Good Welfare Compromise

The Orange County Board of Supervisors’ acknowledgment that funds might be cut off if they failed to act has produced a compromise on welfare reform. All things considered, it was a good solution.

Supervisors Todd Spitzer and Jim Silva prevailed this month in insisting that those leaving the welfare rolls work 32 hours a week. Their three colleagues had favored a 26-hour workweek to start, changing to 32 hours over a year and a half. Two supervisors switched sides and joined Spitzer and Silva, providing the four votes required for final adoption.

The supervisors wisely dropped a proposal that new mothers be required to resume work 12 weeks after giving birth unless medical reasons barred it. Instead, the Social Services Agency will judge cases individually, demanding that women return to the job anywhere from 12 weeks to one year after giving birth.

Most of the county’s rules are clones of state and federal regulations. The welfare reform package that Congress approved sets a five-year lifetime limit on receiving aid and requires most recipients to work, attend school or be in job training programs. Individual counties have some flexibility in specifying how many hours recipients must work initially, which led to the split among Orange County supervisors.

This month the federal government announced that the nation’s welfare rolls have dropped by 2.2 million in the last year to the lowest level since 1971. In the first full year following passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill, welfare rolls dropped nationally by 21%. During that period, the rolls dropped 14% in California, to 2.2 million people.

There has been a similar decline in Orange County, which for years has had a program designed to get people off welfare and into jobs. County officials estimate there are now about 22,000 welfare recipients in Orange County.

Most of those on welfare are women who have children to support. Child care will be an important component of the process of getting people off the dole and onto the job rolls. Transportation to jobs, schools or training programs also will be important.

That is why the supervisors were right to include a provision that would give some welfare recipients cash payments of up to three months of benefits. That money could be used to fix cars to get someone to and from work.

Welfare reform is an important initiative. Done properly, it can benefit taxpayers and the newly employed, who can gain satisfaction from worthwhile jobs. But the county should be careful to move with caution, realizing that it will not be easy to change the habits of years or decades overnight.