Court Orders County to Repay Welfare Cuts

After a hard-fought legal battle on their behalf, the poorest of the poor in Los Angeles County may have won the judicial equivalent of the lottery: a windfall of as much as $160 million.

Late Thursday, an appellate court ordered the county to repay welfare benefits denied to 90,000 General Relief recipients from 1993 to 1995, when county supervisors slashed their monthly checks by $73. The county is considering whether to appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court. But even if the justices sustain the ruling, it remains unclear how many of the recipients can be located.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Richard Rothschild, litigation director for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, said Friday of his legal victory against the county. “But until we see the county actually paying the money and people receiving their checks, we’re not going to rejoice.”

If the ruling is sustained, the county faces the task of tracking down General Relief recipients using last known addresses--a potentially complicated task because recipients are highly transitory, and many who received General Relief during that period are no longer on assistance.

General Relief recipients are childless adults who do not qualify for other forms of welfare. The average back payment would amount to $1,275 for each recipient.

In its sharply worded decision, the three-judge appellate panel not only chastised the county supervisors, but also ordered them to repay the money with interest and to pay all the plaintiffs’ legal fees and other costs.

If all welfare recipients who are eligible to collect the back benefits come forward--an unlikely prospect--the county could have to pay as much as $160 million, further eroding its already shaky fiscal situation.

The panel held that the law is very clear, in that the county cannot be allowed to “short its obligations to persons dependent on public assistance, with no risk of incurring liability for the unpaid benefits . . . at the expense of those of our citizenry least able to bear the burden.” That, the panel wrote, is “a result which a responsible and humane government should not permit.”

As of Friday, most top county officials had not even seen the 30-page ruling. But Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky and Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen said the decision, although dreaded, was not unexpected.

“To paraphrase Vin Scully, in a decade of improbables, we are now facing the impossible,” a subdued Yaroslavsky said. “This is a huge hit--we are looking at $140 million, which is $140 million we don’t have.”

Yaroslavsky said he will convene the board in closed session at its next meeting Tuesday to discuss its options, which include appealing the case, paying the money and covering the cost by slashing all welfare benefits even more.

But county lawyers said Friday the decision to appeal is theirs alone and they already have decided to do so. Yaroslavsky disagreed.

“The board will make the final decision on if we appeal, and we have to discuss the financial consequences first,” he said. “The longer we wait the more expensive the ultimate remedy becomes, because interest is accruing.”

An analysis by the county Department of Public Social Services, which administers welfare programs, has estimated that the county will probably have to pay at least $136 million. That calculation, Janssen said, is based on a study of how many of the estimated 90,000 welfare recipients can be located through the General Relief rolls, and how much each of them is owed.

The legal odyssey that culminated in Thursday’s court ruling began in August 1993, when the Western Center and other advocates for the poor sued the county to block it from cutting the welfare benefits from $285 a month to $212 and giving the poor $73 a month in what the center said were dubious “in-kind” health care benefits instead.

A Superior Court judge denied a request for a preliminary injunction to block the cuts, but the Court of Appeal ordered such an injunction a few months later, and held that the county acted illegally.

The county tried to appeal that ruling to the state Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case in July 1995. The county agreed to raise General Relief benefit levels back to $285.