Welfare Official Warns of Threat From New Law

Several thousand legal immigrants who are so mentally or physically impaired that they cannot care for themselves may become destitute because the new welfare reform law drops them from most federal aid programs, state officials were warned Thursday.

The warning by Fresno County’s top welfare official was made at the first in a series of public forums throughout the state conducted by the Wilson administration to garner comment on the new federal overhaul of welfare.

Ernest E. Velasquez, director of Fresno County’s Department of Social Services, said that once federal aid is denied, the only safety net left for poor, severely disabled legal immigrants is general relief, the program of last resort that counties use to provide cash assistance to needy adults.

But, he said, the general relief payments are not enough to provide the kind of shelter the disabled need, much less the nursing and other home care services they require.

“What happens to these individuals?” he asked. “What is the state going to do? Are we going to pull the plug on these individuals?”

Until now, Velasquez said, disabled legal immigrants have been cared for by several government programs, including Aid to the Blind, Aged and Disabled and In Home Supportive Services, a program jointly financed by counties and state and federal governments. The supportive services program allows the severely ill to live at home.

Under the welfare law signed in August, most legal immigrants soon will become ineligible for these programs.

“Some of these people are in their 80s, others are quadriplegics. Some are mentally ill. I’m afraid it’s going to be devastating for them,” Velasquez said.

He joined a chorus of local officials who appeared at the forum, most of whom voiced fears that the new law would put insurmountable economic burdens on California’s counties.

One official half-jokingly referred to the new law as Congress’ “shift and shaft strategy,” saying that the purpose of the legislation was to shift costs away from the federal government and on to counties.

But even as county officials from the Central Valley were relating their economic worries to the Wilson administration, a report released Thursday from the nonpartisan legislative analyst’s office said the counties’ concerns were exaggerated.

The report disputed an initial projection by the California State Assn. of Counties that the $450-million annual cost of the county-run general relief programs could soar to $1.3 billion because large numbers of legal immigrants would lose federal aid under the new law.

Even if all legal immigrants who lost federal benefits applied for county aid, the legislative analyst said, the costs to the counties would total no more than $500 million a year.

“While counties are likely to experience additional [general relief] costs, these costs probably will be substantially less than the potential maximum for several reasons,” the report said.

Many legal immigrants, the report said, are eligible for citizenship and probably will apply in order to avoid the cutoff in aid. Others who do lose federal benefits, it said, may not want to apply for general relief because it pays less in benefits and has more strings attached than federal aid.

But county officials appearing at the forum said local governments were already overwhelmed by the costs of general relief and could not afford even small increases.

“Welfare reform will literally break Kern County unless we have absolutely ironclad ‘stop-loss’ protection against huge increases in county-funded general assistance payments as people fall out of eligibility [for federal programs],” said Barbara Patrick, chairwoman of the Kern County Board of Supervisors.

Even if only one in four of the legal immigrants who lose federal aid apply for county assistance, she said, the $6.5 million in additional costs for her county will be too much.

“I don’t want to try to tell my constituents that the county can’t afford to spend money to fix roads, hire sheriff’s deputies or control juvenile crime because we have to write more welfare checks,” she said.

She and many other local officials, she said, were supportive of welfare reform and the requirements that recipients be moved from welfare to work. But for the reforms to be successful, she said, counties cannot be forced into bankruptcy.

Patrick said one alternative may be for the state to take over the responsibility for general relief.

State Health and Welfare Secretary Sandra Smoley, who presided over the forum, said California state officials have always resisted any attempt to make general relief a state program. But Smoley said that in light of the new federal legislation, they “need to look at that again.”

As the Wilson administration devises its plan for implementing the federal welfare changes, Smoley said, it will look closely at the “safety net” concerns of Velasquez and other welfare directors who worry “what is going to happen is somebody [will fall] through the cracks.”

Other state officials said at the forum that the disabled legal immigrants may still be eligible for Medi-Cal, the state and federal program that provides medical care for the poor.

The state has the option--but is not required--to deny Medi-Cal benefits to legal immigrants.

But state officials acknowledged that because Medi-Cal would not pay for in-home services, it would mean that many of the severely disabled could end up in nursing homes at much higher costs to taxpayers.

Other public forums on the welfare law will be held in Redding today and in Los Angeles next Monday) and Tuesday at the state building, 107 S. Broadway.