GOP lawmakers bring the budget pain home

Many call for cutting public aid despite representing poor rural areas with the greatest percentage of need.

By Eric Bailey

June 13, 2009

Reporting from Merced, Calif. — In the belly of the Central Valley, hard times have hit harder than just about anywhere in America. But it's also a stronghold of Republicans ready to shrink the safety net.

One in five Merced County adults are out of work, home foreclosures run rampant and anti-poverty programs are stretched to the limit. The county welfare chief calls it California's Appalachia.

This also is a region represented in the statehouse budget brawl almost exclusively by anti-tax Republicans, whose push to downsize government collides with sobering reality -- a greater percentage of their constituents depends on health and welfare programs than anywhere else in California.

One in 12 residents of Merced County have tapped CalWorks, the state's welfare-to-work effort, double the per-capita use in Los Angeles County and five times the percentage in San Francisco.

But the region's Republican lawmakers hold fast to a pledge to tame the tax-and-spend cycle of California's Capitol and are backing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to slash programs for the poor.

Other rural parts of California face the same situation, from the quiet timberlands of the north to the agricultural heartland of the San Joaquin Valley, where high per-capita use of public health and welfare coexists with small-government GOP representation.

It is a paradox lingering in the background as the state grapples with a $24.3-billion budget deficit. But it is not lost on Jessica Alvarez, 23.

Little more than a year ago she was homeless on the streets of Merced, pregnant with twins, gripped by a decade-long methamphetamine addiction. When her babies were born with complications, Alvarez realized the sad consequences of a wasted life.

She entered drug treatment and got into CalWorks. It paid for child care and enrollment at Merced College. She dreams now of becoming a psychologist or lawyer.

"It's really too bad what's happening in Sacramento," Alvarez said. "They don't really think about the lower-class people. . . . There are a lot of people in need."

Schwarzenegger's budget proposes slashing health and welfare spending by 26.5%.

That means eliminating CalWorks, which services 1.4 million statewide. It means killing off Healthy Families and slicing Medi-Cal, affecting more than 2 million people, most of them children. It means cutting home-care workers for the elderly and disabled, and carving deeply into programs for Alzheimer's patients and people with HIV.

Although the number of participants in anti-poverty programs is far larger in urban cities, rural enclaves consistently have the greatest per-capita need.

Roughly 1 in 20 people receive food stamps in big coastal counties such as Los Angeles. The rate is doubled in agrarian counties, such as Merced.

Although about 4% of the people in Los Angeles County fall back on CalWorks to help land a job, more than 8% use the program in the San Joaquin Valley counties of Tulare, Fresno and Merced, which routinely send GOP lawmakers to Sacramento.

Although the rural demographics are shifting, old political habits die hard and Republicans retain a political grip in wide swaths of the Central Valley and the far north, said Barbara O'Connor, director of Cal State Sacramento's Institute for the Study of Politics and Media.

"The opinion leaders remain agriculture and business leaders . . . ," she said. "They really drive the political climate."

Anti-poverty groups say the anomaly is no secret inside the Capitol.

"We've shown [Republican lawmakers] time and time again -- they're voting in ways that are disproportionately more harmful to their own districts," said Michael Herald of the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

Herald chalks it up to core GOP ideology, a yearning to shrink government. "In fairness to them," he said, "much of it is simply philosophical."

Rural Republicans say that California's mammoth deficit makes the cuts a painful but necessary step.

"I don't see any way around it. The truth is it's going to be one of the tougher votes we'll have to do," said Assemblyman Michael Villines (R-Clovis), who as GOP leader broke with Republicans in February to approve major tax increases -- an act he vows not to repeat.

Assemblyman Jim Nielsen (R-Gerber) sees the current calamity as "that inevitable moment" brought on by years of fiscal mismanagement. "We do want to have compassion," he said. "But the magnitude of this deficit is so huge and the need to act so great."

Democrats say there are alternatives, such as tapping the state's rainy-day reserves, rescinding $1 billion in corporate tax breaks approved in February, or enacting a 10% tax on oil pumped from California soil.

Assemblywoman Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) said Republicans face a stark choice: "Do they want to keep corporate tax giveaways while throwing women and children off the lifeboat?"

Some economists see additional consequences. Shutting down CalWorks and Healthy Families means potentially losing billions of dollars in federal funds.

Experts also talk of the economic downdraft caused by eliminating welfare checks.

Anti-poverty payments go right back into the local market -- to mom and pop stores, landlords and coin laundries.

A study commissioned by California welfare directors found that $1.32 in economic activity is generated for every dollar spent on human services.

"It's the ultimate economic stimulus," said Nicole Pollack, Merced County's deputy human services director.

The proposed anti-poverty cutbacks come as demand rises. Pollack is seeing "the new poor," first-timers laid off after years of steady employment.

Ana Garcia, 46, a single mother, worked two decades for Mervyns before it shut down and her world unraveled.

Pride kept her from applying for government help. Desperation forced her to give in.

Buoyed by CalWorks, she recently started a new job at a health office.

"I'm so blessed this program was here when I needed it," Garcia said. "I never dreamed I'd be on welfare. But it's my tax dollars at work for me. It's my safety net."