O.C. Recovery Putting Heavy Burden on Poor : Services: Tapping bus funds would greatly worsen their difficulties in earning a living, advocates say.

COSTA MESA —  Danene Dugger was holding her own before the Orange County bankruptcy.

While benefiting from the county’s safety net of social programs, the mother of two young sons was on the verge of becoming financially independent again through the employment counseling of a grass-roots group.

But when county officials started making drastic cuts in services last spring to deal with their fiscal crisis, they slashed the lifeline that Dugger and hundreds of thousands of the county’s poor, disabled and elderly relied upon.

“You have to keep your chin up, but it’s hard. I can hardly stand to think about all this,” Dugger said.

There may be more to think about. County officials are eyeing the county’s bus system for money to pay for the county’s recovery from bankruptcy, but advocates for the needy complain that any raid on those funds would make it even more difficult for the impoverished ever to earn a living.

The diversion of more than $1 billion of transit sales tax revenue, which subsidizes the bus system, could devastate bus service for some 50,000 riders, forcing a 75% reduction in bus trips, Orange County Transportation Authority officials have said.

“The worst part about this is the human impact,” Charles V. Smith, the chairman of the OCTA board, said last week. “People who depend on buses to get back and forth to work would be hit hardest.”

In a county known for its affluence, advocates for the poor say the destitute are the ones being forced to pay the price of the nation’s worst municipal bankruptcy, brought on by the county’s loss of $1.7 billion through risky investments that went sour.

“They’ve picked on people who can’t defend themselves because they’re too busy trying to survive,” said John Palacio, spokesman for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Even some county leaders admit that their financial solutions have unfairly burdened the disenfranchised, who rely most on county services.

“They don’t have the power or resources to influence policy making or political decisions,” said Supervisor William G. Steiner, former director of the Orangewood Home for abused and neglected children. “In terms of public opinion their issues have not been a high” priority.

Said Angelo Doti, director of financial assistance for the county Social Services Agency: “Targeting the poor certainly seems to be a theme here, doesn’t it?”

Since the bankruptcy, the county has:

* Laid off 416 Social Services Agency employees, throwing welfare and Medi-Cal operations into disarray and eliminating parenting classes and a child abuse intervention program.

* Closed the Health Care Agency’s Westminster Avenue clinic, which served 3,700 patients a year, and eliminated the county’s Pap smear follow-up program, which screened women for cancer.

* Curtailed a program providing dental services for HIV patients and another program that screened and treated sexually transmitted diseases.

* Eliminated services that helped veterans obtain federal benefits entitled to them.

“The fact is the people at the higher end of the economic ladder get very little, if anything, from the county in the way of service,” said former County Chief Executive Officer William J. Popejoy, who presided over the budget cuts.

“What they do get, when they use the harbors, beaches and parks, they pay for it. So anything you cut is going to have a much larger impact on the lower-income folks.”

Popejoy said his bid to solve the bankruptcy with a half-cent hike in the countywide sales tax for 10 years was an effort to spread the pain of recovery throughout the county’s 2.5 million residents--and beyond, to tourists. He also expressed confidence that the transit diversion could work without unfairly taxing the poor if the county took a smaller amount, perhaps $35 million a year, from OCTA.

But the county is not alone in targeting services for poor people as a way to balance its budget. From Washington to Sacramento, lawmakers have sought to solve their fiscal woes by targeting programs that benefit the needy.

“It started in Washington and worked its way west,” Doti said. “But between the reductions at the federal level, the reductions at the state level and certainly the devastation that the bankruptcy forced us to do, it’s pretty clear a disproportionate burden is on the person with the least means.”

Some say the trend of cutting services for poor people also reflects a growing desire on the part of many to see private efforts and personal responsibility take the place of government help, Doti said.

“Years ago, before you had government doing this, it was church or the family,” Doti said. “The expectation is that friends, the family, the church and [charities] will step forward and fill the gap.”

In the wake of office closings and layoffs, Social Services Agency officials have already been meeting with community and religious groups, asking for help.

Where once they picked up the slack for the county, now grass-roots groups are buffeted with emergency pleas for housing and help with utility bills and food. Across the county, in homeless shelters, food lines and church offices, it appears to volunteers, staff and the people they try to help that the poor are getting poorer.

In the past months, calls to Serving People in Need, whose primary purpose is to help people move from welfare to employment, have increased by 75%, said SPIN director Jean Wagoner.

“People are really desperate. We’ve had people come in threatening suicide,” she said.

It’s the same at other grass-roots organizations.

Lutheran Christian Social Services in Garden Grove has no money left in this year’s budget for emergency housing assistance.

“Our phone calls have increased significantly, and unfortunately the answer is always the same,” said Bonnie Miller. “We can’t help until next year.”

At Episcopal Service Alliance in Santa Ana, the August allotment of emergency housing funds was spent in three days. Catholic Charities expects to run out of emergency housing money soon.

Tim Shaw, executive director of the Homeless Issues task force, said he and other advocates for the poor, minorities, children and elderly became so concerned about the disproportionate pain being placed on their clients that they recently formed a coalition in seeking to discourage further cuts to the needy.

“We don’t think people understand how difficult it is for the poor, elderly and disabled to get around,” Shaw said.

But eventually, if the working poor cannot get to work, the economic upper classes in Orange County will notice, said Karen McGlinn of Share Our Selves, a nonprofit agency in Costa Mesa.

“All of us sitting here with our cars don’t think it will matter,” she McGlinn. “I definitely think that many people really do care about the poor, but it will only mean something to some people when the cleaning lady doesn’t show up or the gardener doesn’t arrive.

“That’s going to be when they’ll say, ‘Wow, why did we do that?’ ” McGlinn said.

Times staff writer Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this story.

* L.A. COUNTY SEEKS CASH: Board studies extraordinary moves to avoid bankruptcy. A3