Welfare Overhaul Tops Agenda as Legislature Convenes

Twenty-six years after Gov. Ronald Reagan offered welfare reform in California as a model to “show the rest of the country out of their problems,” Gov. Pete Wilson and the Legislature are poised to launch another overhaul.

Welfare changes present the biggest and most daunting issue facing lawmakers as the Legislature convenes its 1997 session today.

This time, enactment of welfare reform will not be optional for state government as it was in 1971, when Reagan pushed through a massive overhaul of public aid and pronounced it an “idea whose time has come.”

Instead, welfare must be overhauled because Congress and President Clinton decreed so last summer when they enacted sweeping changes for the states.

“Welfare reform is a mega-issue with lots of facets and complications,” said Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward). “I think it is as hard a task as the Legislature has ever confronted.”

Implementing the federal government’s welfare-to-work order is certain to dominate center stage for Republican Wilson and the Democrat-controlled Legislature this year.

Wilson, who for years has championed the reduction of welfare grants to the needy as a budget-balancing tool, has given few hints of his vision of implementing the federal reforms.

In his annual State of the State address Tuesday, he is scheduled to outline some themes for his welfare overhaul.

So far, he and his staff have hinted that the plan will seek broad flexibility for counties and a heavy emphasis on rapid job placement instead of extensive training. More details of Wilson’s plan are expected to be announced Thursday when the governor unveils his budget proposal for the 1997-98 fiscal year.

Although virtually everyone agrees that implementing the federal reforms is an immense task that may take years to fully accomplish, recipient work requirements shape up as the biggest immediate challenge for lawmakers.

“The hardest part is actually preparing people for jobs, helping them find those jobs and keeping them in work,” said Democrat Lockyer. “As we know from numerous studies, the bulk of [welfare] recipients are not employment ready.”

Lockyer said he expects Republicans to propose “punitive” measures that would cut grants while Democrats will advance “humanitarian” alternatives.

“Out of those two moods can come a decent law that would combine personal responsibility, market discipline and humanitarian generosity,” he said.

But Assembly GOP leader Curt Pringle countered that the governor and Republican lawmakers have no wish to see poor mothers “pushed further into a hole.”

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Education is also expected to be a prominent issue in the upcoming legislative session since--for the second year in a row--schools are guaranteed another windfall from the state’s unanticipated budget surplus.

As before, the Legislature’s debate will focus on how to distribute several hundred million surplus dollars in a way that will help students overcome some of the nation’s worst test scores in reading and math.

Wilson wants lawmakers to expand the class-size reduction program begun this year. His budget proposal would shrink every public school room between kindergarten and third grade.

Last year, Democrats hesitated at the idea, saying the money could be better spent elsewhere since it was difficult to implement such a rapid downsizing.

A big question is what Californians can expect from their state Assembly, which heads into 1997 breaking new ground as an institution.

For the first time, barring reversal by the courts, all 80 members fall fully under voter-approved term limits, each permitted to serve no more than three two-year terms.

Democrats, with a 43-seat majority, recaptured control at the polls Nov. 5. Cruz Bustamante (D-Fresno) takes over as the Assembly’s first Latino speaker. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) becomes the first female speaker pro tem and will preside over most floor sessions.

But despite the Assembly’s make-over, its direction remains uncertain.

Bustamante speaks with passion about using the powerful speaker’s position to advance opportunities for minorities and the poor, but his record as a lawmaker is moderate and solidly pro-business on matters affecting the farm interests of his Central Valley district. Bustamante has shown no indication that any of that will change.

Also indicative of no sudden rush to the left is that only six of the 43 Democrats describe themselves, without qualification, as liberal. Most call themselves moderate, but ideological gulfs could widen once debate over welfare gets going.

Reagan and the Democratic Legislature were supposed to have reformed welfare in California in 1971. After a six-month fight, they produced a compromise that included a workfare requirement for able-bodied adults, stiffer eligibility rules and expanded family planning services.

After challenges by legal aid attorneys, the core of the reform was shredded in the courts. Virtually none of it remains today, although later governors and legislatures have enacted piecemeal changes, including cuts in grants.

Under the federal welfare reform, states are largely allowed to come up with their own plan to provide for needy citizens. But there are major requirements: Recipients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children must find a job within two years, and lifetime welfare benefits cannot exceed five years.

Also, a range of benefits for legal immigrants can be halted under the federal rules, although Wilson has said he intends to preserve for about 375,000 needy noncitizens a basic welfare check and free health care.

As a likely preview of welfare battles ahead, the Assembly’s new chairwoman of the Human Services Committee, Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley), said she isn’t impressed by the governor’s gesture.

“This is the man who gave us Proposition 187 and now all of a sudden is recognizing there is a difference between undocumented people and legal immigrants,” Aroner said. She contends that the 1994 ballot measure aimed at denying benefits to illegal immigrants more broadly “bashed all people of color.”

Aroner, who heads a committee that can derail or promote any welfare bill, said she intends to use her position to underscore the point that nothing prohibits the state, at its own cost, from continuing programs being cut or eliminated by Washington.

Her focus, she said, will be to show what can be done to “ensure we don’t put any bigger holes in the social safety net than are already there.”

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Assembly Republicans, said Pringle of Garden Grove, don’t see it that way.

The state will have no choice, he said, but to follow the federal lead in downsizing welfare, including cutting benefits of some recipients after two years and others after five years.

Democrats will have to understand, Pringle said, that such cuts “are part of a federal requirement now.”

Pringle declined to criticize directly Wilson’s pledge to retain some benefits for legal immigrants, but said it was unclear where the money for this and other programs would come from.

Both Pringle and Aroner agreed that especially hard hit from state and federal grant reductions, and generating heavy heat in legislative debate, will be the state’s 58 counties.

Always considered the provider of last resort for the needy, the counties will be absorbing huge new obligations under their general assistance programs, some to the point of bankruptcy, unless Sacramento eases the burden, Pringle said.

Among the options that will be debated in the Assembly, he said, is simply not to require counties to assume the safety net role at a fixed amount of aid per recipient; to allow counties to issue vouchers instead of cash; or to agree to state-funded county assistance.

Times staff writer Dave Lesher contributed to this article.