Budget shell game

Several months ago, Supervisor Don Knabe asked county officials to figure out how to best use federal stimulus money to create jobs for welfare recipients. A plan was hammered out, and the board adopted it on Tuesday, creating summer employment for 10,000 Los Angeles County parents.

That would have been great news, except that just one day earlier, Knabe found himself trudging the Capitol halls in Sacramento, together with his colleague Zev Yaroslavsky and other county officials, trying to ward off wholesale elimination of the state’s welfare-to-work program. If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger follows through on his plan to scrap CalWorks, there can be no Los Angeles County Workforce Stimulus Plan, because there would be no state agency able to put the federal funds -- and the thousands of able-bodied county residents -- to work.

How, exactly, does that save any money? Instead of 10,000 people paying their rent with cash earned from jobs at Starbucks or child-care centers (two examples of more than 300 from a pilot program), and instead of area businesses having to pay their new hires only 20 cents on the dollar for the duration of the program (federal stimulus money pays the rest), the would-be workers remain on the public dole. Taxpayers support them for up to 60 months, and their children for even longer.

That’s the problem with many of the plans to slash state spending by borrowing from, or passing the burden on to, counties. Sacramento’s books may be tidied up, but the cost of government goes up instead of down. For 30 years now, California has been disguising those kinds of increased costs and service cuts by playing a shell game with counties.

Since proposing his May budget revision, with its more than $24 billion in cuts, the governor has sent mixed signals on whether he truly wants to eliminate CalWorks -- or Medi-Cal, Healthy Families and the other human services programs his budget would scrap. Speaking to The Times’ editorial board on Wednesday, Schwarzenegger reiterated some of his other plans, such as privatizing prisons, but said the point of such proposals was to save enough money to be able to keep “all those very important programs.”

That’s not to say that CalWorks can’t possibly be trimmed. In backing away from his plan to terminate key human services programs, the governor alluded to cost-saving “reforms.” Let’s hear some details. Bureaucracy can gum up the works, so innovation should be encouraged. But in working through the governor’s plan, the Legislature must keep in mind programs like the one Knabe is spearheading. It does no good to slash from one end of government if that means an even steeper increase in costs on another.