Countywide : County Returns Nutrition Funds

Citing an “overwhelming demand coupled with a lack of space,” county health officials have turned down $900,000 in state aid since October that would have provided thousands of low-income pregnant women and parents of children and babies with vouchers for food and infant formula.

The number of local cases handled by the Women, Infants, and Children program, or WIC, has tripled since 1991, said Len Foster, Orange County’s deputy director of public health.

The Santa Ana program currently serves 36,500 mothers, providing vouchers along with health checkups. The additional money would have provided services for another 6,000 applicants.

“We’ve been trying to run as fast as we can to utilize additional state aid, but we’ve just run out of space to accommodate thousands of additional cases,” Foster said. He attributed the increased caseload to a population and immigration increase in the county.

County officials said Wednesday they are negotiating to find an additional site to expand the popular program so they can take advantage of state assistance in the future.

But that won’t do anything to reverse a recent decision by the state of California to send $450,000 in aid for the county’s voucher program to other counties because local officials had failed to use the money by March 1. Last October, state officials took back another $450,000 for the same reasons.

State officials said they had no choice, even though there was a great need for expanding the local program.

“We cannot simply hold onto the federal grants and wait for them to find space for those additional cases,” said Phyllis A. Bramson, a statewide coordinator of the WIC program.

The county’s General Services Agency is charged with finding additional office space to accommodate more women and children who need the program.

Orange County Supervisor William G. Steiner said finding more space is a priority, and that GSA officials will likely find suitable space within the next three months.

The latest $450,000 grant is now gone. But if county officials come up with additional space by October to handle the increased caseload, they will receive additional money to make up for the grant they lost this month, Bramson said.

If additional space is found sooner, Bramson promised to look into ways to find more money for the county’s WIC office sooner.

“This is the second time in less than a year we’ve gone through this,” Bramson said, referring to when the state took back the first grant in October.

“They told us then that they would be ready in March, but that is not the case,” she said.

Foster said the problem began in 1991 when the county’s WIC program in Santa Ana experienced a 47% increase in applicants. In 1992, the office experienced an additional 39% increase and in 1993, an additional 15% increase.

“That’s a big jump, the county really does have a big challenge in trying to serve all those people,” Bramson said. “Orange county is probably the fastest-growing need area in the state.”