State Role in Child Support

This week’s legislative hearing on California’s child support mess may be an important step in finally resolving the chaos that has prevailed in Los Angeles County and elsewhere. Testimony at a joint hearing of Assembly and Senate committees in Sacramento came from child advocates, district attorneys, aggrieved custodial parents who can’t get the support payments they’re owed and noncustodial parents who are hounded for money they don’t owe. They provided state lawmakers with ample evidence, if any more was needed, that county collection has failed abysmally. State intervention now makes sense.

No county in California does a very good job of collecting support payments. Los Angeles County, with a caseload larger than that of many states, has one of the worst records in the nation. The L.A. County district attorney’s office, the enforcer of child support orders, handles more than 500,000 cases. A Times series last year found that the office failed to collect support in nine of 10 cases and also knowingly billed men not related to the children at issue.

The Legislature should start by giving state officials primary authority for collection and enforcement. Proposals to create a Cabinet-level “czar” to coordinate child support programs statewide, and possibly to establish a Department of Child Support, should also be studied. The present arrangement, sharing responsibility between county district attorneys and the state Department of Social Services, has produced both deprivation and red tape. Pursuing deadbeat dads--or moms--is simply not a high enough priority for L.A. County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti or his counterparts across California. The state should hold district attorneys to clear standards of performance in child support enforcement, just as it does in criminal cases. When the D.A.’s office can’t or won’t perform, state officials should be able to take over troubled county programs or turn them over to other agencies or even outside contractors.

County officials should welcome new state muscle. County supervisors have made clear their dismay over Garcetti’s sorry record and demanded changes. But the Board of Supervisors has limited leverage over an elected district attorney and is uncertain about the best course. It cannot unilaterally restructure Garcetti’s operation or create a department to handle child support.

The immediate impetus for state action is the threat of up to $300 million in federal fines if California doesn’t implement a statewide computer system to track child support payments by 2001. But the best reason to act is that too many of the more than 3 million children owed support statewide are being shortchanged.