Lean and Sober

At Shepherd’s Recovery House in Sylmar, the bills are piling up.

At North Hollywood’s Cri-Help Inc., beds for addicts sit empty, while waiting lists grow. And at Oasis Women’s Recovery Community in North Hollywood, everyone is “eating a lot of rice,” said founder Anjanay Berrocal.

The three agencies, recovery homes for people trying to kick drugs and alcohol, are among about 100 countywide affected by the latest round of cuts in Los Angeles County’s general relief budget, a last-resort welfare program for the poorest of the poor.

As of March 1, citing severe financial difficulties, the county scaled back its general relief grants for individuals, prompting protests on behalf of the more than 90,000 people who subsist on these bare-bones grants.

The reason agencies are also affected by the cuts is that about 1,800 general relief recipients receive their money in the form of “board and care” grants. They cede their monthly stipend to residential recovery homes that house and feed them while they try to kick addictions.

“These are the people trying to get their lives back together, trying to be clean and sober,” said Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Homelessness.

Together with the cuts to individual grants, board-and-care grants were slashed about 22%. The monthly payment to agencies is now $266 for each eligible person. The cutback will save the county an estimated $1.7 million this year, reducing the board-and-care grant program to about $5.5 million, said Margaret Quinn, county human services administrator.

Although the dollars involved are relatively small, the difference is critical to some of the recovery agencies that provide a refuge of last resort for homeless addicts.

This safety net “was already in bad shape,” said Albert Sonella, administrator of Tarzana Treatment Centers Inc., which provides services for more than 12,000 recovering addicts and alcoholics per year countywide. Now “you are talking about a system in true crisis,” he said.

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The cuts are hardest on tiny homes such as Shepherd’s, which houses about 10 men in a nondescript Sylmar tract home. Some of Shepherd’s residents were homeless, others had exhausted all other options for recovery.

Its founder, Mike Bresnahan, a former addict and ordained minister, earns his living as a graphic artist working from an office in the house. In between chores and Bible study, he counsels the men individually, sharing his own experiences from years on heroin and cocaine.

One resident is 22-year-old Hugh Gilder, who has spent much of the last decade traipsing aimlessly around the country, sleeping on friends’ couches, getting drunk.

He came to Shepherd’s “because I knew I had to stop, and I didn’t know where else to turn,” he said.

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Gilder is now six months’ sober and has completed two semesters of electronic engineering at a community college. “I was very violent and angry . . . but this place took me right off the street,” he said, adding “I’m not going back.”

Shepherd’s “was operating on a shoestring,” anyway, Bresnahan said. But cuts in the general relief subsidy for his six eligible clients have put it in the red.

Before the cut, general relief paid for more than half the cost of running the home. Now, the subsidy barely covers the $1,550 monthly rent on the house. Shepherd’s monthly fund-raising carwash hardly covers the remaining costs of water, electricity, phone and supplies.

So Bresnahan is spending less time counseling and more of his time negotiating with the water company about his overdue bills. He’s also trying to line up odd jobs such as house painting for the men to earn extra money.

“Everyone is fed up with drug addicts and alcoholics,” he said, “but no one wants to help.”

Like Bresnahan, Berrocal of Oasis overcame her own addiction and now operates a home to help other women. She, too, concentrates on those who slip through the cracks, taking in people who are homeless or newly freed from jail, and who want to get off drugs.

General relief subsidies used to cover about 80% of the cost of running her 10-bed house, which is staffed by volunteers. Now, she said, she’s not sure how she will stay afloat. “How the hell are you going to support these people on that kind of money?” she asked.

For large organizations like Cri-Help and Tarzana Treatment, these newest cuts won’t mean anything so dramatic as closing down or throwing penniless addicts onto the street.

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Instead, they’ll just mean continued slow erosion of drug-treatment services for the poor, measured in incremental losses--mattresses that aren’t replaced or greater staff-to-client ratios, said Dennis O’Sullivan, general manager of People in Progress Recovery Home in Sun Valley.

People in Progress, which houses about 80 men, will lose about $50,000 per year due to the cuts. The home is making do with larger caseloads and fewer purchases, he said.

At Tarzana Treatment Center, about half of the 150 people in residential beds are eligible for general relief, Sonella said. The cuts will likely cost the center $75,000 this year--roughly 10% of its residential-care budget, he said. Already, the treatment agency has slightly reduced the number of beds it provides to the indigent, Sonella said.

Cri-Help, a treatment center with 120 beds in North Hollywood, will lose about $25,000 or so a year because of the general relief cuts, said executive director Jack Bernstein. As a result, the agency has reduced the number of general-relief-eligible clients it will accept to 35 from about 50 last year.

The cap means that, even though 40 beds are currently empty at Cri-Help, the agency has a three- to six-month waiting list.

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Poor addicts must wait, because the empty beds are being held open for people with insurance or means to pay. “That’s the craziness of this,” said Bernstein.

A recent court ruling on prior general relief cuts could mean a one-time windfall for all beneficiaries of the program, but is now under appeal. Regardless of the outcome, the current round of cuts, which advocates said were necessary given the county’s fiscal crisis, are likely to remain in place for now, said Quinn.

Drug treatment for general relief recipients is one of the issues now being examined by a county task force on general relief, but its recommendations are still pending, she added.

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Meanwhile, the cuts “have demoralized the whole [recovery] community,” said John Haley, director of the Mary Lind Foundation, which runs several recovery homes offering a total of 385 beds for the indigent throughout L.A.

The cuts will take $312,000 out of the foundation’s $2.4 million budget this year, and but for a last- minute grant from the federal government, the foundation would go broke, he said.

“We are all threatened,” Haley said. “Anyone who does business with the indigent is in the same boat.”