County Putting New Welfare Reform Program to Work

Following months of bickering and bargaining among state and federal lawmakers, the final countdown has begun for the 28,000 children and adults in Ventura County who depend on the nation’s 60-year-old welfare system.

With the beginning of the new year, public financial aid has become a temporary fix, not a permanent safety net.

Armed with $5 million over the next six months, Ventura County officials will be ushering 8,700 families--mostly single women and their children--off the welfare rolls and back into the job market.

Two years in the making, a thick blueprint detailing the county’s welfare reform plans will be presented before the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

It will chart everything from stepped-up child support enforcement to child care, from volunteer programs to higher education.

All of it has one daunting goal: to help people overcome the barriers to employment.

But both welfare recipients and government officials know reform will not come easily.

“I don’t look for us to be able to put every single person who somehow gets involved in subsidized care to work,” said Supervisor John K. Flynn, who has led the county’s welfare reform efforts. “That’s pretty idealistic. Many of the folks have severe problems--otherwise they wouldn’t be in the condition they’re in.”

If the county can help half those on the welfare rolls land permanent work that pays the bills, Flynn said he will consider the effort a success.

Signed by Gov. Pete Wilson in August, California’s new welfare reform program--called CalWORKS--meets federal legislation passed a year before that allows recipients to receive only five years of welfare benefits throughout their entire lives.

CalWORKS replaces the former Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, originally developed in the wake of World War II to aid the widows and orphans of war casualties.

Under the new system, single parents in Ventura County are required to engage in at least 32 hours of work or job training each week to continue receiving public aid. Counties can exempt 20% of families that are deemed hardship cases.

Drug felons, parole violators and felons who flee the state are no longer eligible.

To ease the transition of people back into the work force, the state will pour millions of dollars into Ventura County child-care and job-training programs. This includes $1.9 million for child-care subsidies, $334,000 for mental health and substance abuse services and $1.15 million for new social services staff, facilities and automation.

The county’s three community colleges, meanwhile, have been awarded $980,000 to develop a special job-training curriculum for welfare recipients, and another $450,000 has been allocated for similar adult education programs.

The county is depending on a robust economy to create thousands of new jobs and boost hourly wages while helping recipients confront the social, physical and personal ills that landed them on the welfare rolls in the first place.

Randall Feltman, a deputy chief administrative officer in charge of the county’s welfare reform efforts, acknowledges that the task is huge.

But he remains optimistic. Many welfare recipients are employable, he said, but were forced onto public aid due to desperate and emergency situations they could neither control nor afford.

“You actually get trapped, and what we are trying to do here is eliminate the trap that these women are in,” he said.

Feltman said the county will look to help the most job-ready clients first.

State law allows that for every person removed from the welfare rolls, the county can keep 75% of the cash assistance those recipients would otherwise have been paid.

The county can use that money, in turn, to help clients with the most difficult employment hurdles find jobs, he said.

Still, thousands of welfare recipients who head households face the threat of decreased benefits if they do not find work within two years.

County government officials have their own incentive to succeed: Families with lost benefits translate into more people taxing county foster care, juvenile hall and indigent health-care programs, Feltman said.

The county plans to open seven career centers from Ojai to Oak Park, where welfare recipients can be linked with available jobs and job-training programs.

For George Lopez, 43, the transition from welfare to work is perhaps easier than most.

Three of his five children are grown and out of the house.

The two boys who remain are 18 and 14 and can take care of themselves before and after school.

Lopez said that two years ago he lost his job as a private in-home health-care provider in Los Angeles and later moved his family to Santa Paula after the death of his father.

Not eligible for unemployment benefits, he resorted to the county welfare office, where he was quickly enrolled in the county’s previous welfare-to-work program, called Greater Avenues for Independence.

Each month, he receives $783 in welfare benefits and food stamps in exchange for work as an office assistant in the county government personnel office.

He feels he has had a head start. But others face a more difficult transition, he said.

“It’s gonna be a mess, I can just see it,” he said. “A lot of people have a lack of skills and have been poor a long time. So there will be a lot of different barriers, especially with child care.”

That is Lorraine Moreno’s biggest concern.

The 19-year-old Camarillo woman is the mother of a toddler and is expecting her second child in February. As a mother of two, she represents the typical Ventura County CalWORKS client.

Single mothers with two children make up 82% of the county’s CalWORKS population, which includes 17,000 children.

Moreno’s is a common story. She split up with her boyfriend when she learned she was pregnant and landed in her parents’ house where she shares a room with a sister and her son Dylan.

She has few job skills and relies on $503 a month in public aid.

She is ineligible for food stamps because she is under 21 and still lives with her parents, to whom she pays $200 a month for the room.

Food comes each Friday from the Jehovah Jireh pantry.

But like Lopez, Moreno said she has heard little from welfare officials about how the reforms will affect her.

She is unaware that child-care subsidies may be available to help her fulfill a dream of enrolling in Moorpark College’s veterinary preparation program after her second child is born.

“I don’t know how it’s going to work,” she said. “I might end up not being able to go to school and have to just work nights.”

Although county officials are confident that the state money will help people pay for child care, helping people get to the jobs they find makes for a glaring hole in the county’s plans.

Officials say the county’s network of bus routes is inadequate for people working early morning and late night shifts.

With no money for the effort, county leaders are exploring an array of options, from subsidized bus rates to private contracts with van companies, from citizen volunteers to carpools.

In addition, the Board of Supervisors recently approved a pilot program guaranteeing car loans at standard interest rates for eligible welfare recipients. If a client loses a job and defaults on the loan, the county will repossess the car and help another welfare client finance it.

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Officials also hope some welfare recipients will be able to borrow cars from friends and relatives to get them to work.

Monthly bus passes are available from the Ventura County Transportation Commission for $40, but they don’t help when the bus doesn’t get people where they want to go at the right time, officials said.

“The transportation element is still a weak element of the whole program,” said Flynn, who is pressing county mass transit officials to become involved in the welfare reform effort. “It is perhaps the weakest, yet perhaps the most necessary part of it.”

Meanwhile, officials lament the fact that many of the county’s more than 200 welfare caseworkers still remain tied to piles of paperwork rather than being able to focus on helping their clients find work.

Despite the county’s lobbying efforts for reductions in state-mandated reporting requirements, the new legislation tacks on an even greater documentation burden, officials said.

Caseworkers must now verify each child’s immunizations and school attendance records while tracking client felony criminal records, said Helen Reburn, a deputy director in the Public Social Services Agency.

Detailed monthly income reports for each family also are required, she said.

“If the state would have reduced the rules and regulations, we could have taken all the energy used by 200 to 300 eligibility workers and put that energy toward something more beneficial for people,” Flynn said.

County officials pledge to continue pushing for cleanup legislation that eliminates many of the onerous reporting requirements.

“This is still a developing process,” Reburn said. “Certainly, this isn’t the end of it.”