County Board Gets a Gloomy Forecast : Government: Clinton Administration officials say effects of GOP budget plans on L.A. social services could be dire.

After struggling to survive its worst-ever fiscal crisis this year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors was told Thursday to brace for a “tidal wave” of bad news in the coming months, as Republicans in Congress push to dramatically slash funding for social programs.

A parade of federal officials appeared before the supervisors and gave gloom and doom assessments of both the House and Senate versions of the federal budget and the potentially dire impact they could have on the nation’s most populous county.

Those proposals are “a tidal wave approaching this county, and you as its leaders,” said Felicia Marcus, regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. “It represents not just a reduction in funding, but a frightening back-door attempt to undercut years of progress in protecting public health and the environment, without public dialogue and debate.”

The appearance by the federal officials Thursday was part of an ongoing Clinton Administration effort to highlight negative consequences of the Republican budget proposals.

In all, the spending plan being negotiated in Congress seeks to balance the federal budget in seven years. But, in the process, it would cost the county billions of dollars in health and welfare funding for programs that serve senior citizens, children, legal immigrants, the poor, mentally ill and uninsured, federal officials said.

Because there are competing measures in the Republican-dominated House and Senate and President Clinton has threatened to veto the spending plan, no one knows for sure what will actually happen to federal funding for Los Angeles County.

What they do know, however, is that none of the options are good. Virtually any eventuality, board Chairwoman Gloria Molina concluded, would be “devastating.”

“We’re going to be left holding the bag, again,” said a visibly exasperated Molina, who helped bring the Clinton Administration officials from San Francisco for the hearing.

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Heavily dependent on both state and federal governments to support a broad array of health and welfare programs, the county is particularly vulnerable to changes in Medicaid funding for the poor.

“It’s very serious, the ramifications,” said Chief Administrative Officer Sally Reed. “The amount of dollars involved are very large. The impact in this county is ominous.”

Walter Gray, assistant director of the county Department of Health Services, said the proposals now before a House and Senate conference committee would cost the agency as much as $2.5 billion over seven years, and force the supervisors to “ratchet down the health care system” even further. “This board will have to make decisions that are life and death,” Gray told the supervisors.

The GOP plans will cost the county an additional $200 million to $300 million a year in health services, Gray said, as welfare reform swells the ranks of the indigent who depend on the county to provide medical care.

Art Agnos, regional administrator for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said the county faces at least $28.5 million in lost housing funding in the unincorporated areas alone, in addition to $18 million in new public housing unit grants. Those figures do not include potentially greater losses in incorporated cities such as Los Angeles and Long Beach, federal officials said.

Agnos also said California as a whole would lose millions of dollars used to help as many as 5,000 poor renters find housing and to repair dilapidated public housing projects. Other programs to help those with AIDS and the homeless, elderly and disabled find affordable housing also would be slashed.

On the environmental side, Marcus said, the proposed cuts could curtail programs aimed at keeping drinking water safe and preventing sewage from polluting Los Angeles beaches, and could slash enforcement of all environmental programs by 50%.

The county’s personnel chief, Mike Henry, told the board that if the proposed cuts and shifts are enacted, the county will be forced to lay off and demote more employees, even though it has just gone through the biggest layoff in its history.

Cuts in welfare programs could also be costly.

Eddy S. Tanaka, head of the county’s Department of Public Social Services, said the welfare reform proposals could triple the number of people on the county’s general relief rolls.

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More than 275,000 legal immigrants in Los Angeles County now receive federal assistance through the Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Supplemental Security Income programs. Proposed cuts could force many of those recipients onto the county’s general relief rolls, at a cost to the county of as much as $683 million a year, county officials said.

And Peter Digre, director of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, said a whole array of programs for children would be gutted under the Republican proposals. “The future for children, specifically abused and neglected children, in Los Angeles County and around this nation is in significant danger,” he said.

Under most of the proposals, many of the health and welfare programs would be consolidated into a smaller number of block grants, which have dollar limits. Control would be transferred to state and local officials, and guarantees of aid under the federal system would not always apply.