‘It Will Be Much Tougher’ in Era of Welfare Limits

Ever since she quit school in the 10th grade to have her first child, life for Tarkia Stewart has been hard. On Thursday, as President Clinton signed his name to the most far-reaching restructuring of welfare in history, she decided it was going to get harder.

“It’s already tough, and it will be much tougher,” said Stewart, 19, as she sat in the small Los Angeles apartment she shares with her two children, ages 1 and 2, at 65th Street and Broadway.

The apartment costs Stewart $500 a month, and she gets only $594 from her welfare check. But with food stamps and a few extra dollars she earns braiding hair, she gets by. Now, under the new welfare requirements, she will soon have to get a job. And because she is still a teenager, she thinks she may be required to live with a parent.

“My mother has a baby that is just about the same age as my oldest and then she has three other children,” she says. “She can’t take on me and my kids.”

As the ink dried on Clinton’s signature Thursday, poor families, politicians, bureaucrats and charities across the state began to assess the full impact of new reforms.

The massive package gives states the responsibility for governing welfare, imposes work requirements on recipients and puts a five-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits. The biggest financial burden falls on the poor--particularly mothers and children--and the state’s immigrants, both legal and illegal.

Gov. Pete Wilson called the new welfare reforms “a step in the right direction” but said Congress and the president need to do more.

The governor said the federal legislation “falls short of completely reforming welfare in California. This bill does not reform the inequitable, inflexible and inefficient Medicaid program, it does not reform child protective services, and it restricts the state’s ability to reduce welfare spending levels--critical dollars that could be used to assist the working poor.”

Wilson and his staff were already at work seeking to implement part of the new law that allows the state to cut an array of programs that provides assistance to illegal immigrants.

In Orange County, service volunteers greeted the new law with a mixture of apprehension, uncertainty and hope. Some predicted it would make the poor poorer, while others said it would encourage people to become self-sufficient.

“We’re going to see more people desperate for help,” predicted Ed Borrowe, pastor of the Homefront Church in Fullerton, which provides groceries and meals for people at La Palma Park. “We have people come every day off the streets here, and this will surely bring even more.”

Angelo Doti, director of financial assistance at the Orange County Social Services Agency, said he supports the legislation’s basic goal of making people more responsible for themselves.

“This is a move away from a handout-welfare entitlement program toward one of employment and self-sufficiency,” Doti said, “That’s an admirable goal.”

Meanwhile, local officials wondered where they would get the funds from already strapped budgets to assume the new burdens the federal government had imposed on them. State legislators began squabbling over how to design a new welfare system and who to cut from the rolls.

In all, the state stands to lose a net of about $6.8 billion in federal welfare money over the next six years.

Nowhere in California was there greater concern about the potential impact of welfare reform than in Los Angeles County, with its huge population of legal immigrants, who will be denied benefits.

Preliminary estimates placed the potential cost at $236 million a year if the 93,000 legal immigrants in the county who are aged, blind and disabled seek general relief when their federal benefits are cut off. Such a move could double the size of the county’s general relief program, which is financed by local taxpayers.

“This place can’t be the last entitlement left in America. We can’t afford it,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

County Board Chairman Mike Antonovich praised the new law, saying it would help end Los Angeles as a “welfare mecca.” The reforms, he said, will eliminate “the incentives to become a burden or parasite on the taxpayers” by requiring welfare recipients to work.

In Sacramento, Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) said the Republican majority was ready to move forward next week to enact new laws that are needed to implement the federal welfare changes.

Pringle said that by bringing the issues up immediately, it would force Democrats to demonstrate how serious they are about addressing welfare reform.

“I think that should be a scorecard thing,” he said. “We’ve all heard everybody use the cliches that they want to address welfare reform, but now is the time to act.”

Pringle’s remarks immediately set him at odds with Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) and signaled the beginning of what is expected to be a bitter partisan fight over welfare.

Lockyer said he did not want to rush into a major overhaul of the state’s welfare system but preferred to move deliberately.

He said that for weeks the Wilson administration has been asked to present a plan, but the administration has replied that one is not yet ready. Lockyer said he found it surprising that Republicans in the Assembly were suddenly ready to move while the Republican governor has yet to forward a proposal.

“I don’t know what program the right-wing Assembly members have to put people to work,” he said. “That’s the whole point of this . . . to substitute work for welfare.”

But while state leaders were already bickering over the changes, officials at the local levels were often only expressing bewilderment.

“Would panic describe it?” asked James E. Isom, head of the Ventura County Public Social Services Agency, which estimates $40 million in new costs under the bill.

“I don’t think families will go hungry,” he said. “One way or another they’ll find some way to cope, even if they have to take it from someone else.”

Frank Mecca, a lobbyist for the County Welfare Directors Assn. of California, said the demand on the local government agencies that will administer the new law will be great.

“There is this myth that the federal government just gave us a lot of flexibility to really simplify our programs,” he said. “Frankly, I don’t think that’s the case. I think they’ve made it more difficult.”

From the elderly to young parents, aid recipients all over Southern California said they feared for the future.

The concern over cutbacks had already spurred a record rash of applications for citizenship from legal immigrants.

In Los Angeles, Maria Mascorro, 46, said the new law virtually forces her to seek citizenship in order to keep her family together. A native of Mexico, Mascorro’s family is typical of many immigrant households.

While she and her two oldest children are still Mexican citizens, her two youngest are American, having been born in this country.

With the changes in the law, Mascorro said, she will lose the cash payments she has been receiving for herself along with food stamps. Her 10-year-old daughter, however, will remain eligible.

“I would like to go back to school, but if they cut my benefits how can I afford to?” said Mascorro, explaining that her family was left destitute when her husband was killed in a robbery two months ago. “To me it’s completely unjust to single out immigrants this way.”

Sonny K. Yi of Los Angeles also lamented the bill’s impacts. His wife, a legal U.S. resident who remains a South Korean citizen, could eventually be barred from Medi-Cal, the program that provides medical care for the poor. His two U.S.-born children would remain eligible for full benefits.

“We pay taxes, so this shouldn’t matter,” said Yi, a naturalized U.S. citizen who runs a car-stereo installation shop in Los Angeles.

Santiago Alvarado, a legal immigrant from Mexico who has lived in the United States for 16 years, predicted that the new law would increase crime and homelessness. “We’re going to have more gang violence, more stolen cars, more prostitution, more people living on the streets,” said the Los Angeles resident.

His trepidation was echoed by dozens of advocates for the poor who operate shelters and food distribution centers.

Buddy Ray, executive director of Orange County’s Community Development Council, which provides services for low-income people and distributed about 12 million pounds of food last year, said he fears his organization will be overburdened.

“I think we’re all holding our breath to see what the state is going to do” with the new law, he said. “There is obvious concern that people, especially children, will be left with no resources.”

Amid the gloom and despair, there were some who spoke with cautious optimism.

Rochelle Ellis, a 27-year-old welfare mother from Pacoima, admitted that her views conflicted with those of a lot of women in her neighborhood, whom she described as “waiting around the mailbox for the first of the month.”

“I’ve seen a lot of mothers take advantage of the system and take money where they didn’t need it,” she said. “I don’t want my kids to be teased the way I was. I want them to see me work and get it the honest way.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Dave Lesher in Sacramento; David Haldane and Lily Dizon in Orange County; Jeffrey L. Rabin, Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrew Blankstein in Los Angeles, and Jeff McDonald, a special correspondent in Ventura County.