Tiny Counties Take Welfare Reform Lead

There they are, at the forefront of American welfare reform, two little California counties that just said no to food stamps for some of their neediest citizens.

Their very littleness may make us look at them and say, “So what?” Here in Plumas County on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, 80 to 100 nonworking single adults soon will be without food assistance. In agricultural San Benito County, the number is about 200.

It is that very littleness that also makes these two regions great laboratories for welfare experiments--and places them in dire need should such efforts go awry.

Less than 100 mouths to feed here at the heart of hard-hit lumber country? Good luck. Unlike urban California, there is no mission, no homeless shelter, no hot food program, no safety net. There’s nothing in the way of public transportation to move these strapped citizens on to greener pastures.

Paul Carter, director of social services for Plumas County, is alternately thrilled and scared to death when he looks at his hometown of Quincy and what he hopes to accomplish by turning his back on continued food stamps for his 80 or so clients.

Here in the 10th smallest county in California, Carter banks on a new job-training center and improving weather to bring work for the men and women who will lose their food stamps to the first wave of welfare reform. The state gave him a chance to continue the assistance, but he decided against it.

On the one hand, he says, “The story here is the indomitable spirit you will find in small rural counties,” the so-called “frontier counties,” which earn that designation by being home to fewer than 50,000 residents. With only 21,000 people--many living in towns where elevation exceeds population--Plumas County averages about eight people per square mile.

On the other hand, if Carter has misjudged his ability to find paying jobs or community service for his soon-to-be-former food stamp clients, everyone is sunk. “There is no margin,” he says. “There is no fat in the budget. We’re scraping for every penny. . . . We’re barely able to keep up with what we have now to help those people.”

So why try, when the hometown paper advertises more pickup trucks for sale (34) than jobs (21) open in Quincy, population 6,000?

“We’ve just got to give it a chance,” he says. “I’m disappointed that so many of the counties took the defeatist attitude, that this [the beginning of welfare reform] is preposterous and won’t work. We might get there too. But we’d like to try first.”

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Plumas and San Benito stepped to the forefront a week ago when the Wilson administration agreed to exempt 28 California counties with high unemployment from federal welfare reform provisions requiring them to cut nonworking single adults from the food stamp rolls. Without the yearlong exemption, the counties would have begun cutting off the recipients now.

Almost immediately after the governor made the offer, Plumas, San Benito and Del Norte County, all largely rural with unemployment at 10% or more, decided to go without the waiver. Six days later, officials of Del Norte County, near the Oregon border, changed their minds.

Initially, Del Norte social services chief Stephen Brohmer took an informal poll of the County Board of Supervisors, which figured that hard luck cases from other counties could move to the area if they accepted the waiver. But on Tuesday the supervisors voted to keep food stamps coming for their 400 recipients.

“The risk was migration from other counties if we chose to exercise the option,” Brohmer said. “But it isn’t worth the cost of the harm we’d cause these people.”

Migration is also a major concern in agricultural San Benito County, where supervisors voted to turn down the food stamp waiver. Farm work increases as the weather improves, and local government there is banking on the fields taking care of the needy.

Leland Collins, San Benito County’s director of health and human services, is well aware of the risks and counseled the supervisors to accept the waiver.

“On an average day,” he said, “if someone showed up on our doorstep and said, ‘I have no food and I am not eligible for your programs. Where do I go?’ I’d have to say we have nowhere.”

Plumas County, larger in size than Delaware, is more than 75% national forest, which makes for beautiful scenery but minimal industry. Snow clings to the hillsides and snarls radio reception.

No major highway bisects the county’s 2,600 square miles. The nearest city of any size is 80 miles away from Quincy--Reno to the east and Oroville to the south. Skies are clear. Doors are left unlocked. The county’s first stoplight is less than two years old. There has not been a second.

For a county where the No. 1 employer is government and the No. 2 employer is the lumber industry, the shrinkage of federal, state and county jobs--coupled with federal restrictions on logging--has crippled the area economy.

The annual unemployment rate has surpassed the 10% mark 13 of the past 14 years. Although employment improves with the weather, largely because of tourism jobs, February unemployment rates above 20% are not uncommon.

“A lot of people have moved up here,” says Phyllis Payne, manager of the Bargain Boutique thrift store, which is run by volunteers to benefit hospitals in the region. “It’s beautiful. They figure they’ll find jobs. There aren’t jobs. . . . There are a lot of empty stores. . . . We miss them. It was nice to have a dime store.”

Between 1988 and 1993, Plumas County lost a third of its high-paying lumber jobs. Much of the remaining employment here is part time and low salaried. The median household income in Quincy is less than $23,000--far below the corresponding California figure of nearly $36,000.

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Sandee Renault, a physician’s assistant who lives in Portola, the county’s second-largest town, might be considered one of the lucky ones here--sort of. She works. A lot. And drives. A lot.

“As a health professional living in the county, at one point I had four jobs,” Renault says. “I was juggling. I want to work full time, but there aren’t jobs. . . . Now I have three jobs” in two counties.

Callie Saenz, 25, a mother of two, hopes that the business courses she is taking at Feather River College will help her get a better job than the last one. Four years ago she worked nearly full time as a legal secretary at the county courthouse. Budget cuts shrank the job to 10 hours a week. Without formal training, she made $7 an hour.

Now, she receives federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children, goes to school full time and hopes for more. But she is realistic about the county she calls home. “If you don’t work for the lumber mill or Plumas County, you’re low income.”

At a recent orientation for temporary jobs to repair damage from the January floods, more than 400 job seekers showed up for less than 100 positions. In 1995, when California’s seven-year drought ended, federally funded cleanup and repair jobs were a boon.

“Thank goodness we’ve had natural disasters over the past four years,” says Michele Piller, executive director of Plumas Rural Services, which administers a variety of social service programs. “What are we going to do if we don’t have a disaster in the next two years?”

Piller and other social service providers fear disaster of a different kind, particularly when full-scale welfare reform is finally rolled out here.

When that happens, the 80 to 100 people affected by food stamps will be joined by the county’s 400 recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Under the new federal law, AFDC will be restricted to two years.

Agencies like Plumas Rural Services and the countywide crisis line, which fields calls that range from homelessness to domestic violence, are already strapped for funding. Burnout, they say, is just around the corner.

In the last year, in this county without an emergency shelter, the Crisis Line saw its homelessness calls double. “We’re already experiencing an increase in calls where there’s nothing we can do,” says hotline director Kathy Davidson. “It’s a nightmare. . . . You have to hang up the phone and say, ‘Sorry.’ ”

It is 9 a.m. inside the pride of Plumas County, the sparkling one-stop government-funded Employment and Training Center. Just 10 months old, it screams of newness and whispers of hope. The furniture matches. The paint is clean. The workshops are full, and the counselors are cheerful.

Barbara Vineland surveys the nine men and women who have shown up on this slate-gray morning to sign up for job training and hear about the help they need.

Vineland talks about financial help for people who have lost their jobs when plants closed. She talks about the federal, state and even local assistance for those who have been unemployed for 15 of the last 36 weeks. Heads nod.

Burnell Compton, 34, and Jennifer Hampton, 39, want to go to truck driving school, and they want to go now. “I hear they have a big success ratio, so everybody’s going for it,” says Compton. “I’m ready.”

“Me too,” says Hampton. “I need to find a skill and make it my whole career.”

Compton used to work at Nugget Motors in downtown Quincy, detailing cars. He has four children ages 3 to 12 and had volunteered to have his wages attached to help pay for back child support.

But he lost his driver’s license Jan. 1, when a new California law went into effect taking the privilege of driving away from so-called deadbeat dads. As a result, he lost his job. Now he lives with his mother and his 12-year-old son. He looks for work and dreams of leaving.

“My son is on AFDC,” Compton says. “I just get food stamps. If you come down to crunch time you go out and cut firewood and sell it, do all the odd jobs you can. . . . I figure the people unemployed in the city just don’t want to work. There’s lots of jobs. Here, it’s different. You either have to be way overqualified or know someone.”

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Paul Carter pins his county’s hopes for managing at least the first rumbles of welfare reform in part on the Employment and Training Center, which houses nearly every service a job-seeking Plumas County resident could need.

For now, Carter thinks he can find 80 minimum wage jobs--anything from cashiering to housekeeping--or arrange for part-time volunteer work for people like Compton and Hampton, who will need such employment to keep getting food stamps.

Down the road is another story, and Carter wants Gov. Pete Wilson to know that a welfare reform plan tailored for Los Angeles cannot fit the people of Quincy.

When it comes to helping your neighbors, small is good. “We can put a face to the name here, which you can’t do in a larger area,” says Fran Roudebush, a Plumas County supervisor. “So we’re more apt to find a solution--even if it’s only a quick fix.”

Plumas County will begin a round of meetings this month to try to figure out where to go from here with welfare reform.

Roudebush, however, is not as optimistic as Carter, and plans to have the Board of Supervisors discuss Tuesday what to do about the end of food stamps for the able-bodied.

She is not so sure that struggling Plumas can take the blow. After all, she says, “if we had 80 jobs to spare, we wouldn’t be in double-digit unemployment.”