Fiscal Impasse Imperils Aid for the Elderly : Finances: Nursing home ombudsman agency and anti-abuse task force are among programs jeopardized by federal budget stalemate and pending cuts.

Several vital programs that help the elderly in Los Angeles County--including a venerable watchdog agency that guards the rights of nursing home patients--are being hamstrung by the ongoing federal budget deadlock and by pending congressional funding cuts, according to officials of agencies serving senior citizens.

Already, more than a dozen employees of the respected Longterm Care Ombudsman Program in Los Angeles County have been laid off and seven professional coordinators have had their hours and salaries slashed by 25%, according to WISE Senior Services, a nonprofit organization in Santa Monica that administers the program.

The ombudsman program uses volunteers to make weekly visits to nursing homes and look into complaints at board and care facilities, but depends on paid employees for supervision and recruitment.

A health program that sends medical students and doctors to senior citizens has also been cut back by 50%, according to city officials, and an elder abuse prevention program administered by WISE is on the chopping block.

And a key component of the elder abuse program--an award-winning system of fighting financial exploitation--has lost its coordinator, who worked with a volunteer panel of experts, said Maria Arechaederra, executive director of WISE.

“There is no way we can continue to do the level of work we were doing,” said Arechaederra, who began laying off employees earlier this month. “All the programs are being cut and cut and cut. I don’t understand the rationale for this because all the studies indicate the elderly population is growing.”

In addition, millions of needy elderly people in the county and across the nation are in jeopardy of losing crucial meal programs and other essential services by Jan. 1 if President Clinton and Congress do not resolve the budget impasse.

The Older Americans Act pours nearly $22 million a year into Los Angeles city and county Area Agencies on Aging to provide services such as meals, health programs, elder abuse prevention and an ombudsman program.

If a federal budget is not enacted or an interim agreement reached to continue funding government services, the money tap will be shut off, jeopardizing the lives of senior citizens who depend on such programs in Los Angeles and elsewhere, say state and local officials.

“We have enough funds to get through December,” said Fred Miller, chief deputy director of the state Department of Aging. “This could be a problem nationwide. We can’t pull down any federal dollars unless they sign a budget or a temporary budget.”

Money for programs for the elderly flows from Washington to Sacramento to city and county Area Agencies on Aging. But the programs face threats from two directions. The budgetary struggles and deadlocks between President Clinton and Congress have caused funding reductions, and budget legislation in the House of Representatives would eliminate funding for some programs and reduce it for others.

The WISE programs were running on shoestrings even without cuts.

The elder abuse prevention program, which has been operating on a yearly budget of $106,000, provides, among other services, seminars for professionals and lay people on how to recognize and prevent physical, psychological and financial elder abuse.

“I’m currently looking at next week as being my last week on the job,” said Michelle Gatta, who began as the $33,000-a-year coordinator of the program last summer. “I was just sort of getting warmed up and the wind was taken out of my sails.”

The program has already lost its part-time coordinator of the Fiduciary Abuse Specialty Team--the FAST program, which won a county-sponsored grand prize last year for quality and productivity.

Susan Aziz, who was laid off earlier this month because of the cutbacks, received $10,800 a year for 12 hours’ work per week as the FAST coordinator. She screened suspected financial abuse of the elderly and prepared cases for presentation to a volunteer panel made up of attorneys, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, bankers and other experts.

Sometimes a simple inquiry by the FAST group was enough to stop or prevent exploitation, even when there was not enough evidence for prosecution.

There was the case of an elderly and confused man who was going to the bank each month and writing hundreds of dollars worth of checks to a young woman who had befriended him.

The exploitation stopped as soon as FAST made inquiries.

In another case, an elderly man was about to be evicted from his home by his own children. He had signed the home over to them with the verbal understanding that he could stay for life. The children backed off from the planned eviction when FAST attorneys told them oral contracts are valid.

FAST handled two new cases a month, said Aziz, but will not be able to go on without a coordinator to prepare cases.

“These are volunteers,” she said of her workers. “The team will not continue.”

The Longterm Care Ombudsman Program, which has counterparts across the country, is perhaps the best known agency affected by the cuts.

With a budget of $651,000 a year, most of it federal money, the program set up by WISE provided 225 volunteers to make weekly visits to all 258 nursing homes in Los Angeles County.

The budget crunch has cost the program a full-time assistant director, a full-time volunteer recruiter and 14 part-time caseworkers and has cut the hours of the seven full-time coordinators to 30 hours per week each.

Lee Agnello, coordinator of the program’s South Bay office in South Gate, is trying to cope with the cutback in her hours.

She supervises 30 volunteers and is responsible for overseeing 64 nursing homes and looking into complaints at 270 board and care facilities.

“I feel like I’m not going to be able to keep as close a watch on small things,” she said.

Ombudsmen step in to stop serious abuse and prevent unjust evictions from facilities, she said, but they serve just as helpful a role in smaller matters.

There was the retired teacher who had suffered a stroke, for example. She sat in a nursing home, surrounded by treasured books that she could not read because the light was too dim.

“All she had left was reading her novels,” said Agnello, but the woman didn’t want to bother the staff about the light.

Agnello, however, didn’t mind bothering the staff, even though it took more than one try.

She has found people’s lost dentures so they are not condemned to a pureed diet, and fixed the nosepiece on a pair of glasses that cut an elderly woman’s face. She helps keeps the nursing homes’ staffs on the ball. She tells the volunteers: “You raise the quality of life for these people as soon as you walk through the facility door because the staff immediately starts doing what it should be doing.”

Agnello has a master’s degree in gerontology and has worked for the ombudsman program for 11 years. She says she had been making less than $25,000 a year.

“We love these jobs,” she said.

But as for the future, she said, “I don’t know how I’m going to do in 30 hours what it was taking me 50 hours to do.”