Millions for Counseling Riot Victims Went Unspent : Unrest: L.A. County administered program. Critics blame unwieldy federal rules, inefficient agencies.

In the wake of the most destructive U.S. riots of the century, federal officials last year earmarked $5.9 million for crisis counseling to aid the thousands of Los Angeles residents who lost loved ones, homes, jobs and businesses.

The money was, at the time, the largest grant for crisis counseling ever issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the first to serve the victims of a man-made disaster.

The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health was designated to administer the money. But six months after the spring, 1992 riots, the county was still struggling to organize the counseling program and had to return nearly half of the grant for failing to spend the money, despite two deadline extensions.

Last November, the county received a second federal grant of $8.4 million for the counseling program. The second grant, which was supposed to expire in August, has been extended until November--to give the county more time to spend it.

The loss of the initial funds, mental health professionals say, delayed counseling services or denied them altogether to residents suffering anxiety and other emotional troubles triggered by the violence in their neighborhoods.

Although thousands received counseling through county and volunteer efforts immediately after the riots, help for thousands of others, many of them children, was put off nine months and longer.

A combination of cumbersome federal requirements and the inefficiency of local agencies, both public and private, squandered the chance to aid many more residents, critics say.

“In terms of immediate response, it was at best inadequate,” acknowledged William Arroyo, a psychiatrist and manager of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinic at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. “The Department of Mental Health was trying to use a lot of their own people, but our mental health system is already overwhelmed, and people still had their day-to-day responsibilities. There was a great effort to expand to private agencies, but even those were overwhelmed.”

County officials said creating an emergency counseling program, called Project Rebound, for neighborhoods that were already under stress before the outbreak of civil unrest was a quixotic task at best, especially with the city’s shortage of bilingual mental health workers.

Moreover, many new immigrants in the riot-affected areas are suspicious of authorities.

Others are reluctant to share their fears with strangers, considering it a sign of weakness, mental health officials said. There are also the longstanding hostilities among different ethnic groups, high unemployment and poverty that helped trigger the unrest in the first place.

“A project like this cannot cure all the ills,” said Patricia Mendoza, director of Project Rebound.

The job was made even more difficult when some of the largest neighborhood mental health organizations sought by the county to provide counseling in South-Central Los Angeles either bailed out of the program early or turned down the federal money entirely because of the mountains of complicated paperwork.

“We never accepted the funds because the requirements were too intrusive,” said Gloria Nabrit, president of the Kedren Community Mental Health Center. The 27-year-old clinic is the oldest and largest such agency serving South-Central Los Angeles.

“We were trying to address the emergency needs at the moment and we couldn’t respond to all those picky, tedious kinds of paperwork and tracking. . . . The feds wanted to include us because were at the heart of the uprising, but they couldn’t make us take the money,” Nabrit said.

The $8.4 million granted last November is being used to carry on Project Rebound’s counseling efforts--which range from classroom seminars and youth art projects to senior citizen discussion groups and individual counseling.

County officials said once they overcame initial delays, Project Rebound grew into an effective counseling campaign that has reached an estimated 100,000 people, about half of whom sought information and referrals.

“My impression is that they are doing a good job,” said David Clough, emergency services coordinator in the federal Center for Mental Health Services, which coordinates the disaster relief branch with FEMA.

Tom Kennon, a faculty member in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and a consultant for the project, said Project Rebound, while notable in scope and accomplishment, was stymied by the bureaucrats in charge.

“Anyone could see that Los Angeles was in need of desperate repair; we were emotionally hemorrhaging,” he said. “I don’t know everything about the county and federal systems, but as an outsider I can see there are too many steps and it needs to be streamlined and made more efficient . . . It was demoralizing to find that funds dried up before people could even start their work.”

Public and private agencies, even before the first federal grant was offered, worked overtime to help residents after the riots. Then, after President George Bush declared Los Angeles a federal disaster area in May, 1992, county officials had two weeks to draft the FEMA grant proposal that called for mobilizing an army of professional and lay counselors to comfort the ailing city.

The county’s Department of Mental Health, hit by budget cuts for several years, had given up providing care for all but the chronic mentally ill. So it had little experience in reaching so-called ordinary people who had experienced such an extraordinary event, county officials said.

“All the FEMA guidelines deal with natural disasters, but this disaster was human-made. It was about people attacking one another, about anger pent up for generations,” said Ambrose Rodriguez, the county Mental Health Department’s assistant director for adult services and the project’s coordinator. “FEMA can go to Iowa and apply certain models based on past experience, but we didn’t have that experience. Our people had to become the experts while they were trying to provide a service and project future needs.”

But some say that task was simple compared to coordinating the government agencies involved.

Private mental health agencies said city residents would have been better served if the money went directly to local mental health clinics, instead of the county receiving nearly $750,000 of the grant just to administer it.

The county called on other private and public agencies to help provide counseling, figuring residents who really need the help--the poor, the unemployed, the non-English speaking--would probably not go to a county mental health clinic.

Among the agencies finally selected, the results were decidedly uneven.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, received more than $200,000 for the training of school crisis teams to ease tensions and curb fears among students of city schools.

But the district ended up giving back half of that money after the teachers themselves were too shaken to be of much help to students and the effort was dropped, said Marlene Wong, who was the district’s FEMA coordinator at the time.

The school district created a telephone counseling hot line, budgeted for $43,000, but hardly anyone called it. A video on race relations--approved for $14,000 in federal funds--was never made. The school’s district largest single expenditure of the FEMA counseling money--$42,000--paid Wong’s salary for six months.

Although county officials say the Los Angeles school response was hampered by summer and a pending teacher’s strike, all schools at the time were on a year-round schedule. Teachers did not take a strike vote until nearly six months after the unrest.

Of the nearly $1 million earmarked for counseling children in seven school districts, including Los Angeles, in the months immediately following the riots, about two-thirds was returned last November to the federal government.

Agencies such as the National Conference of Christians and Jews were able to counsel students only after bypassing school district administrators and calling up school principals directly.

“If I’d waited for the district liaisons to set it up, it would have never got done,” said Lecia Brooks, the conference’s community services coordinator.

Most agencies in Project Rebound did not start offering help to residents until after the county received its second grant at the end of last year. With the holidays causing more delays, the bulk of the city’s counseling program did not begin until January of this year, nine months after a Simi Valley jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King.

“But by the time we started offering services, it was nine, 10 months and, in some cases, a year later,” said Xavier Aguilera, president of El Centro Human Services Corp. “You end up asking people, ‘Did you feel anything?’ and they’re saying, ‘Hey, where were you when it happened. Why are you asking now?’ ”

Even critics, however, say the expenditure of any amount of federal money on counseling efforts will benefit the city. The money paid for training about 400 residents to counsel neighbors and help mediate disputes. Teams of counselors from throughout the city eventually brought programs on racial and cultural tolerance to schools, churches and community groups.

Still, many mental health care professionals say the city missed an important opportunity.

“If the short-term goal was, ‘Here’s some money, let’s try to calm things down,’ it did do that,” said Greg Stuart, an associate director of Catholic Charities of Los Angeles Inc., which participated in Project Rebound.

“But in terms of creating anything long-lasting for the community, I don’t think so . . . Ideally, the goal would be to really build a foundation in these communities so they can resolve some of their own problems,” Stuart said.