. As his nest egg disappeared, he and his wife did something he thought they would never have to do--turn to the government for help. He asked that his name not be used.

When the state eliminated their combined disability payments of $60 a month, they lost free access to Medi-Cal, and were called on to pay a new $360 Medi-Cal deductible each month. When he developed sores on his gums so bad that eating was painful, he had to live with it. He could not afford to go to the dentist.

A week before his next pension check was supposed to arrive, the man had no money and not much food. “I don’t have one red cent to finish the month. Nothing. Zilch. I don’t know how we’re going to make it.”

STATE GOVERNMENT

As the man from Tarzana worries about whether he will have enough money for food, many departments of state government were untouched by budget cuts. The prisons’ budget grew.

With the overall state work force growing, entire areas of state government are insulated by law from cuts. Funded by special taxes and fees, about 900 special fund agencies are responsible for services from highway construction to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Caltrans is the largest. Funded largely by gasoline taxes and federal aid earmarked for highways, Caltrans’ budget, like other special funds, is protected by state law. Its special fund budget of $5.9 billion incurred a 2% cut.

The Legislature’s budget was slashed because of a 1990 initiative limiting terms. But it has climbed recently to $120 million, a 5.8% increase over the past two years. Wilson’s own budget included a 24% increase for his Office of Planning and Research to $6.2 million.

In a general budget of nearly $40 billion, such numbers are peanuts--or, perhaps more accurately, doughnuts. The Assembly lounge is routinely stocked with muffins, doughnuts, cheese, soda and fruit at a cost of several hundred dollars a month. During the height of the budget impasse, the August muffin bill in the Assembly lounge hit $380. In year-end Capitol office remodeling, several Assembly members combined to spend more than $78,500.

“It would be a lot easier if there were a single line item that says ‘waste,’ ” said Tom McClintock, a former conservative assemblyman who now directs the National Tax Limitation Foundation. “That’s not where it’s found. It’s found in hundreds of individual sections. They are insignificant until they’re all added together.”

EDUCATION

The focus of last year’s budget fight was over protecting school funding. In the end, payments to schools were protected, and state spending was kept at $4,185 per pupil. With federal funds, per pupil spending was $4,988, an increase of more than $170.

Even so, schools made do with less. A legislative analyst’s report shows that when inflation is taken into account, school spending is $140 below the high point of four years ago.

In many districts, a single counselor is responsible for an entire high school, handling everything from teen-age pregnancy to helping students fill out college applications.

Elementary schools such as Park Dale Lane Elementary School in Encinitas make small economies, even as they anticipate painful cuts in salaries and staff in the coming year. Principal Bruce De Mitchell said kindergarten classrooms have paid aides for 1 1/2 hours, rather than three hours. The school has pencils and paper, but extras such as crepe paper no longer are stocked for art projects.

California’s higher education system did shrink, and student fees rose. Through attrition, the nine-campus University of California lost 5,000 positions last year, and the California State University system lost 7,000 positions.

When Pierce College, a community college in the San Fernando Valley, cut nearly all its summer school classes, students rushed to Moorpark College, lining up at 5:30 a.m. for registration that began at noon. To counter cuts in the equipment budget at Moorpark, a biology teacher dug into his pocket to buy a $300 refrigerator for storing specimens.

Maintenance in many cases is swept aside.

“We don’t paint. At best, all we do is clean up,” said Ray DiGuilio, a vice president at Moorpark.

LAW ENFORCEMENT

In cities and counties, officials struggle to keep police and fire services intact at the expense of other departments, as happened in the city of San Diego.

There, nearly all public services, except policing, were reduced this year. Some examples: fewer fire code inspections, less sidewalk repair, fewer new library books. Public swimming pools were open 12 weeks rather than 15. Kelp piled up at city beaches and bay fronts.

In many counties, however, there have been cuts in law enforcement. This has happened even as new jails are on the drawing board or being built, thanks to bonds approved by voters.

Riverside County’s experience is typical: It finished building a $28-million, 535-inmate jail near Temecula last September. But the Riverside sheriff cannot afford the $17.5 million needed to operate it. The jail sits empty.

Also in Riverside County, Dist. Atty. Dennis Kottmeier cited budget cuts when he explained that many crimes cannot be prosecuted. More than 200 cases await review, but there is no prosecutor to cull through them. If a victim of fraud comes in, Kottmeier suggests a civil suit.

“I’m sorry,” Kottmeier said, “but we can’t right all the injustices anymore.”

THE FUTURE

For more than a decade, county administrative officers and city managers in California have done a Chicken Little routine, warning vital services would be cut, only to come up with more money to keep programs running.

Once again, budgetary sleights of hand last fall saved many programs. The city of Los Angeles’ share of the cuts from last fall’s budget would have been $58 million. But the Legislature kept the sky from falling by passing a bill last fall allowing Los Angeles to take $44 million from the Harbor Department.

Los Angeles filled the $14-million gap by raising business license taxes 7.5%, producing nearly $19 million. Still, the city’s hiring freeze continues, and residents have been called on to pay higher fees.

Will the sky fall next year? In his 1993-94 budget, Wilson calls for a cut in total spending from $57.5 billion this year to $51.1 billion.

He has proposed taking another $2.6 billion from local government on top of the $1.3-billion reduction this year. The governor, who agreed to support a six-month extension for an extra half-cent sales tax due to expire this month, suggests that counties ask voters to approve an extra half-cent sales tax. But many local officials doubt that voters will authorize higher taxes. Even if they do, the sales tax will not make up the difference.

Supervisors in many counties, including Los Angeles, threaten revolt, warning they will not send the additional tax money to Sacramento, setting the stage for an unseemly showdown among governments.

Orange County is one of many where drastic cost-cutting measures are on the table, from library closures to cuts in health programs to across-the-board layoffs.

“We’ve exhausted our options,” said Rubino, the county’s budget director. “The cuts will be much more visible this year. This is real--it’s not posturing.”

Staff writers who contributed to this report are Tom Gorman in Riverside, Tony Perry in San Diego, Tina Daunt and Peggy Y. Lee in Ventura, Eric Lichtblau in Orange County, and James Rainey in Los Angeles.