Lockyer Criticizes Wilson Welfare Plan

State Senate leader Bill Lockyer on Wednesday accused Gov. Pete Wilson of being “unnecessarily secretive” about his administration’s plans to restructure welfare in California.

And the result, Lockyer said, could be a proposal that is particularly punitive to poor women and children.

Lockyer (D-Hayward) said he feared the Wilson administration’s failure to involve the business community and other relevant groups in its deliberations may lead to an emphasis on cutting people off welfare, rather than devising plans to move recipients into permanent jobs.

“I’m assuming that Americans and Californians would not want to just kick people out into the street. Little kids. We’re not a country that’s going to let little kids starve,” Lockyer said.

A Wilson spokesman insisted that the administration had sought a wide range of views through a series of public forums recently conducted by Health and Welfare Secretary Sandra Smoley.

The Senate leader made the unusually critical comments in an interview moments before he opened a one-day conference of business, labor and government leaders that he convened at UCLA to get a “broad inventory of ideas” on the new law.

It was one of the few times that a high-ranking Democrat has openly criticized the Wilson administration’s handling of the new welfare law. Lockyer’s convening of the conference signaled his intention to play a strong role in the design of the new welfare system and to emphasize the need to create jobs for recipients.

Lockyer said that to meet the demands of the sweeping federal welfare law, California faces the staggering task in the next five years of finding jobs for 1 million recipients, many of whom have little education and few job skills.

He said he was worried that the Republican governor, as he moves into his final two years in office, would be content with proposing only short-term “cutoff-type” solutions to the welfare problem, leaving it to a successor to face the real consequences of the new law.

The new federal law revolutionizes the nation’s welfare system by giving states new flexibility to design their own programs. At the same time, it also imposes strict work requirements on adult recipients, who will be denied federally financed benefits if they don’t find jobs by specific deadlines.

Wilson is expected to announce a plan for implementing the law in January.

Business leaders and economists at the conference said California’s economy has made a dramatic turnaround and is creating thousands of new jobs.

But, they said, the expanding economy is not creating enough low-skill positions to meet the demands of either the unemployed or the welfare recipients who will soon be seeking employment.

UCLA social welfare professor Rosina Becerra said there was “a mismatch” between the kind of jobs that welfare recipients could qualify for and the kinds of jobs available; between the location of available jobs and the locations where welfare recipients live.

Thomas E. Rankin, president of the California labor federation, AFL-CIO, said he worries that as government devises ways to move welfare recipients into the work force, it will come up with incentives that will encourage employers to replace the working poor with welfare recipients.

“We cannot let that happen,” he said. “The poor workers cannot be made to bear the burden of this welfare reform.”

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky warned that jobs were only part of the picture, and that government leaders need also to look at the impact on the economy caused by the loss of federal dollars from food stamp and other programs.

Small businesses are expected to be the source of many of the jobs that welfare recipients will need, but Scott G. Hauge, president of Cal Insurance & Associates, a small business in San Francisco, said firms like his are ill-equipped to provide the kind of job training that most recipients require.

“Small business is not going to be the be-all-to-end-all to solve all these problems,” he said.

John Wilson, chief economist for the Bank of America, said he fears that the state’s preoccupation with its current labor surpluses has caused it to ignore labor shortages it will face in the future when baby boomers begin to retire.

“We aren’t making the investment we need to make in education,” he said. “Every student today will have to participate in our labor force in the future.”