Supervisors OK Deal on General Relief

Meeting behind closed doors Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors approved an agreement with legal advocates for the poor that will allow the county to avoid repaying most of the $136 million the courts have ruled it illegally withheld from its general relief recipients.

General relief, currently $212 per month, goes to the poorest people on welfare, those who are ineligible for any other form of assistance.

Under Tuesday’s bargain, the supervisors agreed to boost future general relief benefits modestly and promised to extend eligibility for employable indigents from four to five months per year. The four-month cap was part of a package of general relief cutbacks imposed by the supervisors when the courts ordered them to repay the illegally withheld benefits.

The board agreed to make $60 million in repayments and to postpone planned cutbacks five months, until February.

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Under the terms of the compromise, the county will still save an estimated $30 million a year, according to Board of Supervisors Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky. He said the settlement came just two days before the initial court ruling would have become final, depriving the county of its ability to negotiate the amount of the court-ordered repayment.

“There are no winners here,” he said. “What we’ve done is minimize the loses on both sides. We are not breaking the bank, and both sides can walk away feeling like they got what they needed.”

Richard Rothschild, litigation director for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, said the compromise measure is about as much as the county’s poorest residents could hope for, given the county’s still-precarious financial position and projected deficit.

“It is a reasonable and fair agreement for all the parties,” said Rothschild, who represents one of several legal advocacy groups that filed suit on behalf of the indigents. “It gives people reimbursement and at the same time avoids--at least for a time--some of the more draconian restrictions the county had planned.”

Rothschild said county lawyers had threatened to impose far worse sanctions on general relief recipients if their legal advocates had not gone along with the settlement, including an additional $40 per month cut in general relief payments, as the state allows, and a decrease in eligibility to three months per year, a standard 20 other counties have adopted.

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The compromise was triggered by a 1995 court ruling that held the county liable for an estimated $136 million in back welfare payments the supervisors illegally took from general relief recipients in the years 1993 through 1995. After that ruling was upheld by higher courts earlier this year, the supervisors slashed future general relief benefits and capped eligibility, which previously had continued indefinitely.

Those cutbacks, combined with a program to force recipients with drug and alcohol problems into treatment programs, were designed to save the county as much as $40 million a year.

As many as 200,000 general relief recipients stand to gain about $73 a month in back payments lost during the two-year period covered by the court ruling.

Yaroslavsky and other county officials said they will aggressively try to contact those recipients to tell them they have money coming to them, even though many are homeless or do not have permanent addresses or access to mailboxes.

Unlike other types of welfare, general relief is entirely funded by the county.