Human Toll in O.C. Crisis Is Impossible to Add Up : Bankruptcy: Officials can’t say precisely what will happen if Measure R fails, but they’re sure it will be bad.

It is the one number impossible to crunch.

Six months after Orange County declared bankruptcy, experts quarrel about blame and remedies. But residents are still in the dark on the ultimate cost.

Even in a county bursting at the seams with calculator-wielding bankruptcy wonks, no one can really tally the human toll of the greatest municipal financial failure in U.S. history.

Some facts are clear: Nearly 800 county employees have been laid off, and $200 million has been cut from the county’s general fund budget. Two hundred government agencies have lost access to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The county’s ability to borrow more money, meanwhile, has been questioned by Wall Street managers worried about nearly $1 billion in county debt coming due this summer.

Business owners are owed $200 million by the bankrupt county.

Other facts--the worst ones, some say--resist slide-rule precision.

No lives were lost, though thousands were permanently changed. No schools were closed, though many students must now make do with less. There is no clear way to measure how the bankruptcy has rippled through the lives of the county’s residents since its investment pool collapsed and $1.7 billion belonging to cities, schools and special districts was lost.

“I’d like to be able to tell how the cuts will affect the population at large,” said Dr. Hugh F. Stallworth, the county’s public health officer. “But, alas and alack, I can’t tell you.”

Stallworth can say only that $3 million less will be spent this year to preserve the health of Orange County residents. But he cannot predict how many people will become sick as a result of the cutbacks.

Gary Govett, a senior social worker with the county, believes children will die because $52 million less will be spent on social services next fiscal year.

“There are going to be thousands of children who will be abused and will not be able to receive preventive services because of the cuts,” he said.

But Govett can’t offer skeptics a running total of damaged lives. Human pain and suffering will continue precisely because they will go undetected, he said, thanks to fewer caseworkers visiting families at risk of child abuse.

With such vital information about the bankruptcy eluding the bean counters and escaping the bankruptcy’s daily chroniclers, most county residents still feel insulated from the crisis. Recent Times Orange County polls found that only three in 10 registered voters believe they will feel cuts in local services, despite dire warnings from county officials and economists.

“There are some people out there who think the crisis has passed, even though the leadership is saying the crisis will grow,” said Mark Baldassare, a UC Irvine professor of urban planning. “It’s an issue which is very hard for people to get their hands around, very difficult. It’s not like traffic, it’s not like an earthquake, it’s not like anything most people have ever experienced, even in their own financial lives.”

Everyone seems to know the county lost $1.7 billion from its investment pool before declaring bankruptcy Dec. 6. Everyone knows that voters will be asked to recoup much of that loss by paying one-half percent more sales tax each time they face a cash register over the next 10 years. If Measure R passes June 27, the local sales tax will increase from 7.75% to 8.25%, raising $130 million a year.

But before giving the government more money, many residents would like to know how much the county has suffered so far.

“That’s such a simple question, you’d think there’d be a simple answer,” says Larry Leaman, director of the county Social Services Agency.

One day, Leaman and others predicted, it may happen this way: The most prosperous county residents will look around and have a vague, gnawing sense that life is somehow not the same.

“The county, because of the bankruptcy, [will have] walked away from some kids and some families it didn’t used to walk away from, “ Leaman said.

Down the line, Govett said, those kids and families may become dysfunctional parents, or criminals whose problems will cost the county more than the estimated $50 a year per person that supporters say is the actual price of the sales tax increase.

Some bankruptcy victims, of course, can be counted.

The county government has laid off nearly 800 employees. But even that number is misleading, said Orange County Employees Assn. staff manager Linda Pierpoint, because 4,000 total positions have been wiped from the books.

How many baby-sitters, gardeners, therapists, roofers and refrigerator repairers have not been paid, or have not been hired, by laid-off workers? How many college plans have been scuttled?

“It just has a ripple effect that’s unbelievable,” Pierpoint said.

Before she was laid off, Wilma Ruth Perry was the county’s only clinical social worker making home visits to new mothers.

For Perry, the loss of a job meant postponing a needed roof repair and foregoing a habit of eating in restaurants. The roofer and the maitre d’ may miss her business. But Perry worries more about the new mothers she once called on, the ones who have no money for formula, the ones who suffer severe postpartum depression.

Recently, Perry visited her local unemployment office, where she took part in a strange exercise.

“One of the things they did the first day was try to quantify what we did in our jobs,” she said. “And how do you quantify lives that were saved? They were saved, so you can’t quantify them. Prevention is harder to prove.”

When the dust does settle, financial historians should be able to say the following of the bankruptcy: X number of political careers were ruined, X number of people were prosecuted, X number of legal wars were waged, for which there will be a neat total of billable hours.

But it will be more difficult to sum up the damage done in places like the Huntington Beach Union High School District, which has scrapped plans to buy computers, modems, laser printers and CD-ROM drives for students.

“The real costs are yet to be determined,” said Michael H. Simons, president of the district’s board of trustees. “Twelve to thirteen thousand students are going to have less computer capability.”

Stallworth believes that “the human face, the reality, is those that will suffer the most are those with less resources, less money.”

At besieged welfare offices, for instance, shorthanded workers talk about a system on the brink because of personnel cuts, where needy people are sometimes turned away because there is not enough time to see them. Where they go is anybody’s guess, because no one does a head count of disgruntled welfare recipients.

“We’ve had a few instances of angry, somewhat desperate clients for assistance seeing the door closed in their face,” said Leaman.

“We closed the Westminster clinic,” Stallworth said sadly. “Which means people in that area who want family planning, who want well-child visits or immunizations, are going to have to travel to one of our other clinics.

“And as you well know, if you are not sick, if you don’t have that motivation of pain, or inability to breathe . . . you may not take the time to go that extra mile to be seen.”

Less prevention, Stallworth said, means more illness.

Especially worrisome is the loss of a county clinic that provided follow-up treatment for women with abnormal Pap smears. The clinic once tested 900 women a year for cervical cancer; now, no one seems to know where they will go.

“That really disturbs me,” Stallworth said. “The key to cervical cancer is detecting it early. If it’s detected early, a minor surgical procedure is often curative.”

Barbara Talento, chairwoman of United Way’s Health Care Council, said Orange County will reckon with these women eventually.

“People who were denied health care at community clinics and at health care agency clinics will start to get so sick that they’ll begin popping up in emergency rooms again,” she said. “And when I go to the emergency room because I have an automobile accident, I’ll be waiting in long lines.”

Talento said county residents might not be able to enumerate the ill effects of the crisis. But soon enough, no one will doubt that the ripples have reached every shore.

“When I go to a restaurant, I will stand a greater chance of getting salmonella than ever before, because there are not enough people checking for health violations. When I go swimming in the ocean, there will be more polluted areas that will go undetected because there are not enough people checking the water. . . . These things affect me personally.”