Hufford OKs 2 New Child-Abuse Workers

A week after criticizing her management style and denying her request for an exemption to a hiring freeze, Ventura County’s top administrator said Friday he is now convinced welfare chief Barbara Fitzgerald is making efforts to be “on the team” and deserves two new employees to help investigate child abuse.

In exchange, Fitzgerald, director of the Human Services Agency, has agreed to shift five members of her existing staff to fill in as child-protection workers until the freeze is over, perhaps by July.

She also will continue a review of employee conduct such as turning away public requests for help, which triggered Chief Administrative Officer Harry Hufford’s initial criticism.

“I’ve agreed to fund two jobs for her that she considers very important,” Hufford said. One worker will coordinate foster home placements and a second will train workers who investigate child abuse.

Fitzgerald said Friday she was grateful for Hufford’s willingness to let her restate her case in the wake of last week’s events.

“I’ve always agreed to be a team player,” she said. “I really appreciate the fact he’s allowing me to fill those two positions.”

Hufford was upset with Fitzgerald partly because four of her subordinates took their case for help to county Supervisor Kathy Long, circumventing the chief administrator--a chronic problem Hufford has vowed to end.

Supervisor Frank Schillo, a critic of Fitzgerald, said Friday he was satisfied with her recent actions.

“I think she was forced to do her homework,” he said. “Good for Harry for insisting [on facts] rather than the emotionalism and smoke and mirrors we’ve encountered in the past.”

Hufford’s decision followed a trying week for Fitzgerald.

First, Hufford turned down her request to hire new staff, after she provided unconvincing data to back up her claim that the hiring freeze imposed by Hufford in January was stretching child-abuse workers too thin.

Within days, Hufford charged that a member of Fitzgerald’s staff told a resident calling about a child’s black eye that the hiring freeze meant the agency could start no new investigations.

Although Fitzgerald denied any knowledge of such calls, county supervisors criticized her, and Hufford publicly chastised her.

Then her review revealed three instances where employees told callers that child-abuse workers were too busy to start new cases. Fitzgerald promised she would end such conduct, reassign workers to patch any shortage and give Hufford a better report. By Friday, Hufford said, she had fulfilled those promises and convinced him she wasn’t responsible for the phone call fiasco.

In their first meeting, Fitzgerald told Hufford 81 employees oversaw 891 children--a ratio he figured at 11 cases to one employee, compared with a statewide standard of 35 to 1.

Fitzgerald’s new data show that more than 1,600 children are in the county system, and that the emergency-worker ratio is actually 29 to 1, compared with a statewide standard of about 16 to 1. The two new workers and shifts in responsibility bring that ratio much closer to standard, Fitzgerald said.

Hufford imposed the hiring freeze to erase a $5-million, mid-year budget shortfall. Since the freeze began, he said, “a modest number” of exemptions to the freeze have been granted.

“It’s a freeze with compassion,” he said.