Internal Report Tells of Family Services ‘Chaos’

A confidential report that apparently triggered the resignation of the director of the Department of Children and Family Services describes the troubled agency as in “chaos” and raises serious questions about its ability to adequately care for the 70,000 abused and neglected children legally in its custody.

Thursday marked the first day of a new era for the embattled agency, as veteran Los Angeles County bureaucrat Sandra Davis took over as the department’s interim director, holding a series of management meetings and vowing to make children’s protection the department’s top priority. The Board of Supervisors put Davis in the job, replacing Director Peter Digre, in hopes she could turn around the nation’s largest child welfare agency. But the difficulties she confronts are spelled out in harsh language in the confidential report written by board staff members, a copy of which was obtained by The Times.

The document paints a picture of a $1.2-billion agency rife with mismanagement, deception and favoritism and blames the controversial Digre for failing to deliver on promises to improve.

Drawing on a lengthy series of audits by both the county’s own auditor-controller’s office and the private Price Waterhouse firm, the report alleges that the Department of Children and Family Services has allowed serious overcrowding to persist in the county’s own home for abused and neglected children, that it has deliberately misled the supervisors about its internal finances, and that Digre failed to discipline his managers for engaging in favoritism.

“A complete review of the findings of the Price Waterhouse audit makes it clear that the department is in a state of chaos,” the report says. “ . . . Management deficiencies have led to severe personnel and morale problems and, most importantly, to major failures in the delivery of services to abused and neglected children.”

Critics say those failures culminated in the deaths of three foster children over the past three months, two at the same foster care agency.

Those deaths “are the result of the problem of mismanagement,” said Supervisor Mike Antonovich, the department’s harshest critic on the board. “Management was more interested in preserving the status quo” than in protecting children, he said.

Digre did not return a call for comment Thursday, but in the past he has strongly defended his administration of the sprawling agency, a daunting task which won him admirers in the child welfare field but ended with his alienation from his own social workers and the board.

The supervisors’ report is dated April 27 and was presented to Digre, sources say, to urge him to leave. The next week, while the board was traveling to Washington, Digre walked into The Times’ offices and announced his resignation, which he said was a consequence of his own decision.

Digre arrived at the department in 1991 as the agency was about to be taken over by the state for failing to monitor foster care. At the time, he was praised as a powerful speaker and activist manager, but he quickly became a lightning rod for dissatisfaction within and outside the agency.

A nimble politician who was haunted in recent months by continued rumors that he would be ousted, Digre lasted eight years in what is considered to be one of the toughest child welfare jobs in the nation. Critics said he promised more than he could produce.

The board’s report expresses the evident frustration of supervisors at how they have had to “micromanage” the department and spin off its responsibilities to other county agencies because of what the document terms Digre’s inability to fix problems.

Among those were Digre’s failure to create hundreds of new beds for foster children, some of whom were crowded into the county’s home for abused and neglected children. Nor was Digre able to hire a new adoptions head a year after that division leader’s accidental death, leaving social workers with staggering caseloads because of improper referrals, the report says. The county auditor-controller was forced to step in when the department’s child abuse hotline went unanswered. Although he pledged to keep foster children in their original communities, this occurred only in a minority of cases, an issue that drew heated comments from supervisors at a meeting weeks before Digre’s resignation.

The report raises other serious questions about Digre’s tenure. It notes that the department took $4 million it should have paid to foster parents to patch a deficit in its own budget and says that “the auditor-controller has been requested to make an unprecedented number of investigations regarding sexual harassment, discrimination and other improprieties.”

In two instances, the report alleges, Digre failed to discipline managers for sexual harassment or favoritism in promotions. The report also states that the county’s affirmative action office has taken the lead in investigating discrimination complaints at one field office, “demonstrating the failure of the director to deal promptly and effectively with this situation.”

The two-part Price Waterhouse audits of the department, which appeared last summer, also painted a sweeping picture of an agency with problems at many levels--with morale, employee retention, management and caseloads. The board did not grant Digre a raise after receiving the audit, the report states.

“I prefer to look ahead, not back,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky on Thursday. “ . . . With the transition that is underway and the selection of a new director in the weeks ahead, we have an opportunity to turn [the department] around.”

Until the board finds a permanent replacement, Davis will run the agency, assisted by another well-respected county administrator, Walt Kelly.

In an interview, Davis said her job would be ensuring that the agency is “responsive and accountable. . . . We have room for improvement. We have need for improvement.”

Noting that she has no experience in the child welfare field, Davis said that “evolution, not revolution” will be her theme. On her first day, she said it was far too early to know what changes she will implement at the agency, which has 6,000 employees.

“I’m not a miracle worker,” she said. “But we’re going to give it a try.”