County Expected to Slash General Relief

In an attempt to save about $40 million annually, the cash-strapped Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors is expected to vote next week to drop able-bodied general relief recipients from the welfare rolls after they have collected benefits for four months, and to deny those with drug or alcohol problems any payments unless they are in a treatment program.

General Relief, which currently may continue indefinitely, goes to the poorest of all welfare recipients, those who are ineligible for other forms of assistance. Many of them are homeless people. But unlike other welfare programs, which are funded by a mix of federal and state dollars, General Relief is paid completely out of the county’s annual budget, which is expected to be about $12 billion next year.

Places in drug and alcohol treatment programs are in notoriously short supply, and many of the General Relief recipients receiving such help use welfare to cover their costs.

The supervisors reached a consensus on the politically sensitive move during a series of private meetings and phone calls this week, according to county officials. Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and other top county officials predicted Friday that the measure will pass at Tuesday’s meeting with at least four votes. Conservative Supervisor Mike Antonovich reportedly is balking because he wants even deeper cuts.

“I just don’t think we have a choice,” said Burke, one of the board’s most liberal members. “As much as I hate to see us do this, we have to bite the bullet.”

Conservative Supervisor Don Knabe said that, for some board members, “it’s also hard to justify not having time limits for those able-bodied recipients” of General Relief money.

Burke said the proposal--whose details still had not been made public Friday afternoon--is a response to a court decision handed down in late March. In that ruling, a panel of appellate judges ordered the county to pay as much as $160 million it had improperly withheld from General Relief payments.

That panel scolded the supervisors for “illegally” cutting $73 a month from as many as 90,000 General Relief recipients in the early 1990s, and ordered them to pay back the money with interest, as well as the legal fees and other costs incurred by a consortium of homeless rights advocates who initiated the lawsuit.

To help counties respond to federal welfare cutbacks, the state Legislature voted more than a year ago to allow counties to impose time limits on General Relief recipients. Burke said the county has waited as long as possible to impose such restrictions.

But advocates for the homeless immediately decried the move, saying the supervisors are trying to balance their problematic budget on the backs of the poor. They also accused the board of trying to quietly engineer an end-run around the March court ruling.

Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, likened the board’s proposal to “robbing the poor” a second time.

“The county did something that was absolutely illegal and immoral and were told they couldn’t do it, and now they’re doing it again, but in a different way,” said Erlenbusch. “In an insidious way, they undo the victory” won by legal advocates for the poor.

County sources confirmed Friday that the proposal includes an effort to force thousands of General Relief recipients who have drug and alcohol problems to undergo some kind of treatment before they can be eligible for any money.

The county is expecting to save $8 million a year when many of those with drug and alcohol problems cannot meet the new eligibility requirements, according to Burke. Another $31 million would be saved by cutting payments to able-bodied recipients after a maximum of four months, the sources said.

If the proposal passes, the county would borrow money to pay back those General Relief recipients who are owed an average of more than $1,000 in back benefits, then pay back those loans with money saved by cutting future General Relief benefits, sources told The Times.

The new cuts would probably be implemented July 1, at the start of the fiscal year, sources said.