D.A.’s Office Adds to Child Support Furor

Already under fire for his record on child support, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti sparked new outrage Saturday over his office’s failure to adequately publicize a long-awaited community forum on the issue.

As a result, fewer than 50 people attended an event that last year drew an estimated 2,000, many of whom booed Garcetti over his office’s much-criticized child support program.

Most everyone at the forum Saturday said they had received their notices of the event from the district attorney’s office only the day before. Just two, by show of hands, indicated that they had received their invitations earlier.

“There is no excuse, no excuse, for someone trying to sabotage something that would help them fulfill their duties,” an angry county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said during the session at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson.

Added Assemblyman Carl Washington (D-Paramount), one of the forum’s sponsors: “I am appalled at the low turnout and the . . . attempt to try to not address the issues.

“Not only is it an insult,” he said later, “it is an attempt to not address this problem.”

The attacks, coming from political allies of Garcetti, were as stunning as the district attorney’s failure to adequately publicize an event that, just last week, county officials had pointedly reminded him was important.

During both the Board of Supervisors meeting and a subsequent advisory panel discussion, elected officials and their appointed representatives reminded Garcetti’s office that time was running out to publicize Saturday’s forum. The responsibility fell to Garcetti’s office because it is the only agency with the list of the hundreds of thousands of mothers and fathers enmeshed in the child support system.

Garcetti’s office blamed the problem on a “snafu.”

“We’re very sorry,” Barbara Catlow, assistant director for the family support office, told a reporter, reading a prepared statement over the telephone. “But it appears a snafu occurred in the mailing of the form notices.

“I am requesting a thorough investigation of the mailing procedure to see what did or did not happen.”

Those who had worked for months to prepare for the event were in no mood for excuses.

“Sending them out the day before is tantamount to not sending them out at all,” said Burke, a forum sponsor, adding that Garcetti had assured her Tuesday that the invitations were in the mail.

Long before that, Garcetti’s office had told organizers that the district attorney would not attend this year’s forum because of death threats. Although it sent two staff members to the event, the office withdrew its sponsorship and bowed out of planning meetings.

Proceeding with what has become an annual event, several community and government agencies hauled boxes of pamphlets and fliers to the Cal State gymnasium Saturday morning only to have them sit untouched and blowing about in the wind. To provide tight security, extra sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers assembled on the campus. But they stood idle against the wall of the nearly empty hall.

Garcetti “should have said forthright, ‘We’re not going to send out the notices,’ . . . rather than waste our time,” Burke said.

Added Shauna Jackson, an aide to Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who is sponsoring a child support forum at the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita next Saturday: “Gil lost the opportunity to show people that he cares.”

Garcetti’s aides said the office did fulfill its pledge to distribute tens of thousands of fliers at welfare offices in Burke’s district.

But what happened Saturday led some at the session to question the district attorney’s willingness to take the necessary steps to improve the child support program and respond to critics amid new questions about the operation.

As part of its three-part series on child support, The Times last week reported that Garcetti’s office not only has a poor record in collecting the payments but did not even spend the money it had to improve its operations. The Board of Supervisors has asked Garcetti to respond, in writing, to criticism of his child support unit, which has an annual budget of $100 million.

“The district attorney clearly has to step up to the plate,” Washington said minutes after Burke referred to the child support program as a “failure.”

Although acknowledging that last year’s crowd was at times unruly, with one prosecutor having to be escorted out by security, organizers insisted that was no excuse for Garcetti not to publicize the event sufficiently.

“They basically set it up to fail,” said Sue Speir, founder of Single Parents United N’ Kids, a child support advocacy group based in Long Beach.

The parents who did attend Saturday sat through panel discussions with lawyers, judicial officers and two prosecutors, seeking guidance on how to navigate the often confusing child support bureaucracy.

“I’m worried they’re going to do me like they’re doing them,” Patrick Ridgle said in one workshop after hearing horror stories from several couples. The 34-year-old South-Central man said he had just received a court summons from Garcetti’s office in a child support case.

During the same workshop, Compton Superior Court Commissioner Jeffrey Marckese told the handful of anxious parents that they had a hard road ahead of them--whether they are owed money or are being billed.

“You have to have a lot of guts and be persistent,” he said.

Although some parents left frustrated, organizers hoped they provided enough information to help. Burke pledged to have her office check every attendee’s child support case.

“It’s good for the people who came out, because they were able to get information,” said Reggie Brass, founder of the father rights group My Child Says Daddy.

“But overall, it was bad for the community,” Brass said, “because they couldn’t get the help they needed.”