Few Changes Expected in New Child Support Plan

New legislation reforming the state child support system is designed to help the most desperate parents get the money owed them, but the people who run Ventura County’s program believe the results of the bill, which was signed by Gov. Gray Davis on Friday, will be negligible here.

Parents who need help collecting support will still go to the familiar brown government building on Telephone Road in Ventura. They will continue to meet with the same caseworkers. And prosecutors will still be called on to drag serious deadbeats into court.

Stripping collection responsibility from the district attorney and giving it to a newly created county department will probably not greatly increase the amount of support going to families, said Stan Trom, who has overseen the county’s Child Support Division for more than a decade.

“Basically, we scratch [Dist. Atty.] Mike Bradbury’s name off the door and stencil on the name of the person from the state,” Trom said.

But authors of the legislation say collections will climb steadily as counties take a unified approach to getting child support payments to the families that need them.

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Even counties like Ventura, which has done a better job than others, will see improvements in their programs, said Donna Hershkowitz, an aide to Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), who sponsored one of the reform bills.

“Ventura County has had a good program compared to Los Angeles,” Hershkowitz said. “But the goal is to make it even better.”

In January, the state will create a new department of child support services whose sole responsibility is to oversee collection efforts in California’s 58 counties. The fragmented approach taken by district attorneys will be replaced by uniform procedures and accountability, said Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson, (D-Santa Barbara), a reform proponent.

“Those are the two keys we have not had and the reason most of us believe we have not been as successful as we should be,” Jackson said. “You cannot run an effective system with 58 chiefs.”

The state department will have new tools to help track down delinquent parents. Cases that are more than 60 days overdue will be transferred to the Franchise Tax Board, which will monitor payments.

Employers will be required to report earnings of private contractors to the Employment Development Department for inclusion in a registry of employees. And a statewide computer system will be created that allows counties to share information.

Reform supporters say California’s track record in collection is miserable, with more than $10 million in back support owed. The inclusion of the Franchise Tax Board in enforcement is expected to increase counties’ ability to collect payments.

The Franchise Tax Board runs large data matches against employer records, bank records and financial documents, a powerful tool in finding assets that can be used to pay support, Trom said. But Ventura County is one of several counties that have worked with the state board since 1995 as part of a pilot project, he said.

“We are using that same power on our cases,” Trom said. “So I am not expecting to see a major increase in collections.”

Ventura County’s performance varies depending on the measures used to rate it.

A 1998 report by the National Center for Youth Law ranked it 38th out of 58 counties, collecting just 14% of support owed. But local officials have challenged those figures as flawed and say they actually collect payments in about one-third of open cases.

No one disputes that collections are on the rise. Ventura County’s collections rose 16.5% to $43,966,599 for the year ending in June.

Bradbury said his office will cooperate fully to ensure that the changeover, expected to occur sometime after January 2001, causes no disruption to the 32,000 families Ventura County’s child support system serves. He is expected to announce the formation of a transition team in coming weeks.

“We will do whatever is necessary to effect a smooth transition,” Bradbury said. “We have a great child support staff. They are dedicated to helping children, and that won’t change.”

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Child Support Division employees are guaranteed jobs in the new county department at the same pay level and with the same benefits, Trom said. The 170 child-support officers, clerical workers, accountants and administrators won’t even have to move their desks--their current location is already geographically separate from the district attorney’s criminal division.

“It ought to be a basically seamless transition,” said Barry Hammitt, leader of the union representing the employees.

The future of eight deputy district attorneys and six investigators is less certain, Trom said. Some of the attorneys may elect to leave the district attorney’s office to become child support attorneys. The county may also decide to contract with the district attorney’s office for services during a transition period.

Investigators’ jobs are most in peril, Trom said. If they transfer to the new county department, most will lose the benefits they receive as law enforcement officers, he said.

Hershkowitz agrees that the legislation does not address investigators. But some kind of compromise can be worked out, such as offering them the ability to contract their services to the county, she said.

“The transition doesn’t occur immediately,” Hershkowitz said. “It’s something we have time to examine.”

The principal job for the county Board of Supervisors will be selecting a director to run the department. Trom said he is interested in the position, which would require him to report to whoever is selected to run the state child support department.

Local officials worry that transferring authority over the program to the state poses some risks.

Although the state has committed $157 million to pay the local share of costs for the coming year, Trom and others worry about what will happen when the current strong economy turns sour.

In past years, the state Legislature has raided counties’ property tax revenues to balance its own budget. If the state decides at some point to cut child support funding, the counties will be responsible for the difference, Trom said.

“Counties will be vulnerable to paying the local costs of child support, where they didn’t have to do that before,” he said.

Such hand-wringing is unnecessary, reform supporters say. By creating a new state department, California has loudly declared that child support collection will be a priority. And lawmakers are not likely to back away from that, Assemblywoman Jackson said.

“The district attorneys have had this job for 24 years and they haven’t been impressive,” she said.

“It’s time to transition to a new system that will do a much better job.”