D.A. Opposes Proposal for State Child Support Unit

Saying local prosecutors have done a good job enforcing child support laws, a Ventura County official was in Sacramento on Tuesday to oppose legislation that would remove collections from the district attorney’s office.

Stan Trom, director of Ventura County’s Child Support Division, said the county collects child support payments at a rate higher than state and national averages. Although some reforms of the statewide system are needed, Trom said, it does not make sense to toss out prosecutors, who are in the best position to enforce child support orders.

The bill by President Pro Tem John Burton, which passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 6-1 vote, would remove authority for running child support programs from the state’s 58 district attorneys. If adopted as law, responsibility for collecting payments would probably shift to a state agency, a move that offers no guarantee of better performance, Trom said.

“We all acknowledge there needs to be improvement,” Trom said. “But there is nothing in any study for this major change in policy to say the state would do it better.”

Burton, a San Francisco Democrat, has the backing of child support advocates who say prosecutors around the state have done a poor job of collecting support over the years. Some authorities estimate that $8 billion may be owed statewide.

A companion bill in the Assembly calls not only for creating a new child support department but for Gov. Gray Davis to appoint an undersecretary for child support enforcement by January.

While stopping short of stripping prosecutors of authority, the bill by Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) would require that the state take over, or assign to another government agency, local child support departments that are failing.

Burton’s bill faces fierce opposition from the California District Attorneys Assn. Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury, president of the group, was unavailable for comment Tuesday. But his top deputy, Gregory D. Totten, said he believes very strongly that control of the program should remain with counties.

“We don’t feel that transferring it to some large, faceless bureaucracy in Sacramento would have the same accountability as a locally elected D.A. running the program,” he said.

There are 265 employees in Ventura County’s program, including 10 prosecutors and 115 caseworkers. Those workers juggle an average of 900 cases each, Trom said. The county collects payments in about 33% of its 32,200 open cases, well above the statewide rate of 17% and the national rate of 21%, according to a report prepared by Bradbury last fall. Totten said the county’s rate of collections is rising every year.

The program is inherently difficult to administer, he said, because nearly half of uncollected cases involve a deadbeat parent who is either in jail, out of the country or on welfare. And he disputed a report last year by Children Now, an advocacy group based in Oakland, that ranked Ventura County 38th out of the 58 counties in terms of collection.

The 14% collection rate that Children Now provided is based on data that is flawed because of problems with the state’s child support computer system, Totten said.

But Amy Dominguez-Arms, director of policy at Children Now, said she stood by the report.

“This shows that even in a wealthy county like Ventura, the support is not being collected,” Dominguez-Arms said. “And that underscores the need to change the way support is collected.”

Totten said there is room for improvement. The county wants to improve its responsiveness to the people it serves, mostly single mothers, he said. And it is awaiting the installation of a new computer system that officials hope will speed up the process of obtaining court orders for support, Totten said.

Barry Hammitt, chief of the local Service Employees International Union, said he is concerned that the proposed reforms would force hundreds of county workers to become state employees. If that conversion occurred, the workers could lose pension rights and have to wait five years before they become vested in the state’s benefit program, he said.

A better course would be to more tightly monitor the performance of district attorneys and publicize the work of those who are failing, Hammitt said.

“There would probably be a higher compliance if those elected D.A.s realize there is a potential source of embarrassment,” he said.

* POWER SHIFT: A legislative committee Tuesday voted to take the child support system away from district attorneys and put it in the hands of the state. A3