‘Brain Drain’ Hitting Social Services Agency

Among the forecasts of how Orange County’s late-1994 bankruptcy filing would affect ordinary people was that the most skilled, experienced county employees would seek greener pastures as budgets were cut, programs were canceled and staffing was slashed by layoffs.

The prediction is coming true at the Social Services Agency, which serves the poor, senior citizens, immigrants and abused children.

Three of its six directors have left in the past year, most recently Dianne Edwards, director of Adult and Employment Services.

The departure of top agency officials began when Gene Howard, the former director of children’s services, left the agency last year to head the Orangewood Children’s Foundation.

Then one of Howard’s two deputies, Bob Theemling, left to run a large group home in La Verne. Other county departments also have turned to top Social Services officials for their expertise: Robert A. Griffith, chief deputy of the agency prior to the bankruptcy, was pulled away to run the General Services Agency--although that agency’s dissolution may mean that Griffith will return to Social Services.

“We’ve been fortunate and have not had a departure of top people the better part of a decade,” said Social Services Agency Director Larry Leaman. “We still have many talented people working here--I don’t want to make it sound as if we don’t.

“But it’s difficult to lose top-level people like this. We spent a lot of time building an outstanding management team and that success resulted in a self-fulfilling prophecy: Top-notch people are marketable and they are moving on. This is the brain drain that was predicted.”

Edwards, whose department oversees in-home services for the blind and disabled, an employment program for welfare recipients and the adult abuse registry, left to head the Sonoma County Social Services Department.

While the opportunity to lead her own agency was appealing, the fiscal crunch also was a factor in her decision to leave, said Edwards, who joined the Social Services Agency 23 years ago screening clients for welfare eligibility.

“It’s difficult to see programs you’ve worked hard to build . . . withstand reductions that are so significant they’re having a negative impact on your ability to maintain that level of service,” Edwards said.

In a county where one person in 12 benefits from social services and requests for help are rising steadily, budget cuts mean that agencies can do less for the people who need help the most.

“It’s got to be hard for Larry to have so many top people leaving--it’s a wonder how he holds it all together,” Howard said. “I really hated the thought of abandoning my staff and colleagues with the horrible kind of situation they were dealing with, but it finally came down to if I let this one go, I may never see it come by again.”

Theemling, Howard’s second in command, said he too was torn, but that leaving the county to become the executive director of the David and Margaret Home was made easier because of the bankruptcy.

“It was a combination of how things were there and the opportunities here,” Theemling said. “It’ll be a long time before [Orange County] will be able to do anything really innovative because of the money involved, and that doesn’t make it much fun.”

Figuring prominently in Edwards’ decision to leave is the diminishing role Orange County now plays in shaping social policy at the state and federal level, she said.

For example, in the early 1990s, Edwards spearheaded talks that convinced the federal government to provide special funding to counties where large numbers of Vietnamese prisoners of war were resettling, Leaman said.

The result was services for several hundred people and a savings of many thousands of dollars to the county, he said. Now, because of travel restrictions brought on by the bankruptcy, top officials seldom travel for business purposes.

For Edwards, the chance to resume her role in state and national politics by heading the Sonoma agency was such a strong lure that she might have taken the job if no bankruptcy had occurred, she said.

“But I think if anything, the bankruptcy caused many of us to perhaps stop and think about what other opportunities might be out there,” Edwards said. “There had been other times when recruiting agencies had contacted me and encouraged me to apply and I declined.”

Whether Edwards will be replaced is in doubt, and tentative plans are being developed to determine how adult services would run without a director, Leaman said.