Legislature OKs Welfare Provisions

Despite bitter opposition from Republicans, Democratic legislators in both houses passed major portions of a welfare plan Monday that provides job training for recipients, sets limits on the time they can receive aid and provides community service jobs.

The plan now goes to Gov. Pete Wilson, who has already made it clear that he prefers his own blueprint for welfare reform and who immediately began to veto parts of the Democratic proposal.

But its passage is considered the first step in a political minuet that ultimately will require the Republican governor and the legislative leadership to sit down at the bargaining table and arrive at a compromise.

Most of their package passed on a primarily partisan vote, and Democrats failed to gather enough Republican votes to win the two-thirds majority needed to approve provisions that would have supplied food stamps to thousands of poor legal immigrants and state-financed assistance to elderly immigrants who will lose federal aid in the fall.

Republicans voted solidly against the measure even though Democrats had included a sweetener--a provision that would extend for another year a 4.9% cut in welfare benefits and the suspension of a cost-of-living increase for recipients. Without the extension, current state law mandates that the cut will be rescinded in November and the cost-of-living increase will kick in.

Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) warned that Republicans had, in effect, just endorsed a huge increase in welfare benefits that would cost the state millions of dollars, could force GOP legislators to forgo a proposed tax cut and make it necessary to reduce spending for education and health care.

“Those are the three areas I would suggest are now at risk,” he said.

But Sen. Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga) said Republicans believed that to be an empty threat because ultimately Democrats would make welfare cuts rather than reduce spending for education and health care.

The rest of the plan required only a majority vote and Democrats, who had fought among themselves over its provisions in recent weeks, presented a united front in support of the proposals. As finally approved, the plan set five-year lifetime limits for recipients to receive aid, required them to get jobs within 24 months, created community service positions for those who did not and provided for the state to assume 30% of the cost of General Assistance, the county welfare program for single adults.

The governor began vetoing provisions in the measures even while legislators were casting their votes on other sections, prompting an angry Lockyer to say later, “Essentially, the governor has flipped us off. . . . My current thought is we wait for the next governor” to fashion a welfare overhaul.

In often rancorous debate in the Assembly, Republicans attacked the Democratic plan as fatally flawed because it provided too many exemptions to work requirements, cost too much money, made it more difficult for the state to investigate fraud and created loopholes in the time limits.

Republican Leader Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) said Congress and President Clinton had tried through the welfare act of 1996 to move the country along a new path to reform but “all we get from [the Assembly Democratic] plan is a resurfacing of the same old road.”

Assemblyman Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield) called the plan “blemished beyond cosmetic repair” and accused the Democrats of ignoring the desire of most Californians for a welfare system that costs less and pushes more people off the rolls.

Democrats, who had been forced to rewrite the plan numerous times in order to forge a consensus within their own diverse ranks, complained that much of the Republican criticism was misleading and inaccurate and ignored the plight of the poor and their children.

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Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley), a former social worker who was the architect of many elements of the plan, said that by its passage California was embarking on “revolutionary social reform like nothing else we will ever vote on.”

In devising their plan, Assemblyman Roderick Wright (D-Los Angeles) said, Democrats had recognized that there was more to fixing welfare than just reducing caseloads. “This is a jobs program,” he said. “Jobs create taxpayers. It creates people who pay into the system not draw from it.”

Debate in the Senate was more sedate, and a few senators in both parties broke ranks with the colleagues to follow their own consciences.

Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley), one of the hardest-working members of a conference committee that had written the plan, cast the lone Republican vote in favor of all four bills in the package.

A 17-year member of the Legislature who has built a reputation for unflinching conservatism, Wright asserted that Wilson’s demand that welfare mothers leave their new babies at home at age 12 weeks so they can work was unreasonable and one of many provisions in his proposal that she could not support.

She lectured the mostly male Senate about the shortage of child care, particularly for newborns. “When you have a 3-month-old infant, you can’t leave that baby to go to work on the 10 o’clock night shift,” she said.

Several liberals in the Senate however, expressed dissatisfaction with the measures, and one, Sen. John Burton (D-San Francisco), voted against all but one of the bills.

He complained that by putting a lifetime prohibition on welfare benefits for anyone convicted of a drug felony, the Democrats had failed to give a second chance to many mothers who were trying to put their lives back together.

And by the tough time limits, he said, Democrats failed to consider that even in a booming economy there were not enough jobs for all the welfare mothers who would need work. “We’re talking about children here and that’s why I can’t support all these bills,” he said.

Times staff writer Max Vanzi contributed to this story.