Board Charts Course for Welfare Recipients

The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday set a course for welfare reform in Orange County by adopting two dozen guidelines for moving aid recipients from public assistance into the work force.

The new rules, which will be added to a larger welfare reform plan to be completed in December, address everything from how long recipients must work each week to how much time mothers may take off to care for newborns.

Four hours of deliberations Tuesday highlighted the ideological division of the board, with supervisors Jim Silva and Todd Spitzer repeatedly pushing for stricter rules than the Social Services Agency recommended--and, in some cases, than law allows.

The board’s action involved elements of welfare reform that give counties flexibility in setting rules. Most of the regulations are set by the state and federal governments, including a five-year lifetime aid limit for most recipients and the requirement that each recipient work or participate in some type of job-training program.

The most debated element of the guidelines involved whether single mothers who receive assistance should be required to work or be in school for 32 hours a week, as the Social Services Agency recommended, or 26 hours a week, as some educators have urged. The state requires 32 hours of work by July 1999 but gives counties the option of requiring fewer hours until then.

Some board members said they were swayed by the emotional testimony of two welfare recipients who said it would be difficult to balance 32 hours of work with child-raising responsibilities.

“Thirty-two hours for someone dealing with limited resources is a lot to ask and is setting that person up for failure,” said Shelley Riddle, a single mother of three and an honors student at Irvine Valley College who receives public assistance.

“Requiring 26 hours to start out with . . . would be a tremendous asset for people trying to get their lives together,” she said. “I would not have been able to do it without some kind of transition.”

Board Chairman William G. Steiner and Supervisors Charles V. Smith and Thomas W. Wilson agreed to reduce the requirement to 26 hours through July 1999. But Spitzer and Silva backed the 32-hour requirement.

“We have an obligation to build in disincentives to welfare,” Spitzer said. “I want to make welfare as difficult as possible.”

Other contentious issues involved how long a new mother should be exempted from work or school. The state gave counties options ranging from 12 weeks to a full year. The Social Services Agency recommended that the county determine the time on a case-by-case basis.

The board adopted the agency’s recommendations on a 3-2 vote.

Silva, in support of the 12-week limit, said, “I’ve been in the community and have mothers and grandmothers come up to me say, ‘We had to go back to work in six weeks or 12 weeks. And we are taxpayers.’ ”

Spitzer suggested a complicated plan that would give less time off to mothers who purposely have more than one child while on welfare. But other board members rejected the idea. “I don’t think we want to become the bedroom police,” Smith said.

The board also approved a program that would give some recipients up to three months of welfare payments if they used the money to pay rent, fix their cars or do other things that would help them get jobs.

Silva failed to gain support for a proposal to ban all felons from participating in the program. But Spitzer, who as a prosecutor handled welfare fraud cases, convinced his colleagues that recipients who receive large payments should show proof that the money actually went to the landlord, auto mechanic or other vendor.

After the meeting, Smith said the board had developed a set of “practical and workable” guidelines that will ultimately help to move many of Orange County’s more than 30,000 adult welfare recipients off aid.

“This is a milestone, but it’s only the beginning,” he said. “The next step is implementing all this. The big challenge is going to be finding jobs for these people.”

Many of the 23 speakers at Tuesday’s board meeting agreed. Health-care advocates, for example, urged the board to improve medical services for welfare recipients, noting that healthy workers are more likely to keep their jobs.

Representatives of the Vietnamese community urged that the welfare changes be explained to non-English speakers and be carried out in a “culturally sensitive” way.

Others said the county needs to make child care available for recipients while they are at school or at work.