Car Donation Gets Schillo’s County Aid Idea Rolling

Ventura County Supervisor Frank Schillo’s plan to get cars into the hands of welfare recipients looking to get off public aid and on the job is headed for a test run.

The Bank of America has agreed to donate two cars to the county’s welfare-to-work program, which is seeking to help welfare recipients obtain jobs as government aid is scaled back.

The cars will be donated to a nonprofit group and leased through a county credit union to welfare recipients over long terms to help reduce monthly payments.

The lease proceeds will accumulate in a special fund that could be used to buy more vehicles or support other efforts to help welfare recipients overcome one of their largest obstacles to employment: transportation.

County officials estimate that half of the 8,600 families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children do not have reliable cars.

To address this issue, Schillo recently proposed establishing a program to help welfare recipients obtain cars to get them to their jobs.

The supervisor on Monday welcomed the donated cars and said the county will use them to get his proposal rolling. But Schillo acknowledged that many details of the program still need to be worked out.

“I need to go through the entire process and see what kind of problems we run into,” Schillo said.

The county will not take possession of the donated cars, both late 1980s models, with roughly 100,000 miles on each, Schillo said.

Rather, the cars will be turned over to Visions for Recovery, a Thousand Oaks-based nonprofit organization, giving Bank of America a charitable tax break for its donation.

The cars will then be leased to eligible welfare recipients through the Ventura County Federal Credit Union, with the county guaranteeing the loans. Their eligibility will be based on a number of factors, including whether they lack transportation but are otherwise employable.

“These are people who are qualified to work, but they just can’t get there,” Schillo said. There are already three aid recipients being considered as potential lessees of the donated cars, he said.

In the future, however, the county may explore helping welfare recipients buy cars through the county credit union.

Carol A. Harris, president and chief executive officer of the Ventura County Federal Credit Union, said the bank is still working out all the legal details necessary to protect the interests of the credit union, the county and participants.

However, she expects that only a “minute” number of recipients will be eligible for the loans each year.

“It is not a charity program,” she said. “They will have a loan for the purchase that they will have to repay, and it will be at a rate comparable to other loans, not discounted. It is not a giveaway program. It is one that we are working very closely with the county to make sure we have our members’ interests as the No. 1 consideration.”

Brian Thiele, vice president of the Bank of America’s employee transportation programs, said his company’s donation was a chance to take old fleet cars that otherwise would have been auctioned off and contribute them to the county’s welfare-to-work efforts.

“I drove [one of the cars] home the other day,” said Thiele, a resident of Thousand Oaks. “It drove beautifully.”