County Plan to Cut Welfare Payments 25% Gets Initial State OK

Saying Los Angeles County is in “significant financial distress,” a state panel tentatively ruled Tuesday that county officials can slash general relief payments by 25% to more than 90,000 poor and homeless recipients.

Relieved county officials--desperate to ease their worst-ever financial crisis--hailed the decision. They already have spent $25 million of the anticipated savings by cutting minimum welfare payments during the rest of the fiscal year.

Once approved, benefits will shrink to $212 a month from the current $285.

The 4-0 vote in Sacramento by the state Commission on Mandates was immediately met with alarm by advocates for the homeless, who said the county is unfairly trying to solve its continuing fiscal mess by attacking the most politically powerless--the poorest of the poor.

The vote came after weeks of lobbying by county officials, and after a hearing last Friday in which county officials testified under oath about the county’s dire financial condition.

The vote is expected to be formally approved when the commission reconvenes in February, allowing the county to redirect up to $78 million a year toward desperately needed health, welfare and law enforcement services.

“The commission has validated the county’s grim financial condition,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said. “It is a Hobson’s choice that we face. But every facet of county government has to share in the financial burden. Sadly, that includes people who are most economically marginal in our society.”

Some homeless advocates said they were considering suing the county to block the cuts, while others said the decision would consign welfare recipients to a downward spiral of homelessness, joblessness, hunger and despair.

“They are just picking on the weakest people, because they can’t fight back,” said Sharon Fatahi, a volunteer soup kitchen worker for the Homeless Partnership in Santa Monica. “Already it is not enough to live on, to find an apartment.”

Paul L. Freese Jr., a lawyer for the Los Angeles Coalition to End Homelessness, warned that the decision will translate into greater social costs.

Freese said it costs more to jail a homeless person for two days for sleeping in a public place than it does to provide him with general relief benefits for two months.

Lawsuits have already been filed in two of the three cases in which the commission has allowed other financially strapped counties to slash welfare benefits.

In one case, a judge upheld Sacramento County’s cuts. But in another, efforts by Alameda County to slash welfare services were blocked by a judge’s restraining order. Alameda County has resubmitted its application, said commission Legal Counsel Gary Hori.

Roberta Fesler, an assistant Los Angeles County counsel, said the county would prevail in court if sued over the cuts.

“We believe that we demonstrated significant financial distress, which interferes with our basic ability to provide service needs, which is what the test is,” Fesler said.

Commission Chairwoman Theresa Parker said she approved the request because the county had more than met its burden of “significant financial distress.”

County officials showed compelling evidence of at least $495 million worth of critical government services that it lacked the money to provide, Parker said. She said she was especially concerned about testimony by representatives of the Sheriff’s Department and the courts, who said criminals were being let go early because the county lacked the money to staff the jails.

Parker said the commission’s responsibility is to assess the financial burdens of counties to see if they had exhausted all other means of coping with fiscal problems, even if that means excluding concerns over potential lawsuits and the plight of the poor.

“We felt the county had done things to try to deal with their obviously severe fiscal problem,” she said.

At its weekly meeting, the County Board of Supervisors said it would move quickly to approve reduced welfare benefits.

Unlike other welfare programs that use mostly federal money, general relief payments--primarily for individuals without children--come directly from the county. The commission can authorize counties to drop their general relief payments to about 40% of the 1991 federal poverty level.

Los Angeles County has sought to reduce general relief payments twice before.

First, it reduced payments but put the welfare recipients into a county-run, corporate-style health plan that even some county officials conceded was a disaster.

Then the county tried to get a law passed at the end of last year’s legislative session that would have given it permission to cut welfare benefits. But the bill died in the early morning of the last legislative session when bickering Democrats and Republicans finished the year without voting on it.

In another budget matter Tuesday, county probation chief Barry Nidorf told the Board of Supervisors that his department will begin distributing layoff and demotion notices to about 1,200 employees Friday.

The probation department is counting on $17 million in funding from Sacramento to keep open 19 camps for juvenile offenders and avert the layoffs and demotions that the closures would cause.

The camp-assistance legislation will be introduced later this week, said an aide to Assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), who has spearheaded the effort to save the camps.

Without state help, Nidorf said, 790 probation department employees will lose their jobs, 400 others will be demoted, and the camps will close by mid-February.

Times staff writer Timothy Williams contributed to this story.

* WELFARE CUT OKd

L.A. County plan to cut welfare payments wins tentative approval from state panel. B3