County Welfare Cuts Illegal, Judge Rules

In a decision with potentially devastating financial ramifications, a judge has ruled that Los Angeles County illegally reduced general welfare payments to its poorest residents over a two-year period under the pretext of providing them with compensating health benefits.

The ruling by Superior Court Judge Aviva Bobb could cost the cash-strapped county as much as $160 million in retroactive payments to tens of thousands of general welfare recipients. But officials said late Friday that the county’s liability could be far less than that, and that they plan to appeal.

Elated Legal Aid lawyers hailed the ruling as “justice long denied” for the county’s poorest residents, whose general recipient welfare payments were slashed from $285 a month to $212 in September 1993 by a Board of Supervisors that was eager to cut costs.

“The county took money from its very poorest residents, those least likely to vote, least likely to fight back. Now the county must pay the price,” said Richard Rothschild of the Western Center on Law & Poverty, lead counsel for a coalition of Legal Aid groups that rallied to help the welfare recipients.

“It’s tragic that the county made so many truly needy people suffer so cruelly for so long, on such a flimsy pretext,” Rothschild said. “They made a lot of people go hungry, and a lot of people go homeless.”

Under Bobb’s ruling, the county must pay $73 a month plus interest to anyone who received the lowered amount of aid from September 1993 to September 1995, when the $285 a month minimum was reinstated. Rothschild said Legal Aid lawyers have set up a hotline at (213)-385-2900 Ext. 201. Those eligible for back payments can call and leave an address so they can be located when payments are made.

The ruling, long feared by county officials, could be staggering for the nation’s largest county as it tries to fight its way out of a fiscal crisis that nearly drove it into bankruptcy last year. Already, an estimated budget deficit of more than $500 million for the next fiscal year has prompted calls for another round of cuts in services and jobs.

The county must deal with the potential expense and make plans to pay for at least some of it in the bare-bones budget under consideration for next year, said Chief Administrative Officer Sally Reed.

“If we were able to find every [welfare recipient], it would cost us $160 million,” Reed said. She said the county’s financial exposure is “very large” even if only a small percentage of welfare recipients--a usually transient population that is hard to contact--come forward to seek retroactive reimbursement. “My guess is it is at least in the tens of millions” of dollars, Reed said.

Legal Aid lawyers sought to block the welfare cuts as soon as they were enacted in 1993, but a judge ruled against them. Then, in April 1995, the state Court of Appeal reversed that ruling, finding that the county acted illegally in counting the cost of county health care toward the minimum welfare grant required by state law.

That ruling forced the county to reinstate the $285 a month minimum general welfare payment. The matter of whether the county should be held retroactively responsible was then taken up by Bobb. Although the judge ruled April 24, most county officials were not told of the ruling until late Friday.

Reed said the county would not have to pay until the planned appeal is settled. But Rothschild said the appellate court ruling has already decided the issue, and that any appeal would merely be a delaying tactic that would further compound welfare recipients’ misery.

However, earlier this year, the county’s dire financial situation prompted a state commission to grant it permission to again reduce general relief benefits from $285 to $212.