State Emerging on Middle Ground of Welfare Reform

By VIRGINIA ELLIS

Aug. 22, 1997 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SACRAMENTO —

In California, welfare mothers can be required to get a job 12 weeks after the birth of a baby. But in Illinois, they are allowed to stay home for as long as a year.

In California, poor mothers can receive aid for five years before they reach the lifetime limit. But in Florida and Georgia, they can expect to be cut off after four.

California’s new welfare program--bitterly attacked by the left as too conservative and by the right as too liberal--is emerging on the national landscape as a moderate plan that is neither as punitive as the programs offered by some states nor as generous as those presented by others.

Using other states as the benchmarks, California’s recently enacted welfare plan fits snugly into the middle ground. The program eschewed the short time limits and harsh sanctions adopted by many states, particularly those in the Deep South, but also offered some safety net features of states such as New York and Illinois.

The structure of all state plans was dictated primarily by the federal welfare act approved Aug. 22, 1996, especially by its work requirements and time limits. States are left to decide whether to adopt stricter measures than those prescribed by federal law or to use state funds to pay for programs abandoned by Washington.

One of the last large states to pass a welfare reform plan, California waited until this month--just weeks short of the anniversary of the national welfare act--to revise its program by incorporating federal requirements with its own vision of how the state should treat its poor.

Slowed down by the philosophical battles between Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and a Democrat-led Legislature, California approved its plan long after welfare reform was solidly underway in most states.

According to a Times analysis of welfare plans offered by the 10 most populous states, California’s program closely resembled those adopted by several other states. It combined federal time limits with some state-financed safety net provisions that allowed children to continue receiving assistance even after their parents were cut off.

“We have a fairly moderate proposal,” said Frank Mecca, executive director of the County Welfare Directors Assn. of California. “There are states that are more punitive than California, and you [also] have states that are stricter on time limits and cutting people off without safety net assurances.”

Although nearly all states have redesigned their welfare systems, the true test of welfare reform will come in populous ones--such as California and New York, which account for nearly a third of the 10.7 million children and adults who receive assistance under the program formerly known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

And because those two states lag behind most others in the adoption of their programs, the overall success or failure of national welfare reform will not be determined for some time to come.

Conservatives are already predicting that most programs are too lenient and will not push enough welfare recipients into the work force, while advocates for the poor maintain that there is too little time invested in education and training for jobs that will lift recipients out of poverty.

Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation said: “What the states with the best success rates have in common is an emphasis on bringing as much of the caseload into work activities as quickly as possible and an emphasis on having a real sanctioning system.”

He predicts that California will not show a dramatic drop in caseload because it has adopted what in his view is a lenient system of sanctions--one that only cuts the aid of the adult in a family when he or she refuses to comply with work requirements. In Florida, by contrast, failure to comply with work requirements can result in the loss of aid and food stamps for an entire family.

“California’s reform, since it doesn’t have a serious sanction and allows most of the welfare payment to continue, will fail,” Rector said.

But Bob Erlenbusch, director of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Homelessness and Hunger, said the goal shouldn’t be just to move people into jobs and off the welfare roles, but to reduce poverty. He worries that California’s plan, and those in most states, will ultimately lead to an increase in hunger and homelessness because there is not enough emphasis on moving people into jobs that will adequately support a family.

“Everybody is copying each other,” he said. “I think it’s a broad ideological consensus that’s driven by myths about people on welfare. The themes are, ‘Let’s return power to the states, let’s give them the broadest control and let’s not allow anybody to get a free ride.’

“It’s strict, it’s punitive. It’s work, work, work and it doesn’t value education.”

All the state programs give work their highest priority, demanding that recipients get jobs quickly and that they engage in training or some other form of work activity. To drive home the point, they have given their programs names such as Ohio Works First, New York Works, Work First New Jersey, or in Florida’s case, WAGES, an acronym for Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency. California’s new program will be called CalWORKS.

Most, too, have beefed up training programs and made heavy investments in child care, recognizing that if mothers are required to work, their children will need child care. Some, such as California and Illinois, have also extended child care benefits to the working poor.

The heavy state investment in such services was prompted in part by windfalls from Washington and federal requirements that states maintain spending for social services at 80% of the 1994 levels. Since 1994, caseloads in most states have dropped significantly--so to comply with the federal requirements, states had to increase welfare benefits to individuals or pump up spending for other services.

“I wonder how generous the states would have been had this federal [requirement] not been there,” said Mecca.

Where states seemed to break ranks, however, was in their handling of time limits, sanctions and treatment of immigrants.

The federal welfare law initially eliminated benefits for legal immigrants, including food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (the program that replaced Aid to Families With Dependent Children), and Supplemental Security Income, which provides aid to aged and disabled poor people. This year, under pressure from the president and states with large immigrant populations, Congress reinstated SSI benefits for most legal noncitizens, but refused to tinker with the other cuts.

Nearly all the states agreed to use their own funds to continue providing cash aid to poor immigrant families. But California, Florida and New York were among the few that decided to use state funds for a limited time to continue some food stamps. California created a three-year program that would provide food assistance to children under 18 and elderly immigrants over 65.

In the California Legislature, where time limits were one of the most hotly contested issues, many liberals voted against the final bill, contending that they were too harsh. However, a comparison of the largest states shows that only New York and Illinois were more generous in their time limits than California.

California’s plan adopted the federal five-year lifetime limit for aid, but provided a safety net with state funds that would allow the children in a welfare family to continue getting assistance after their parents reached the limit.

In New York, after families have reached the five-year federal limit, they can continue to get cash aid through a state-financed safety net program. If they still haven’t found employment after that, they can be provided a small cash stipend, plus vouchers to pay rent and utilities.

The New York provisions contrast sharply with those of Texas, Florida, Georgia and Ohio--each with a limit shorter than the five-year federal limit.

Sanctions for failing to comply with work requirements also vary widely from state to state, although nearly all have stiffened penalties since the passage of the federal act.

California penalizes the adults in a family, cutting their portions of the monthly benefits, but leaves those of the children intact. Georgia, on the other hand, has adopted a “two strikes and you’re out” sanction system. The first failure to comply with work requirements results in a 25% cut in benefits; the second causes the family to lose assistance entirely.

Nearly all states require teenage parents to attend school and to live at home with parents or another supervising adult. But states have widely different views on how long a mother with a newborn should be allowed to stay at home without working.

In California, counties have the option to exempt mothers of newborns from work requirements for three, six or 12 months.

Florida gives a new mother only a three-month exemption but Texas will allow a family to be exempt from work requirements until the youngest is 4 years old, providing that child wasn’t born after the family came on assistance.

Next: How Los Angeles and smaller California counties cope with reforms.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

What the States Are Doing

Time limits are a key difference in how the top five welfare states are handling reform.

State: California

Welfare Population: 2.3 million

Time Limits: 60-month lifetime cap for adults; aid for children can continue.

State: Texas

Welfare Population: 607,366

Time Limits: 12 months, 24 months or 36 months depending on education level and job experience. Children’s aid not affected by limits.

State: New York

Welfare Population: 1.9 million