Governor Vetoes County Welfare Bill

Despite unanimous legislative support for an ambitious plan to restructure Ventura County’s welfare system, Gov. Pete Wilson stunned local officials by vetoing a bill that would have started the three-year pilot project.

In his one-page rejection letter, Wilson cited conflicts between the county program and a recently approved federal welfare reform package.

But supporters of the legislation said Wilson was misinformed.

“Whoever gave the governor the analysis of the bill didn’t read it,” said state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley), who wrote the bill. “If you’re going to veto a bill, you better damn well read it.”

County Supervisor John Flynn suggested politics was the underlying motive for the veto.

“This just shows total distrust for local elected people in counties and cities,” Flynn said. “I think the governor has his eye on running for the presidency in the year 2000, and he doesn’t want anybody to get in his way. He wants to be the leader of California welfare reform.”

Wright vowed to keep fighting for the legislation and said she would personally lobby Wilson to support the measure.

“I plan to reintroduce it in December,” she said. “I’m going to put an urgency clause on it so we can fast-track it.”

The welfare reform bill, which has been in the works for a year, would have enabled county officials to work more closely with employers and prepare welfare recipients to reenter the workplace more quickly.

It would have also allowed the county for the first time to combine money and staffing for welfare and return-to-work programs that have operated separately in the past.

And it would have given county officials more control over how they spend welfare dollars and manage government assistance programs. The bill did not provide any money for the program but cleared the way for the county to try the new approach.

Wilson’s own director of social services suggested a month ago that counties be given wide latitude to develop their own reform programs. “I’m very reluctant to have the state dictate to each county how they opt to structure their program,” Eloise Anderson said.

In his rejection letter, dated Friday and sent to Wright on Monday, Wilson said that the state could incur major financial penalties if Ventura County did not follow new federal welfare reform requirements.

The federal program, for example, requires welfare recipients to rejoin the work force within two years or lose all cash benefits. It also limits assistance to a lifetime total of five years.

Wilson said the county’s welfare reform bill would not give the state Department of Social Services any authority to approve or modify its demonstration project.

But Wright said the governor was mistaken. She said the bill ensured that the county would have to adhere to all federal laws.

“How could the state have any penalties?” she asked. “The bill says that the county has to comply with all federal requirements.”

Wright said the bill also would have given state social service officials final approval over the three-year pilot program. But the senator acknowledged that the legislation would have restricted any changes the state wanted to make once the program was approved.

“What the state wants is to oversee everything,” she said. “I say, absolutely not. The whole reason for welfare reform, I thought, was that they wanted the locals to run it.”

Wright said she believes that officials in the state Department of Social Services launched an aggressive lobbying effort to persuade the governor not to sign the legislation.

“This is all about some bureaucrats who want to keep their power and control--and the governor listened to them,” she said. “They said their lawyer was unclear as to whether the bill complied with the federal law. Well, you know, you can always find a lawyer to agree with you.”

Because they are closer to the situation, Flynn said counties are in a better position to run their own welfare programs.

“I have zero faith in the state,” he said. “They are only going to come up with a bunch of rules and regulations that are going to stymie any effort to improve the standard of living for people on welfare.”

Flynn said county and state officials spent thousands of hours over the last year working on the welfare legislation. After its unanimous approval in both the Democrat-controlled Senate and the Republican-dominated Assembly in August, he said the county was confident of Wilson’s approval so it began working out the details of implementing the pilot project in January.

“I’m really upset,” Flynn said. “I’ve put so much energy into this and I believed in it so much that this is probably the greatest disappointment I’ve had in my 20 years in office.”