Activists Say Cuts Would Hit Hard in Child-Support Cases

Activists warned Sunday that Orange County’s bankruptcy could spell disaster for thousands of children if the district attorney’s office must cut staff and curtail its effort to get child-support payments from delinquent parents.

Ex-spouses who now often must wait 1 1/2 years before receiving late child-support payments will have to wait even longer if the county reduces enforcement personnel, said Kathy Raphael, co-chairwoman of the Orange County chapter of the Assn. for Children for Enforcement of Support Inc. (ACES).

“Is it now going to be moved back to 2 1/2 to three years because of the bankruptcy?” Raphael said. “We’re dealing with people with very limited incomes.”

Nora O’Brien, regional director of ACES, said the nonprofit group will try to keep child support in the spotlight because it is a politically vulnerable issue.

“Child support is not a major concern for most” district attorneys, said O’Brien, who, with Raphael, appeared at a seminar of single parents in Anaheim. “There’s a panic and panic hasn’t stopped yet. It’s just going to get worse.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Jan Sturla, head of the Family Support Division, said in an interview his office has not lost any employees to layoffs caused by the county’s bankruptcy.

“Everybody is anxious; right now we have been told that until further notice no cuts are expected here,” he said, expressing confidence there will be no staffing reductions in his office.

But he said $1.5 million in state support for the office--money that would have paid for educational programs and an improved computerized records program--were placed in the county’s frozen investment fund and can’t be obtained.

If there were personnel reductions, it would take longer to resolve cases, and fewer cases would be resolved, Sturla said. That would drastically cut the amount of state and federal funding the office receives.

“Like just about all the large counties, we’re having a very difficult time coping with a myriad of state and federal regulations,” he said. “We’ve got an exploding case load, tight budgets and the difficulty presented by working the toughest cases around. These cases wouldn’t be here if the dads that owed the money were easy to get to.”

Many of the office’s 370 employees have been working overtime to convert tens of thousands of pages of antiquated records to an efficient computer database, as mandated by the federal government.

“When moms call me up and say, ‘You’re not doing a very good job on my case,’ a lot of times the answer is not simple,” Sturla said.

Raphael said county case workers each deal with 1,200 to 1,400 individual parents delinquent with their child support, and “the system’s so overloaded and cumbersome right now, nothing’s happening.”

“It actually encourages a parent not to support their child,” Raphael said.

Orange County had more than 120,000 child-support cases still open at the end of the 1994 fiscal year, according to the state Health and Welfare Agency.

Sturla said his office saw a 20% increase in the number of delinquent child-support cases within the last year alone. Some say numbers have risen because the state in recent years has dramatically boosted the child-support payments required from most non-custodial parents, making it tough for some to keep up.

During the 1993-94 fiscal year, Orange County district attorney staff members located more than 15,000 absent parents--about 33% of the 45,000 parents they were trying to find. That compares favorably to Los Angeles County, where investigators could only find about 7% of the more than 365,000 parents they were looking for. The county also compares well with counties of similar size but lags behind smaller counties.

“Is the child-support system as efficient as it should be? Absolutely not,” Sturla said. “But is it getting better? Yes.”