Welfare Overhaul Now Urged in Steps

Reacting to criticism from some quarters that Los Angeles County’s proposed welfare reform plan lacks sufficient detail and a strategy to achieve its goals, welfare officials now say they want the Board of Supervisors to consider key measures over a period of several months rather than all at once.

Important issues such as child care and child support, transportation, post-employment services and community service jobs would be voted on and phased in over the next year and a half to give county officials ample time to develop specific proposals and levels of funding.

This method for implementing new welfare policies will be presented to the supervisors Jan. 6 for approval--four days before the deadline for counties to submit their welfare-to-work plans to Sacramento. Officials with the county Department of Public Social Services who are developing the welfare proposals will also ask the board to approve a skeleton plan to be submitted to the state that would govern welfare policies as comprehensive programs are adopted.

The new strategy represents a reversal and follows criticism by some supervisors that their offices have not been sufficiently involved in the process.

Welfare officials had tried to forestall such complaints by engaging advocates for the poor and for children, private industry, educators, government leaders and welfare recipients in an unprecedented collaboration on the design of the welfare plan, which was presented to the board for the first time Dec. 16.

Welfare officials had also set up monthly meetings with the staffs of all five county supervisors. But some supervisors were not satisfied.

“I think the department could have solicited the input of board offices and staff, many of whom have good people working in the welfare field and have a perspective other than a departmental one,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. “As much effort as was put into getting input from advocates and clients, a similar effort would not have been much to ask for from board offices. But I think that is being done now.”

Yaroslavsky and other supervisors have also complained that they had expected the plan to include far more specifics about how welfare-to-work goals would be achieved.

“For example, one of the areas I’m most focused on right now is mental health and child care,” Yaroslavsky said. “I was not satisfied with what I heard at the board meeting with what they planned to do with the mental health component and other human services.”

Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke expressed similar concerns in the areas of child care resources and alcohol and drug abuse services for women.

The plan “addresses them but it does not have the specifics yet,” she said. “We’ll continue to be involved. This is just the basics we’ve seen. I want to make sure we are involved as they develop this.”

Welfare officials concede that they may have unintentionally raised expectations about the scope of the welfare plan that supervisors will consider next month and say that they had always planned to implement various new policies over a period of time.

This strategy will not hinder the provision of services to welfare recipients, officials say. For example, new welfare applicants will only begin enrolling in CalWORKS--as the new state program is called--in April, so some issues do not have to be resolved immediately.

And it would be impossible to implement every aspect of the massive welfare overhaul in one fell swoop, they insist. For one thing, federal and state authorities have yet to complete their drafting of rules and regulations that will govern many policies.

“I think in retrospect that if we had talked more about this being the vision of what we want to do rather than having labeled it early on as an implementation plan, it would have been more accurate,” said department Director Lynn W. Bayer. “That label carried certain expectations with it that the document couldn’t fulfill.”

The confusion and complaints after so many months of careful planning on the part of welfare officials illustrate once more the difficulty of reaching consensus on the thorny issue of how best to bring welfare reform to the nation’s most populous county.

For example, although most supervisors say they agree with the overall direction of the plan, there are signs that each will seek to champion different issues that could wind up competing for funds.

And Los Angeles-area legislators are offering opinions on the merits of various proposals.

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At a Hall of Administration news conference after the release of the plan, Assembly Majority Leader Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) used a cautionary report by the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness to fault county welfare plans.

The report “should be an eye-opener for the Board of Supervisors as they implement welfare reform in Los Angeles County,” Villaraigosa said. “It has confirmed widespread predictions that job creation, wage levels, transportation, homelessness and the lack of affordable housing, and child care would be major issues in moving people from welfare to work. . . . The proposed plan does not succeed in overcoming them.”

The massive federal welfare overhaul enacted last year gave states broad authority to craft laws tailored to the needs of their populations. But under CalWORKS, counties were handed the task of working out the nuts and bolts of welfare-to-work programs, including making key decisions about the provision of support services. To implement the plan, Los Angeles County will receive nearly $390 million in state and federal funds in the first year.

With a welfare population larger than the entire public assistance caseloads of all states except New York, the plan devised by Los Angeles County officials has been eagerly awaited because it could reverberate throughout the state and nation.

More than 1.6 million county residents receive some form of public assistance, with 768,000 people enrolled in the largest cash assistance program, formerly known as Aid to Families With Dependent Children and now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

What the supervisors will be asked to consider Jan. 6 is a broad outline, required by the state, of services the county intends to deliver.

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Key recommendations of the proposed plan include the following:

* Mothers would be exempted from welfare-to-work activities until their youngest child reaches the age of 1. With subsequent births, mothers would receive a six-month exemption. However, parents would be encouraged to find work and would have to meet with case managers periodically to discuss time limits and child care services.

* Single parents would be required to engage in 26 hours of work participation each week in order to maintain a family grant. The county has the option to require from 26 to 32 hours per week from July 1998 to July 1999, when 32 hours will become mandatory under state law.

* The county would contract with child care agencies to administer the first stage of child care services.

* Families losing cash benefits because members become employed would be offered Medi-Cal, subsidized child care and employment retention services.

The board would also consider a timetable for deciding other key issues. Detailed proposals for child care, mental health and substance abuse services, as well as services for victims of domestic violence, would be presented in March. Post-employment services would be considered in May and transportation and job creation goals would be taken up in June.

Under the federal welfare overhaul, most welfare recipients can receive only five years of benefits during their lives. But each state can exempt 20% of families deemed hardship cases. The head of each family on welfare must find work within two years or the family loses cash benefits.

Although some local advocates and legislators may fear that Los Angeles County is--some might say in typical fashion--lumbering sluggishly along in its attempt to enact welfare reform, others are more charitable and say that the county has made great strides in what is a gargantuan task.

Supervisor Don Knabe praised the county department for involving a wide variety of people in the planning process.

“It’s one of the classic examples for the first time of where Los Angeles County has been out in front on the issue of welfare reform, by being very proactive,” Knabe said. “You could always include more people, but at least from a starting document standpoint, it is a fluid document that’s going to need change. I think that is what the board means.”

To date, only five other counties have submitted welfare plans to the state to beat its Jan. 10 deadline, said Margaret Pena, a welfare lobbyist for the California State Assn. of Counties.

“I’m sure all counties are going to be fine-tuning their plans as time goes along,” she said. “I don’t find that at all surprising and certainly don’t look at it as a setback. As I understand it, [L.A. County] is going to meet all statutory deadlines. Look at how long it took us to do base closures, and in this situation we are changing in a short period of time a [policy] that has existed for 60 years. Los Angeles County has done a tremendous job in working toward that.”

Bayer said the proposed county plan is only the beginning of a long period of scrutiny of ways in which to usher welfare recipients from dependence to independence.

“This is an evolutionary process,” she said. “The future success depends on our being able to create new and innovative programs and that takes time. We can’t do that overnight.”