County Child Welfare Budget Cut $6.5 Million : New rules: The state also has stopped paying for social workers to respond to certain reports about abuse against children.

At a time when Los Angeles County is being criticized for failing to deal with violence against children, state officials have slashed an additional $6.5 million from the county’s child welfare budget and have stopped paying for social workers to respond to certain emergency child abuse reports.

Under new rules, counties across the state are no longer required to send social workers to investigate every child abuse report they receive. Some reports will simply go unanswered unless the counties can find another way to pay for the services--a feat that Los Angeles County officials say may be impossible with the $6.5-million budget cut.

“We will miss kids that really need us,” said Emery Bontrager, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services. “There’s no way to get around the fact that in this business it requires social workers to go out and see for themselves what is really happening in this family.”

State officials say the new regulations--which have not yet been put into effect in Los Angeles County--have been issued to help local agencies cope with a $55-million cut in the state’s child welfare budget.

The new rules advise social workers to screen out reports where there is no direct evidence that children are being abused.

For example, if someone calls in to report that a husband is beating his wife, a social worker does not have to make a visit unless the caller says that a child is being hurt. Moreover, social workers no longer have to respond to reports that children are not attending school, that families are homeless or that parents abuse drugs and alcohol.

This worries child advocates because child abuse often has its roots in other family problems.

“Over and over again we’ve seen cases where it looked like a nothing case until the worker actually got there,” said Helen Kleinberg, a member of the county Commission for Children’s Services, which discussed the issue Monday. “There’s a point in time where you have to say this endangers children too much. We need to all say to the state and the new governor, this is not acceptable.”

Paradoxically, the $6.5-million budget cut and the new, looser regulations come just three weeks after the release of a highly publicized study that found widespread violence against children in Los Angeles County. Moreover, the cutbacks follow a state-ordered overhaul of the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services.

The department for months has been the subject of criticism from state officials in Sacramento, who at one point threatened to take over the agency if services to the county’s 55,000 abused and neglected children did not improve.

Those threats, and disclosures that children had been abused while in foster care, prompted the resignation of the agency’s former director. For the last four months, the department has been run on an interim basis by former appellate Judge Elwood Lui. The county Board of Supervisors is interviewing candidates for a permanent director.

In a recent letter to the director of the state Department of Social Services, Lui said the $6.5-million budget cut would gravely impair his efforts to get the beleaguered county agency back on track.

He said the agency has already lost $23 million in funding this year and that added cuts might force him to lay off as many as 224 of the county’s 1,500 social workers. That would translate into higher caseloads for the agency’s already overburdened staff, Lui said in the letter.

But state officials say the $6.5 million does not rightfully belong to the department. It was eliminated because a state audit showed that Los Angeles County billed the state for more child abuse cases than it actually handled.

“They’re asking for money that they don’t have coming to them,” said Loren Suter, deputy director of the state Department of Social Services.

As for the new regulations, Suter said state officials decided that “we shouldn’t be requiring the same level of effort for less money.” He said social workers in every county must now do a better job of assessing child abuse cases over the telephone, and noted that several large counties--including San Diego, Santa Clara and Alameda--already screen out child abuse calls over the phone.

Asked if he is worried that abused children will fall through the cracks, Suter said: “If we were having uninformed, untrained individuals making these decisions, yes, I would be concerned. But that is not supposed to be what is taking place out there.”