Attempt to Delay Welfare Cuts Fails

A Superior Court commissioner Thursday turned down an advocacy group’s request for a temporary restraining order to stop Los Angeles County from reducing general relief payments by 25%, clearing the way for the cuts to take effect today.

The Southern California Advocacy Project had sought a 10-day delay in imposing the reduction to allow some 90,000 county welfare recipients sufficient time to find less expensive places to live and make other changes in their personal budgets.

Last month, the Board of Supervisors voted to reduce general relief grants from $285 to $212.

“[Friday] is going to be a very bad day for people on general relief,” said Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Homelessness. “There’s 90,000 people out there who are going to open up their checks and go, ‘What the heck happened to $73?’ ”

General relief is a payment made to those who earn less than the amount of the welfare payment, possess less than $500 in cash, have less than $500 worth of insurance and have a car worth less than $4,500.

Some recipients also hold jobs or receive other types of aid, such as food stamps.

In February, the Commission on State Mandates approved the county’s request to slice the amount of general relief grants in order to save county services. A week later, the county cut the grant to the lowest amount allowed by state law.

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During Thursday’s court hearing, the issue was not the board’s decision, but the narrower legal issue of whether the county was required to give general relief recipients warning about the impending cuts and whether it had to notify them individually.

Superior Court Commissioner Bruce E. Mitchell pressed Kirk McInnis, an attorney for the advocacy project, for a case that provided a precedent for such a demand, but McInnis failed to offer one.

Afterward, McInnis acknowledged that he did not expect a victory.

“We are here for the sole purpose of preventing irreparable harm,” he said. “I would have been very surprised to have gotten anything but the 10-day delay.”

Sally Reed, the county’s chief administrative officer, said the general relief cuts have been widely publicized through the news media, but said the county’s own budget problems prevented personal notifications through the mail.

“If we felt we could have afforded it, it would have been a good idea, but we simply couldn’t afford to do it,” Reed said.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who voted for the cuts, said Thursday the board’s decision was a necessary one.

“The general relief cut is painful and distasteful, but so are all of the other cuts we’ve had to make,” he said. “If we didn’t do this, we’d probably have to order more layoffs.”

Diane Carter of Los Angeles, one of the claimants in the request for the temporary restraining order, said she does not know how she will manage.

She pays $195 a month to live at the Senator Hotel downtown, and has received general relief for about four years. She uses the money for personal hygiene, rent, groceries and transportation.

Once the cuts take effect, she will have $17 left for other bills after paying rent.

“It’s going to be bad,” she said. “People are going to be hurting other people. People are going to be thrown out because they can’t pay rent. . . . They don’t know what they’re creating.”