What a Mere $4.5 Million Could Do

Watching Los Angeles County’s supervisors try to preserve the flimsy remains of their health care system this week, I wondered if another $4.5 million might save some threatened clinics.

I didn’t pull that figure out of the air. It’s the minimum in taxpayers’ dollars the supervisors have channeled into their legal defense against the U.S. Justice Department’s charge that they rigged district boundaries to exclude Latinos from the board.

So far, the legal expenses have been money down the drain. A federal judge ruled against the supervisors after a long trial. But the supes--the kind of clients lawyers love--aren’t giving up. They’re appealing, starting the long, expensive process they hope takes them to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their lawyers, I bet, hope so, too.

But what if they hadn’t resisted the Justice Department’s attempt to create a supervisorial district that would assure a Latino being elected to the board? What if, instead, they’d used the $4.5 million to partially ease the impact of $138 million in reductions in state aid to the county made by Gov. George Deukmejian and the Legislature? How much difference would a few million dollars make in a county budget totaling almost $10 billion?

Plenty.

For instance, the $4.5 million would more than cover the $3.39 million in cuts that the county mental health department has recommended for the San Fernando Valley Mental Health Clinic in Van Nuys.

The clinic, the only such facility in the entire Valley, serves the poorest of the mentally ill, those without health insurance, not even eligible for Medi-Cal aid from the government. Outpatient care, including prescriptions and counseling, keeps them sane. Their families also receive counseling, which helps the patients maintain a tenuous grasp on normal life.

Or the supervisors could use the money in another part of the county. It would take just $877,454 to preserve present services at another facility designated for extinction, a center in Baldwin Park which provides short-term residential care for the San Gabriel Valley’s mentally ill. Compton’s clinic could remain in full operation for $963,000. Just $1.9 million would save a well-known, old mental health facility, the Gateways Mental Health Center in Echo Park, from recommended cuts.

Less than $1 million would preserve services at a county-operated evaluation center at Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, where the mentally ill go in a crisis for evaluation. The center is the only such screening facility for the San Gabriel and Pomona valleys and East Los Angeles.

Mental health care, of course, isn’t the only county service that could use part of the $4.5 million. County government operates parks, the Sheriff’s Department, the jails, the courts. The cuts in state aid are hitting most of these.

I looked through a list of requests from the county lawmakers, programs and projects they’d like to finance if money was available.

One was for $400,000 to develop a trail from the Santa Clara River to Castaic Creek in the far northern Valley--with more than enough left for $344,000 to put more employees in the parks at nights and on weekends.

A $131,000 request would go to About Face, which serves seriously emotionally disturbed children in the San Gabriel Valley. And $438,000 would pay for a gang alternatives program in the Antelope Valley.

I could give you more figures, but I’m sure you get the idea.

Aside from the reduction in services, there are two other issues involved.

One is representative government. Although the supervisors hold open hearings on appropriations, there were no such sessions on paying lawyers to press on with the the redistricting fight. That’s because the supervisors said they were entitled to confidentiality when discussing a lawsuit. In this case, taxpayers didn’t get to say whether they wanted the money spent on legal fees or other services.

Second, the supervisors made an open-ended financial commitment: $4.5 million represents the minimum price.

It could grow. Supervisor Ed Edelman, whose job was threatened by the redistricting plan favored by the board’s majority, was provided a lawyer to represent his interests--at taxpayer expense. And if the county ultimately loses, a court might order the supervisors’ to pay the multimillion-dollar legal fees run up by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the plaintiffs in the redistricting case.

No, the gloomy county fiscal picture could not have been transformed by abandoning the expensive redistricting fight. The state cuts were too great for that. But at least the money would have provided a Band-Aid for some rather severe wounds. The supervisors had other priorities.