End of Welfare Leaves Rural Poor in a Bind

Felipa Ayon sells parts off the Oldsmobile marooned in her frontyard -- the radio, window handles, anything for a few dollars. Even before asthma pushed her from Tulare County’s grape fields three years ago, she needed a welfare check to make it through the dead of winter.

Though Ayon still gets a government check for four of her children, the nation’s reconstructed welfare policy has dried up her own $110 monthly payment for good. With a fourth-grade education and no English skills, Ayon is hunkering down in economic survival mode.

Come grape season, she will care for the children of farmhands behind the floral curtains of her home in the tiny town of Earlimart. Her pay: $7 a day per child.

Hundreds of miles to the north, in Trinity County, Pamela Hayward is trying to avoid a similar slide to the economic margins. She has a year to go before her welfare payments end.

But the recovering drug addict faces many of the toughest challenges of the rural poor: no phone, no car and a struggle to get the psychological help she needs to hold a job. Welfare recipients in her neighborhood wait a month to see a psychiatrist -- and then only on the Internet.

There’s one more problem: Finding work in this fading timber county is next to impossible. Hayward has begun plying the main street of Weaverville with her resume. But to get the type of bank or government position she wants, she fears, “Somebody has to retire or -- I hate to say it -- pass away.”

The goal of the 1996 federal welfare overhaul was to goad families from a life of dependency into the workaday world. The law established stringent work requirements and placed a five-year lifetime cap on benefits. Now those time limits are kicking in across the country.

Often lost in discussions of the reconfigured safety net is the effect on rural America. Welfare reform was tailored to cities, where caseloads are concentrated.

But it is rural counties that face the most entrenched joblessness and deepest poverty, with work prospects often limited to seasonal positions in agriculture or tourism. Moreover, the building blocks for finding and holding jobs -- buses, child care, classes and training -- are usually in extremely short supply.

In California, clocks didn’t start ticking until 1998. Since January, when adults began hitting their lifetime welfare limits, visits to two of the state’s most challenged counties have hinted at likely outcomes for families: a slide into deeper poverty, the flight to cities and other states and the further growth of an informal cash economy that begets hand-to-mouth survival.

The premise of welfare reform, said Henry Brady, a UC Berkeley public policy professor who is studying the issue, is that “ ‘There are a lot of people who are not even trying to get work. Let’s get them to go get work.’ That’s not what’s going on with these folks. It’s just ludicrous to think” that they can all get jobs.

Worst Poverty Rate

Sprawled across the San Joaquin Valley’s middle, Tulare County is California’s top agricultural producer. It is also burdened with the highest poverty rate and the lowest education level. The unemployment rate is among the state’s steepest. (At 18.1% in February, it was nearly three times Los Angeles County’s.) And farm towns such as Earlimart fare even worse. Last year’s jobless rate there averaged 44%.

Across the county, the rhythms of the growing season put dollars in the pockets of field workers such as Maria Ceja -- who also has hit her lifetime welfare limit -- then take them away. The pain pinches people like Ayon, who has no baby-sitting work when fields are empty. It burdens retailers and contractors, who see demands for home improvements dwindle.

Mirroring a nationwide trend, welfare caseloads in the county have fallen since California began its reform efforts, but a relatively high percentage of the population remains on government aid. Though the rolls nationwide have held steady since 2000, Tulare’s have begun to climb again.

Tulare’s English speakers have left the system but, for the most part, Spanish speakers haven’t. Many are children whose undocumented parents have never been eligible for aid. Others -- like Ceja and Ayon -- are there legally, but entry-level jobs that would keep them from losing ground after leaving welfare are virtually nonexistent, said UC Davis agricultural economist Philip Martin.

Rather than getting pulled off the rolls by decent jobs, recipients in the San Joaquin Valley are likely to get pushed off welfare by time limits or because they failed to fill out paperwork or attend job training classes.

For Ceja, there is a thin ray of hope. While still receiving her $130 monthly welfare payment, she and Ayon traveled the 25 miles to Visalia in Ceja’s 1985 Buick. There, they learned to scrub floors, clean windows, wash dishes and work a grill. Ceja recently found fill-in work -- at $8 an hour -- at the elementary school cafeteria near her home.

But she gets called only when someone is ill or on vacation. Earlimart’s few restaurants are family-run and there are no office buildings to clean, so permanent prospects are slim.

Ayon’s situation is worse. Like nearly a quarter of the county’s adult population, she has less than a ninth-grade education. And her asthma prevents a return to the fields.

“I thought they would be able to help me,” Ayon, 45, said of her training. “But then I saw the girls who spoke English and had a high school diploma, and they couldn’t find work.”

With her gas service scheduled for next-day shut-off, Ayon recently made the half-hour trip to a nonprofit in Tulare to plead for help with her bill. These days, her hopes are for her seven children, whose sports awards and photographs line the living room wall. Ayon proudly points to one daughter, a Marine.

“They tell me: ‘We’re going to pay for everything so you won’t have to worry,’ ” she said. “That lifts my spirits.”

Ceja and Ayon plan to stay put. Like many others, they will probably lean on the town’s already strapped food bank.

Others are eager to leave, and the county has been happy to help. An Office of Education program -- MOVE, or More Opportunity for Viable Employment -- has paid to ship more than 1,000 welfare recipients outside Tulare County in the last four years. They have headed for Midwestern meat-packing plants, Las Vegas resorts, any place where jobs are more plentiful.

They are evidence of a rural trend that academics like Brady and Martin believe will intensify as time limits set in: an exodus to cities.

Sherrie Martin has her eye on Long Beach, where she lived until three years ago. A mother of three girls whose partner has three daughters and an adopted grandson, she moved her clan to Tulare County’s Porterville for a fresh start; instead she found greater despair.

Martin recently discovered that her welfare benefits will expire at the end of this month.

“There’s nothing here for us,” said Martin, 39, who hopes her accounting experience will land her a job. “We were doing better when we were living in motels” in Long Beach.

Just 1 Mill Survives

The state’s major highways do not graze Trinity County. It doesn’t even have a traffic light. Apart from the retirees who move to its pristine riverfront land, this forest county deep in spotted owl habitat is also poor.

Only one mill, in Weaverville, survived shifting forest policies that limited logging on federal land. Government is now the largest employer. But even coveted county jobs pay so little that some workers are eligible for welfare, and one probation officer moonlights as a waiter at a cafe.

In Hayfork, many families pulled out to seek jobs elsewhere after the last mill closed six years ago.

The February unemployment rate of 13.5% was more than twice that of Los Angeles County. But that’s just part of the story: Half the adults in this predominantly white county don’t even seek jobs, so they aren’t counted in labor force data.

Some scold their neighbors, saying they have a slothful, welfare mentality. But even many working people have been forced to turn to welfare.

The bartender needed it. So did the owner of one local market. As did the self-proclaimed “unofficial mayor of Hayfork.” A millworker for nearly 15 years, Mike Wyckoff opened his own store when Sierra Pacific pulled out. But the credit he extended to strapped locals did him in, and he and his wife turned to aid.

“My ego didn’t allow that to happen very easy,” said Wyckoff, 48, a gray-bearded Little League coach who now supplements a grocery store job with local construction, fencing and roofing gigs.

Moving people out of poverty isn’t easy. On a recent day at the county’s job center in Weaverville, listings posted on a state electronic system numbered 10. Los Angeles County’s count that day: 6,018.

As in Tulare County, Trinity rolls have shrunk, but few people are finding jobs. Of those who stopped participating in job training in the last quarter of 2002, only 14% found employment. The rest were exempted by doctor’s notes, booted for failing to follow welfare rules or just moved away.

Weaverville at least has a Burger King and a Subway -- luxuries to a place like Hayfork. But Pamela Hayward has worked those kinds of jobs: Miller’s Drive-In, Allan’s Oak Pit, La Casita Mexican Restaurant. All paid too little to lift her and her children -- 12-year-old Shashena and 10-year-old Dakota -- off welfare.

If she strikes out in her search by the time her aid runs out, Hayward will seek another fast-food job, she said. Such a position, itself not a sure thing, would keep her mired in poverty despite all her recent efforts.

“I’m trying so hard. I just don’t want to give up,” said Hayward, whose family moved to the area to log four generations ago. “My children want to be raised here and I don’t want to leave.”

Behind on rent and bills, Hayward recently sold her 1977 Toyota Corolla for $200 to pay debts. She bums rides from her mother to get to her on-the-job training as a county office clerk. Friends drive her to 12-step meetings in a nearby town.

If they can’t offer many jobs, at least county Health and Human Services Department employees can offer personal touches. The department has bought welfare recipients firewood, hauled their trash and purchased many bunk beds for children who were sleeping on the floor, said director Linda Wright.

When all other options failed, county workers have driven to get welfare recipients to appointments and classes.

But getting residents with no telephones or cars to participate in the requirements of welfare is just one battle. Moving them into jobs is the war. Few skills are taught at Shasta College’s annex in Weaverville.

So Donna Pate, who oversees the county’s welfare employment program, creates her own training alternatives.

There was the waitress certification program, designed to help people get summer jobs after fishing and boating season begins. Pate devised OfficeWorld, the clerical program that Hayward attended to professionalize her skills.

Kelly Young landed on aid after her ex-husband abandoned her and her two daughters, ages 10 and 6, at a campground with nothing -- not even identification. She gained her footing in Hayfork, where her parents live. Then the grim reality of the job market sank in.

She now works two jobs: one for $7.25 an hour, afternoons and weekends, six miles outside town; the other a graveyard shift, 10 miles out, for $25 a night.

With no local bus service, Young must catch rides to the jobs. While her daughters sleep elsewhere, she gets her elderly client to bed safely, then rises whenever she hears the woman’s tinny bell.

On a recent day, Young’s daughters played in the family’s rented two-bedroom home. A blue bedsheet doubled as a window drape, and the furniture -- donated by neighbors -- was battered. A piggybank on the TV console held $47.57 scrounged by the girls from beneath sofa cushions. Though Chantel, 10, dreams of a Nintendo set, she tells her mom the jar money should be saved “for spring and summer clothes.”

Still, Young and the girls remain hopeful. Young has enrolled in a certified nurse’s assistant program, held twice yearly at Weaverville’s library. Within a year, she hopes for a job at Trinity Hospital, the only county facility. Then, Young says, she will add her name to a two-year waiting list for a licensed vocational nurse certification course at Redding’s Shasta College.