California and the West : Assembly OKs Child Support Department

A groundbreaking reform bill that strips California’s district attorneys of their job of collecting overdue child support cleared one house of the Legislature Thursday and was was expected to pass the other this morning and land on the governor’s desk.

Gov. Gray Davis, who has indicated that he will sign it despite intense lobbying by prosecutors, insisted on one amendment that allows the new child support offices in some cases to contract with district attorneys for legal help in the next four years. That will allow prosecutors across the state to hold on to the 360 attorneys they have working child support cases and phase them into the criminal sides of their offices during the transition.

But child support advocates said they were untroubled by the change and were elated at the passage of reforms they had sought for years.

“I can’t believe this,” said Leora Gershenzohn of the National Center for Youth Law. “After 24 years of failed child support systems, California is on the brink of creating one of the best child support systems in the nation.”

Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), author of the Assembly version of the bill, said: “It’s a wonderful result.”

The amended package, which cleared the Assembly on a 45-34 vote and was expected to sail through the Senate this morning, creates a state department of child support and moves the nuts and bolts of collections to new county departments responsible to local boards of supervisors.

District attorneys, who had complained that their recent improvements in collections were ignored by legislators, vowed to cooperate in the two-year transition period.

“The bottom line is we have a difference of opinion with the Legislature in regards to moving the D.A.s from the program,” said Bill Otterbeck of the California District Attorneys Assn., “but that will not change by one iota our commitment to the program and our ability to ensure, to the extent possible, that this transition is as smooth as possible.”

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), a co-author of the Senate version of the bill with Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), said he believes the district attorneys will cooperate during the transition and said that implementation is now the key.

“The proof of the pudding will be in the eating,” Burton said. “But it will mean for a more efficient system.”

Child support advocates and outside analysts have long criticized California’s use of district attorneys to collect child support, saying that the politically powerful prosecutors have repeatedly rebuffed attempts to control their operations and created a fractured statewide system.

Prosecutors have long stalled such reform efforts, fighting to keep control of the program and the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants it brings in annually.

Reform efforts picked up new momentum after a Times series last year revealed that the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office ran the worst-ranked child support unit in the state, failing to collect money in nine of 10 cases and pursuing the wrong men in thousands of child support actions.

Two other child support reforms were also moving through the Legislature in the crush of bills as the session drew to an end Thursday. One bill by Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley) to allow parents to appeal their child support judgments appeared to be headed toward the governor’s desk.

The fate of another, more complex bill by Aroner to begin the construction of a unified statewide computer system was still up in the air Thursday night. Advocates said that if the bill does not garner the two-thirds votes needed for passage it could expose California to as much as $150 million in federal penalties for failing to have a certified child support computer.