The Unkindest Cuts of All : Aftermath: Many hit hardest by the reduction in services are those who can least afford it.

Bankruptcy hovers above Orange County like a cloud of complicated math: dense and important, but probably harmless and safely ignored.

For most people, that is.

For some, it looms dark and close.

Consider the case of John Murphy, Santa Ana resident. Murphy happily regales any passerby with tales of derring-do, from his Medals of Honor to his recent tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate. He does not know that Orange County is broke.

“I returned a kidnaped U.S. Army general, Gen. Jones,� Murphy says, blue eyes blazing. “Kidnaped by the CIA, the FBI, possibly the KGB. Ever heard of the Quakers? They were running Ace Hardware stores and intentionally bankrupting them. Ever heard of the Amish?�

Murphy lives on the streets, a seemingly cheerful man broken by dashed dreams. Only a year ago, Murphy would have been a prime candidate for a special county program that targeted the homeless mentally ill. County workers persuaded the mentally ill--who make up perhaps a third of Orange County’s homeless--to come in off the streets and accept treatment.

The project served 2,000 of the county’s homeless last year and “worked fantastically well,� said Doug Barton, who directed the program.

When the bankruptcy roared in, supervisors axed the whole program. It used to cost about $600,000. Now that spending has been cut to zero and county health workers are no longer guiding them into treatment, the homeless mentally ill are often left to fend for themselves.

“We are seeing more mentally ill people in here, no doubt about it,� said Connie J. Jones, executive director of the Annie Mae Tripp Southwest Community Center, which provides meals for homeless people in Santa Ana. “And there’s no one to call.�

Murphy and the mentally ill are not the only ones cast adrift by county budget cuts. For a whole class of Orange County residents, the financial disaster weighs heavily on lives already too hard. The bankruptcy caused a fiscal crisis, and the crisis prompted elected officials to jettison large chunks of what they did to help the sick, the abused and the misguided.

The result, according to people who receive and deliver public assistance, has been a noticeable increase in pathology and pain. The machinery set up to carry the unfortunate still runs, they say, but it is a battered, clattering affair, lurching toward its destination with great strain and far fewer passengers.

Orange County taxpayers still fork out millions of dollars annually to help the downtrodden and the abused. In many cases, health and social workers are providing roughly the same services with less money than they had the year before. Large and important parts of the social safety net remain intact.

But the cutbacks made since Orange County found itself insolvent 12 months ago have made life a little harder for many, and much more difficult for an unlucky few. Entire programs have disappeared. Some that remain are so tattered, and the people who administer them so demoralized, that they exist in little more than name only.

Across the county, the spending cuts prompted by the bankruptcy unleashed profound changes that, while sometimes difficult to measure, are too numerous to ignore.

A few tales from the front lines:

* Carol Greenwald, a senior social worker, is accustomed to big caseloads and gritty conditions: She counsels families that include young victims of physical and sexual abuse. What she is not accustomed to is talking to families in a language they do not understand. Greenwald speaks only English. Many of her clients speak only Spanish.

The county employs a handful of translators, not enough. Since the bankruptcy and the budget cuts, there are even fewer.

Greenwald often finds herself looking across a table at the parents of a child who has suffered the worst sort of abuse, unable to get through. Or even to understand. Sometimes she asks the children to translate, but that isn’t always appropriate, since the topic is sometimes sexual abuse.

“It’s difficult,� Greenwald said.

Greenwald is not alone. At least 14 of her colleagues who speak only English are counseling families who speak mainly or exclusively Spanish.

* Before he got sick, Fredric Bishop was a professional photographer, shooting models and celebrities in a glamorous world. Then schizophrenia engulfed his mind, and he had to give it up. Bishop retreated to a rent-subsidized apartment in San Clemente, where for 10 years he has struggled to cope with his disease--and dreamed of a comeback.

“I would love to go back to work,� Bishop said. “It’s hard to do on your own. You forget stuff. It’s real hard to focus.� Earlier this year, with the help of a county program, Bishop moved closer than ever to getting back. County workers were helping Bishop find a job in his field--making calls, coaxing Bishop, prepping him, readying him for the interviews.

Then came the bankruptcy cuts. The vocational program for the mentally ill, which had cost $400,000 a year, was among the first to go. It served about 140 people a year.

Bishop is back in his apartment.

“My hopes were high,� he said.

Tim Mullins, director of the county’s mental health, alcohol and drug programs, calls the loss of the vocational program the toughest cut to bear.

“This program gave people a future who didn’t have a future,� he said. “It changed them from being tax users to taxpayers. It gave people hope.�

* Lashalle Mason, a mother of four at 22, is alone and in need. Orange County can’t find time for her.

The father of Mason’s children is in jail. One of her children was allegedly physically abused by a family friend. Five weeks ago, she lost her secretarial job. Since then, Mason has been searching for a full-time job and, at the same time, beseeching the county for temporary financial help.

She has yet to get any. The first four times Mason telephoned a caseworker, she got the standard message on the answering machine:

“Due to Orange County staff reductions, there may be a delay in answering your call. You must schedule an appointment to see me before coming into the office.�

Most caseworkers carry such messages on their answering machines.

After a month of trying, Mason got an appointment--for Nov. 21. She showed up, but the caseworker didn’t.

“I waited four hours to be told I couldn’t see anyone,� she said. “I could have been looking for a job.�

Mason demanded to see someone. A supervisor apologized and told her the staff was too busy to make anything happen for her very soon.

Alice Apodaca, a social worker who is counseling Mason’s children, said such waits are not uncommon. As a social worker who deals with children, she has no authority to give out food stamps or welfare payments.

“Everybody is swamped, nobody has any time,� Apodaca said. “Even a family in crisis has to wait.�

Mason is hoping the county will come through for her. Last week, she pawned a $40 necklace to buy diapers and food. Today, she has $3 in her pocket. Next week, the $710-a-month rent is due.

“I’m pretty worried,� Mason said.

* Last year, county prosecutors sent some 2,000 youths accused of crimes--mostly first-time offenders--into a program meant to turn them away from lives of crime. The youths were required to attend counseling and, often, repay their victims.

Today, because of the budget cuts, the program is dead. The majority of youthful offenders who would have been in face-to-face counseling sessions are now counseled by mail. The county’s juvenile hall is too jammed to hold them, and a $4.7-million plan to expand it by 30 beds was shelved after the bankruptcy. Now, the offenders are sent a letter of reprimand and are told to perform community service. They are supposed to write their probation officers about their progress.

“There’s supposed to be follow-up,� said Rod Speer, an analyst for the probation department. “But the probation officers have huge caseloads.�

Says Kevin Meehan, who ran one of the diversion programs: “You’ll be seeing these kids again, I imagine, except that they will be committing more serious crimes.�

* Brenda Roa, district manager for the Social Services Agency, picked up her phone recently and heard a woman ranting over the line. The CIA is after me, the woman said. I am being followed by the U.S. government. My family wants nothing to do with me, and I have nowhere to go. Could somebody please help me?

Only a year ago, in better days, Roa would have picked up the phone and summoned a county worker to take the woman to a county mental health clinic. There she would have been given medicine and a bed.

But these days, since the budget cuts, there is no longer the worker she would have summoned, and there is very likely no bed. And downstairs, lines and lines of people are waiting to be seen.

Roa did her best: She sent an assistant to give the woman the address of the clinic and tell her how to get there.

“I don’t know what happened to her,� Roa said.

* County law requires social workers to perform monthly checks on children who have returned home following abuse or neglect--even if the families move out of state. Tight budgets have made that noble goal a fiction.

Among the cases social worker Carol Greenwald is now overseeing is that of an 8-year-old boy whose family moved to Arizona. Because money is short, Greenwald has not been to Arizona to check up on the boy, the victim of neglect. Greenwald tried to get social workers in Arizona to look in on the boy, but they refused. Too busy, they said.

Instead of visiting, Greenwald phones the boy’s teachers to make sure everything is OK. She hopes she is not missing anything.

Such cases are rare, and there has never been much money for things like travel. With the bankruptcy, there is no chance at all.

“It would be a lot better if I could see him,� she said.

On a bulletin board in Greenwald’s office, caseworkers tack up notices of where they plan to take their vacations. That way, if anyone happens to be going to a place where a family under supervision lives, they can interrupt their vacations and check on a child.

No one has planned a vacation to Arizona yet.

In most cases, the consequences of shrinking budgets have not been so dramatic. Services like health care, food stamps and welfare still get to the people who need them--just not as quickly. People who once had their children immunized at the county’s big public health clinic in Westminster, for instance, must now travel farther--and stand in line longer.

In other cases, budget cuts that seemed Draconian turned out not to be. Despite a $50,000 cut in county funding, the nonprofit Women’s Transitional Living Center has not yet had to send home any battered woman and her children seeking shelter. Sometimes, workers must send women to other shelters.

“We are all stretched here,� said Fran Shiffman, the center’s executive director. “But we have been able to continue.�

Fortuitous events have also blunted the sting of some spending cuts. Just as county supervisors closed a clinic that provided neonatal care, for instance, changes in the state-administered rules governing medical care for the poor encouraged private physicians to pick up the slack.

Social workers and nurses say they are still tending to the most acute cases. Probation officials say the worst underage criminals are still being put away.

But anything less than an absolute priority, they say, runs the risk of being neglected.

More than anything, the cuts imposed by the bankruptcy have left county officials wondering what they aren’t seeing--cases of abused children that have gone unreported, outbreaks of infectious diseases undetected, young punks who could have been reformed not being counseled.

Take child abuse: If a child is severely abused, county social workers may ask a judge to remove the child from the parents’ custody. At the same time, the county maintains a project that offers counseling and other services to families where the evidence of abuse does not quite rise to a crisis level. The program is voluntary, but social workers credit it with helping prevent more severe abuse.

After the bankruptcy, supervisors cut the budget for the voluntary counseling program by a third. The number of social workers fell from 52 to 36. Administrators tightened the criteria by which they allowed families to receive help. As a result, the program that in August, 1994, had 2,030 active cases had 1,103 a year later.

That’s got some social workers worried about the children they aren’t examining.

“You can’t predict the future,� said Clemantine E. Bonner, a supervisor for the Social Services Agency. “But you hope nothing bad happens to those kids.�

It’s a similar situation with the county’s field nursing program.

The county’s Public Health Services maintains a staff of nurses who check on newborn babies vulnerable to health problems. Referrals come from local doctors.

On a routine check of a newborn two years ago, field nurse Kathleen Parris discovered two cases of tuberculosis in the apartment complex. When nurses returned and checked the entire complex, they found 12 people who tested positive for the sometimes deadly, and highly contagious, disease.

“It was the epidemic that never was,� Parris said.

In her 20 years as a field nurse, Parris has found a host of other horrors--including child abuse--on her checks of newborns.

Earlier this year, the county’s field nursing staff was cut by a third. As a result, they will no longer examine newborns in their homes except when they have potentially serious health problems. Parris guesses that county nurses visit 100 fewer babies each month.

“Who knows what we’re not finding?� Parris said.

As the bankruptcy ravaged the government’s ability to do its job, it flattened the spirits of the people who work there. Some county workers say the fiscal collapse confirmed for them that much of the public holds them in contempt. Layoffs, pay cuts, demotions, exploding caseloads and shrinking budgets have failed to move the public in any meaningful way, the workers say. Orange County government, they say, has become a dreary place to work.

The result: Since the bankruptcy, so many caseworkers have quit the layoff-ravaged Social Services Agency that the county is now actively recruiting more. And they are having a hard time of it. Earlier this year, officials mailed 170 recruitment letters to prospective job applicants. Only a dozen responded. Nearly half were unqualified.

“No one wants to come and work here,� said Apodaca, the social worker.

In Apodaca’s division, money is so tight that some workers are saving aluminum cans to pay for routine office expenses. When a lock broke on a door recently, they sold a pile of cans to pay for the repairs. When social workers needed to have an office microwave fixed, they held a bake sale. For about eight months this year, several caseworkers didn’t have business cards.

“I can’t buy business cards for my social workers, and yet all I hear is how lazy and overpaid the bureaucrats are,� said Sylvia Wall, sitting in a surplus chair sent from the courts. “It’s very demoralizing.’

Wall is the interim director of the Children’s Services agency, a post vacated when its director quit. Wall does not want to fill the job permanently.

Some county workers say the staff cuts have gone so deep that they can no longer do their jobs. One county program for the homeless mentally ill, for instance, lost almost its entire staff but still has shelters with 18 beds. Among those who lost their jobs was the driver who transported the homeless people. As a result, even though the county has 12,000 homeless people and just 945 shelter beds, these 18 often go unused.

“It’s a shame, because we know they are out there,� said Ed Henderson, mental health housing coordinator.

Not everyone has given up. Joyce Zeller, according to her supervisor, was “totally dedicated, a rising star, focused, a leader.� When the budget cuts came down, she was demoted, her salary as a caseworker cut 20%, and she will not be eligible for any pay increases this year.

Zeller says she has no plans to leave.

“I’m hoping Orange County will come back,� Zeller said. “And that I’ll get my old job back.�

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Scaling Back

Two county government agencies charged with assisting disadvantaged citizens suffered the biggest budget and manpower slashes after bankruptcy was declared. The Social Services Agency lost 24% of its positions and 20% of its budget. For the Health Care Agency, the comparable losses were 10% and 30%, respectively.

Social Services Agency

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Positions Budget (in millions) 1994 3,679 $213.3 1995 2,795 $170.0 Health Care Agency 1994 2,407 $40.2 1995 2,165 $28.3

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Source: Social Services and Health Care agencies

Researched by DEXTER FILKINS / Los Angeles Times