Welfare Reform Poses Privacy Dilemma for Counties

SANTA ANA — As counties throughout California begin to implement sweeping welfare reform rules mandated by the state last week, local officials are beginning to realize that government will delve into the private lives of aid recipients as it never has before.

Supporters of the state welfare reform program, modeled after federal restrictions approved a year ago, say that more intense monitoring of welfare recipients is an important step toward getting them into the work force while reducing their dependence on the government.

Counties across the state can each craft their own blueprints to put the state law into effect, determining their own methods of monitoring the behavior of welfare recipients.

In Los Angeles, county officials have created 13 working groups made up of caseworkers, local service providers and recipients to produce a plan. Officials are weighing what new role caseworkers will be asked to adopt as they become more involved in the lives of welfare recipients. One worry is that the county’s vast caseload of 1.68 million welfare recipients will make a Herculean task of any monitoring efforts.

Orange County officials are beginning to focus on the challenge of implementing these changes and the effects these new rules may have.

“This kind of oversight has been needed for a long time to make sure that money is going to the right people and is being used properly,” said Orange County Supervisor Charles V. Smith, whose central county district is expected to see the biggest effects from welfare reform. “It’s going to terminate a lot of welfare waste.”

Still, the new policies mark a dramatic--some say draconian--shift in the way government traditionally provides services to the poor.

“It’s like becoming the social police,” said Angelo Doti, assistant director of the Orange County Social Services Agency. “Clients will no longer have the right of self-determination, and we will be expecting more from them than we do the general population. It’s a whole new concept for us.”

The closer scrutiny is required under California’s new guidelines, and county officials throughout the state will spend the next few months deciding exactly how to implement the rules.

For example, Orange County will begin monitoring course schedules of welfare recipients who attend community college, to make sure they are taking classes that will lead to employment.

The Social Services Agency will regularly check the school attendance records of more than 30,000 children who receive welfare to comply with new state rules that penalize families for truancy.

Some recipients will have to take drug tests, and others may receive their aid not through monthly checks but through vouchers the county will pay directly to landlords and utility companies.

Orange County officials already are expressing concerns about the added workload expected to come with all the monitoring. Some social workers, educators and advocates for the poor insist that the requirements also raise a variety of privacy-rights issues that have not been fully addressed.

“There is an element of Big Brother here,” said Jean Forbath, founder of the Share Our Selves food bank in Costa Mesa. “This is really more of a behavior modification program than welfare reform.”

The state’s welfare reform guidelines are set to take effect Jan. 1 and give current recipients 24 more months of aid no matter how long they have been on welfare. Those receiving aid will be required to have jobs or participate in job training programs and will be penalized for refusing to accept valid job offers.

But the state rules also grant individual counties wide powers to craft their own job training, education and child care programs.

County supervisors, for example, will ultimately decide how many months new mothers on welfare will have before they must find jobs. The state legislation calls for anywhere from three months to a year. Counties also must determine whether some new recipients will lose their benefits after just 18 months or as many as 24 months.

The Social Services Agency has begun a formal plan to move welfare recipients from welfare to work--a mission expected to touch the nearly 100,000 adults and children in Orange County who now receive aid. If endorsed by the Board of Supervisors, the plan would then be submitted to the state for final approval.

Social Services Agency Director Larry Leaman said his office is sorting through the state’s rules to determine exactly what the county is required to do and whether enough money is available to do it. He said the required oversight of recipients’ behavior poses a special challenge.

“Monitoring the attendance records of 30,000 to 40,000 schoolchildren could require a massive bureaucracy,” Leaman said. “The county is inheriting major new responsibilities. We are saying, ‘How do we do it?’ ”

Ronald Wenkart, general counsel for the Orange County Department of Education, said attendance and other academic records are usually confidential and available only to parents.

“We are definitely going to need to look into this,” Wenkart said. “There is federal and state law protecting the confidentiality of school records. We have to see how this interfaces with welfare reform.”

Despite the uncertainty, some county supervisors like Smith strongly endorse the tough state standards and believe that government should fully implement them.

“It makes more work for the county, but I think it will end up saving us a lot of money,” Smith said.

Another state guideline requires counties to make sure that community college students on welfare are taking classes that will lead to jobs. As a result, social workers might have to review each student’s class schedule and make judgments about whether a certain course will provide the student with skills that are in high demand by employers.

“This could clearly put us in some conflict with clients as well as college counselors,” Leaman said, noting that up to 25% of community college students statewide receive welfare. “I suspect some people are going to be upset with it.”

Counties will also have to determine how many hours a student is in class because of a state rule requiring that they work or be in school for up to 20 hours a week for the next two years. After that, the requirement jumps to 32 hours a week.

People convicted of felony drug use or possession are barred for life from receiving welfare. Other recipients with substance abuse problems will be required to join treatment programs that will include drug testing.

Recipients who can’t receive welfare because of a drug conviction still might be eligible for aid if they have needy children. But counties might not provide them with a monthly welfare check. Rather, state guidelines appear to require that counties use vouchers to directly pay the recipients’ rent and utility bills, Doti said.

“We essentially get into the business of paying rents,” said Doti, noting that earlier efforts to pay recipients with vouchers proved logistically difficult.

Backers of state welfare reform say that the tough safeguards and oversight are needed to break a “cycle of dependence” they say the current welfare system has created.

But Forbath said she worries that the new rules create new problems.

“I can see how these kind of blanket regulations can cause a lot of stress and conflict in a family on welfare,” she said. “It’s a feeling of distrust. . . . You can see how it can strain relations within a family.”