Child Support Reform Clears Senate Panel

A key committee of the state Legislature overwhelmingly agreed Tuesday that California’s beleaguered child support system should be taken away from district attorneys and put under the auspices of a new state department.

The 6-1 vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee marks the first time in years that any serious progress has been made in Sacramento to strip the child support program from county prosecutors.

This proposal, however, has been spearheaded by one of the state’s most powerful lawmakers, Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), and co-sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank).

“This is very significant,” Burton said after the vote. “Now, it’s up to the opposition to explain why this bill isn’t any good as opposed to us explaining why it makes sense.”

Unlike several other child support reform packages already winding their way through the Legislature, the Burton-Schiff bill, SB 542, would over three years remove the program from the control of the 58 district attorneys who have run it for two decades.

Oversight would transfer to a new state Department of Child Support Enforcement. The agency would be responsible for ensuring that support is collected and distributed for about 3 million children statewide.

California’s program is widely viewed as one of the nation’s worst, with unpaid support by some estimates totaling as high as $8 billion.

In Los Angeles County, which runs the largest program of its kind in the country, a Times investigation found that Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s office has failed to collect child support in the vast majority of its 500,000 cases, while simultaneously failing to distribute millions of dollars that was collected because, the office claimed, it could not locate the proper recipients.

For years Orange County’s child support collection rate ranked near the bottom among the state’s 58 counties. Recently that performance has improved dramatically, with collection more than doubling in the last five years. But the department still fails to collect for children in nearly 85% of the 142,000 cases on file.

The child support division, which gets 38% of the Orange County district attorney’s annual budget of about $78 million, has 14 attorneys and more than 500 support staff.

The $30 million earmarked for the division is an important source of funds for the district attorney’s office, which recoups from the federal government about 66% of money spent on child support enforcement. In addition, district attorneys can recover more money through performance incentives. Last year, the first that the county met minimum state requirements for enforcement, the office received nearly $4 million in incentives, said Assistant Dist. Atty. Jan Sturla, who heads the department.

Orange County Dist. Atty. Anthony J. Rackauckas, who campaigned last fall on promises of tougher tactics to collect child support payments, would not comment Tuesday, spokeswoman Tori Richards said. But Sturla said his boss told him Tuesday that he believes local authorities should enforce child support collections.

“When I talked to him his words were: ‘We want the program studied. We think it belongs with the D.A. at the local level. We think local control is the best way to run the program,’ ” Sturla said.

Some parents who have been involved in the system, however, said the change would be welcome.

“It is absolutely necessary that they take this away from these people,” said Phil Rowland of South Pasadena, who is locked in a battle with the Orange County district attorney’s office. Rowland has maintained for two years that the child, now 14, is not his. Officials at the district attorney’s office say they have an order saying Rowland is the father, and they are required by law to collect child support from him.

“From Day 1 they were out to win,” said Rowland, who learned last week that his appeal for a blood test to establish paternity of the child had been denied. “They do not care about the truth.”

Rowland, who also has an 8-year-old son, said he is in danger of losing his home and car. He has spent about $7,000 in court fees and lawyers’ bills, and he is running out of options to stop the district attorney’s office from collecting tens of thousands of dollars in back support that officials say he owes.