A Lack of Support by the Court

Just when it appeared that things couldn’t get much worse in the overcrowded, confusing Central Civil West family support court, there are changes in the works that could inflict even more misery.

A proposed rule would require many parents seeking child support, most of them working-class single moms, to travel from Pomona, Santa Monica, Torrance and other branch courts to the Central Civil West courthouse, on the western edge of downtown Los Angeles, to pursue their quest for assistance.

No car? Too bad. Take a bus. Got a job? Too bad. Ask the boss for a day off.

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I heard of the rule from Patricia A. Lang, a lawyer whose clients include many poor women seeking child support. She invited me to the Crenshaw Boulevard offices of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, where she and other attorneys filled me in.

What normally happens in a child support case, particularly among the less affluent, is that a parent goes to the district attorney for assistance in collecting the money if the absent parent is a deadbeat.

The D.A. engages in these efforts as part of a vast federal program that forces parents to financially support their children. The federal and state governments pay 87% of the cost of the county’s collection campaign.

But the Legal Aid attorneys complain that the D.A.’s office is a laggard collector and unresponsive to those seeking help. Such complaints were echoed in a far more detailed manner last month in an audit by Price Waterhouse for Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and other county officials.

When parents tire of waiting for help from the D.A., they often go to private attorneys, such as those associated with Legal Aid. These lawyers take over the cases and pursue them in the courthouses closest to the parents’ homes.

The proposed rule would hurt these people.

It says that any child support case involving the D.A.--even if mom has given up on the D.A.-- must be tried downtown, at Central Civil West. The rest of the divorce--matters such as custody, visitation and control of assets--would continue to be heard in courts more convenient for the parents.

Downtown for child support. Pomona for visitation. Think of the files shuttling back and forth on the Pomona Freeway. Think of the lost papers.

“Litigants, already baffled by the system, would be rightfully confused and disheartened and either give up completely or beg for divorces without child support,” said Susan G. Millmann, staff attorney for Legal Aid’s Santa Monica office. “For those of us who have ever waited for a case to be transferred from one court to another, we can only imagine the delays as files are lost in transit or fail to appear on time.”

She said she didn’t know exactly how many cases would be transferred to Central Civil West, but said it might amount to thousands a year. That would be an unbearable strain on courts that hear almost 200 cases each working day.

I asked for an explanation from the author of the proposed rule, Superior Court Judge Paul Gutman, who heads the family law operation.

Gutman said he doubted Millmann’s estimate of the increased caseload. Most child support cases, he said, are originally filed in the Central Civil West courthouse.

He said his goal was efficiency and economy, consolidating all the federal-state-financed child support programs in one place, Central Civil West.

The judge conceded Central Civil West is packed. “I am not going to tell you it is a luxury hotel,” he said. “It is cramped and crowded, but there are plans to increase the space available. . . . It will take months to enlarge the accommodations, but we are aware of the crowded conditions.”

Judge Gutman said he’s willing to revise his proposed order to try to reduce the number of parents forced to journey downtown. “I have no desire to be an autocrat,” he said. Wayne Doss, director of the D.A.’s Bureau of Family Support Operations, said he would favor such a change.

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Good. But let’s see it in writing. And even with revisions, there would still be too many parents forced to find their way to unpleasant Central Civil West.

That’s punishment for people in Norwalk and Lancaster and West L.A. who have done nothing to deserve it, who, because of a relationship gone bad, find themselves asking government for help.

This doesn’t happen to the more affluent. Their disputes over child support are settled by their lawyers. It may not be pleasant, but at least these parents don’t have to wait in confusion in a crowded courthouse hall.

Sending low-income parents far from home, into the depths of a confused and confusing court system, is another example of our two styles of justice, one for those who have money and another for those who don’t.