D.A.’s Child-Support Collection Program Gets a Mixed Grade : Law enforcement: Independent study ranks Ventura County first in locating parents who owe payments, but 44th in cost-effectiveness. Local officials downplay results.

Ventura County leads the state in finding parents who have skipped out on child-support payments, but lags far behind other counties in making the system cost-effective, an independent report concludes.

Legal Services of Northern California, which provides legal aid to many Northern California counties, ranked Ventura County 20th out of California’s 58 counties in its overall performance in collecting outstanding child-support payments.

“Ventura is one of the better ones, so they have less to be embarrassed about,” said Leora Gershenzon, Legal Services’ directing attorney. “But there’s certainly room for improvement.”

According to the report released earlier this month, Ventura County ranks first in locating non-custodial parents who owe child-support payments. But the county placed 44th in cost-effectiveness, the study said, because it collects just $2.42 in payments for every dollar it spends.

By contrast, Tuolumne County collects $6.41 for every dollar it spends--tops in the state, the report said. Even urban Alameda County reported $3.93 in receipts for every dollar it spends.

“Ventura County runs a very expensive program and I don’t know why,” Gershenzon said.

The county ranked 11th in collections per case, receiving an average of $56.24 per case each month, the analysis said. It also ranked seventh statewide in welfare recoupments--reimbursing nearly 20% of its welfare rolls from child-support payments.

Local officials with child-support services played down the significance of the study, in part because they said it is based on misleading data.

“If you look at the counties that are ahead of us, they’re almost all very small counties,” said C. Stanley Trom, who oversees more than 43,000 cases in Ventura County.

“They have so few cases to work,” he said. “We’re struggling against a bigger river, and they’re wading in a small stream.”

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Trom, who heads the district attorney’s child-support department, also questioned the timing of the report, because a hearing is scheduled in Sacramento within weeks to determine whether child-support services would be better administered by a state agency.

Legal Services is “unhappy with district attorneys running the program,” Trom said. “They think somebody else can do it better.”

But “I don’t know of any state agency raising its hand to take over this program,” Trom said. “Collecting child support from someone who isn’t paying is no easy task.”

Legal Services of Northern California is co-sponsoring the legislation because the job is not getting done, Gershenzon said.

“Local district attorneys argue about local control,” she said. “But you tell me a D. A. out there who is elected on their child-support record. They care about one thing, and that’s criminal enforcement.”

Helen Reburn, deputy director of the county Public Social Services Agency, stood behind the handling of child-support investigations by the district attorney’s office. PSSA distributes $70 million in welfare each year.

“If absent parents were fulfilling their parental responsibility, that would have a significant effect on reducing welfare payments,” Reburn said. “With the resources they have, they’re doing a very good job of tracking down absent parents.”

Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury has for several years profiled the worst offenders--parents who owe thousands in child support--on posters made public.

Last month, Bradbury’s office located Larry Lee Williams, a former Camarillo father of four who owed more than $237,000 in child support. That sort of effort impresses one nonprofit agency director.

“That department very much shares our belief that fathers be held responsible and accountable,” said Charles Watson, executive director of Interface, which serves needy Ventura County families.

“They do everything they can to do their part in making that happen,” he said. “Obviously, we can all look for ways to improve what we’re doing.”