Bankruptcy Cuts Holes in Safety Net : Social services: Troubled juveniles, homeless people and abused children all have been affected by cutbacks in Orange County.

By DEXTER FILKINS

Dec. 3, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

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 others, 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 Congressional 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 constitute perhaps a third of Orange County’s homeless population--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 program. It used to cost about $600,000. Now that the 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 cut 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 aid to 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 a year 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 are too numerous to ignore, though sometimes difficult to measure.

* 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, but 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 because the topic is sometimes sexual abuse.

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

* 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 badly beaten 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 have 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 do anything for her soon. Come back Dec. 1 she was told.

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.

Mason is hoping that 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 2,000 youths accused of breaking the law--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.”

Kevin Meehan, who ran one of the diversion programs, said: “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 the other day 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.

Now, there is no longer a worker to summon or even a bed to offer. Downstairs, lines and lines of people are waiting.

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 after abuse or neglect--even if the families move out of state. Budget cuts have made that noble goal a fiction.

In most cases, the consequences of shrinking budgets have not been so dramatic. Services such as health care, food stamps and welfare still get to the people who need them--only not as quickly. People who once got their children immunized at the county’s big public health clinic in Westminster now must 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, the nonprofit Women’s Transitional Living Center has yet to turn back a battered woman seeking shelter.

Fortuitous events have also intervened to blunt the sting of some cuts. Just as county supervisors closed a clinic that provided neonatal care, 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 have left county officials wondering what they are not 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. A project 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 to 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.

The bankruptcy also flattened the spirits of county workers, some of whom say the collapse confirmed that much of the public holds them in contempt. Layoffs, cuts, demotions and exploding caseloads have failed to move the public, the workers say. Orange County government, they say, has become a dreary place to work.

The result: So many caseworkers have quit the Social Services Agency since the layoffs that the county is recruiting more, albeit not successfully. Officials have mailed 170 letters to people who had sought employment with the county. Only a dozen responded. Nearly half were unqualified.

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

Not everyone has given up. Joyce Zeller was “totally dedicated, a rising star, focused, a leader,” her supervisor said. Then the budget cuts came down, she was demoted, her salary as a caseworker was cut 20%, and she will not be eligible for 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.”