ORANGE COUNTY IN BANKRUPTCY : State Funds Expected to Avert Worst of Cuts in Social Services : Recovery: The recently reached agreement calls for the infusion of $6.2 million. Child abuse program will benefit.

SANTA ANA — An expected $6.2-million cash infusion from the state Department of Social Services will avert the most dire impacts of budget cuts on Orange County programs for abused children and other human services, officials said Thursday.

The state agreed in recent days to provide nearly a third of the $19 million in matching funds the county would have lost by cutting $4.2 million from its Social Services Agency, the agency’s director Larry Leaman said Thursday as the Board of Supervisors approved $188 million in cuts for its fiscal 1995-96 budget.

The funding will allow the county to minimally comply with state regulations for investigating child abuse and neglect and welfare fraud, Leaman said.

“We will be much closer to being in compliance” with state funding requirements, Leaman said. Specifically, he said, staffers in children’s services would be at 125% of recommended state workloads, instead of 150%.

But in AFDC and food stamp programs, Leaman said, the county would still be “grossly underfunded,” with caseworkers handling about 175% of state-recommended caseloads.

“I don’t want to mislead you and make you think we’re in great shape,” Leaman told the board. And he warned that the county does not have a “100% commitment” from the state to provide the money.

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Popejoy’s initial proposal to slash the county’s contribution to the Social Services Agency budget by $18.4 million prompted social services officials to predict that case workers would not be able to meet state regulations for investigating reports of child abuse and neglect and that calls for help would go unanswered.

But led by Supervisor William G. Steiner, former director of the Orangewood Children’s Home, the supervisors asked county Chief Executive Officer William J. Popejoy on March 16 to restore $4.2 million to the budget. Restoring the money would have allowed the county to keep another $19 million in state and federal funds.

But Popejoy recommended Thursday against restoring the money. Instead, Leaman explained, the agency had negotiated an agreement under which it expects to receive $6.2 million from the Department of Social Services.

The money will cushion the impact of the cuts, officials said, but the agency’s other programs still will be wounded as Social Services absorbs the largest budget cut of any county agency.

More than 400 employees will be laid off, but the added money may allow children’s services social workers to meet the bare minimum requirements for investigating abuse.

“I really wanted $4.2 million back into the social services budget,” Steiner said Thursday. “But how can I ask the CEO and the other departments to give up 4 million bucks?

“Fortunately, Sacramento has been convinced that if they want us to comply with all their mandates, they’ve got to give us some support costs,” Steiner added. “It’s still a tremendous number of jobs, (but) the most essential services in SSA, especially children’s services, can be saved with this. A disaster . . . has been mitigated.”

Specifically, Leaman said, the $6.2 million would restore major cuts in Medi-Cal programs--funding 10 welfare fraud investigators--and restore other positions in children’s protective services.

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But aid recipients, county employees and workers at nonprofit social service agencies reeled at news of the cuts.

“It’s pretty devastating for us,” said Nikki Niznik, a Medi-Cal social worker who is also president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local 1076, which represents welfare caseworkers.

“There’s going to be long lines and waiting at our offices,” Niznik said. “We’re not going to be assistance eligibility workers, we’ll be disaster workers.”

Public sympathy is not with either the people who receive welfare or the workers who administer it, Niznik said, but should be.

“I just don’t think people in the county know how bad things really are, or they wouldn’t let this happen,” Niznik said.

“For example, we had a gentleman come in who did some work for a small computer company. But when the county filed bankruptcy, it couldn’t pay the company and the company couldn’t pay this gentleman. The company owed him $7,200 in salary and all it could say was the county hadn’t paid it yet.

“The day after Christmas, he went to the company and found that it had closed. So finally he walked through our doors,” she said.

At the board meeting Thursday, Bill Fogarty, executive secretary-treasurer of the Orange County Central Labor Council, decried the lack of equity in the cuts, noting that most of the workers who will lose their jobs in the Social Services Agency are women, many of them single mothers.

“Many of them will have to apply for the programs they administer. It’s disgusting . . . unfair, unjust and discriminatory.”

For others, uncertainty on how the cuts would be distributed was the preoccupation of the day.

“If they eliminate the funds for these programs, we don’t know when they will be canceled,” said Kevin Meehan, director of Orange County Youth and Family Services, a nonprofit agency that provides a variety of social service and probation programs for the county.

A 55-year-old Anaheim woman who has relied on the Social Services Agency for help with her 10-year-old grandson worried Thursday that she would lose counseling and other services for the child, who suffers from attention deficit disorder.

“My daughter died with AIDS last April and I am raising her two children,” said the woman, who requested anonymity to protect the child’s identity. “We get no help from the child’s father, and on a private basis, the costs would be more than we could handle.

“There’s many of us grandparents that have already raised our children and because of drugs or whatever we’re thrown into this,” she added. “We really ask very little from the county.”

Also cut from the budget was $131,000 to maintain an elder care program administered by the Health Care Agency.

The program provides education, health screenings and preventive care at about 30 senior centers.

“I am devastated by this,” added Sharon Phelps, director of the Feedback Foundation, a separate program that provides in-home meals for many who receive elder care. “It just impacts our seniors so much in this community. If there is less care for seniors, more will end up needing us to provide services,” she said.