County, Child Activists Wage Court Battles

A series of court battles between children’s advocates and Los Angeles County is running up legal fees and causing some of the advocates to complain that the county is protecting its legal rights at the expense of children’s welfare.

In one case, county lawyers are resisting efforts to allow volunteers to take abused and neglected children on short field trips from the county’s MacLaren Children’s Center. In another, they argued unsuccessfully that the county should not be punished when social workers fail to report when a foster child is hospitalized, injured or moved.

And in a third, government officials initially said children’s advocates should not be allowed to visit the county shelter or see its blueprints--an argument they later reconsidered, allowing the visits. The county said that its efforts are meant to defend children, protecting them, for instance, from volunteers who might harm them while on the short excursions from MacLaren.

In court papers, county lawyers laid out a list of requirements that they said the judge should make of volunteer advocates, who act as guardians for foster children in difficult cases, before renewing a roughly 7-year-old blanket order allowing the trips.

The most contested point is a county requirement that volunteers who have been convicted of anything other than minor traffic violations must get a waiver from the state before they can be left alone with children.

County officials said the added scrutiny became necessary after another group of child advocates won a legal battle requiring the shelter to meet the same standards as other group homes.

But Sharzad Talieh, director of the Court-Appointed Special Advocate program, complained that those rules apply only to employees of the group homes, not the advocates, who work for the court. No other county group home has set up those barriers, she said.

The 25-year-old court program makes extensive criminal background checks on its volunteers, she said, and has its own policy for waiving minor or irrelevant past transgressions.

She claimed that the county’s real motivation is to restrict access to MacLaren, long the subject of complaints of abuse and overcrowding.

“It’s a control issue,” Talieh said. “The big story is: Why is the county counsel--who’s supposed to be representing the interest of the public--being paid our taxpayer dollars to fight what’s good for children?”

Presiding Juvenile Judge Michael Nash will hold a hearing on the issue this week.

Anita Bock, head of the county’s child welfare department, said that each case was an individual, reasonable objection and that advocates are reading too much into them.

“It’s not a fight. It’s a legal process. That’s how disputes get resolved,” she said. “This is quintessentially what makes America so great. You go in and make your argument and the judge rules.”

Assistant County Counsel Ada Gardiner, one of three high-ranking officials who supervise the dozens of attorneys who represent the county Department of Children and Family Services, said her office helps child advocates when it can, but also is determined to protect the county’s legal interests.

“We, as lawyers for the county, have to represent the county and take their position in court. That’s our job,” she said. “If funds were limitless, maybe things would be different.”

The head of the Juvenile Court said he thinks that the county is reasonably defending its legal rights on complex issues.

“I have from Day 1 around here encouraged the use of the legal system to resolve disputes,” said Nash. “I can’t say that they didn’t have an arguable position in anything that I’ve seen.”

But some advocates said the county simply fights too much, too long.

They cited its protracted efforts to keep the courts from meddling with social workers’ policies of deciding how often to visit foster children.

State law requires monthly visits, but allows a waiver if the case meets specific standards that show that the child is in a safe, stable home and has been doing well for some time.

A number of reports over the years criticized Los Angeles County’s internal visitation waiver process as overused and dangerous. Two years ago, the county could not say how many children were on waivers, and judges and lawyers complained that it rarely informed the court when it decided to reduce visits to children.

As a result, the nonprofit Alliance for Children’s Rights asked the court to force reforms, leading to an order by then-Presiding Juvenile Court Judge Terry Friedman that judges hold hearings in each case in which a social worker says fewer visits are appropriate.

Despite having stated publicly that more visits would be beneficial to children, the county fought the advocates’ request to Friedman and then appealed the case up to the state Supreme Court, losing at every turn.

The issue, the county argued, was whether a judge can set social worker policy--especially when that policy costs the county money by requiring more staff.

After its last loss, the county said it is preparing to comply with the order, but its lawyers are seeking a modification to make the hearings optional rather than mandatory.

“I do see a trend of spending Los Angeles County money litigating issues that are not in the best interest of the children,” said Amy Pellman, head of the Alliance for Children’s Rights, the nonprofit group that won the visitation reforms.

“The irony is: If they took the money they spent litigating this case to hire more social workers, then their whole argument that it was a budget issue would be moot,” Pellman said.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, one of two supervisors who objected to appealing the child visitation order, said that he has seen the department put up legal roadblocks to reforms, and that the department is resisting his attempts to ask questions.

“A kind of disease of bureaucratic defensiveness has set in where every single inquiry becomes a cause celebre--becomes, to quote [Los Angeles Mayor] Jim Hahn, an issue of biblical proportions,” said Yaroslavsky. “To me, it’s unacceptable.”

Others on the board disagreed. Supervisor Gloria Molina defended the county’s decision to fight the visitation order.

She agreed with the advocates that not enough children were being visited, but she did not think that the court should be involved in every waiver, her staff said.

“The way they wanted it done was inappropriate, in our opinion,” said Molina spokesman Miguel Santana.

But he said such disputes are not uncommon because of the nature of the relationship between the government and advocacy groups.

“Oftentimes, the county and advocates have the same goal in mind,” he said. “The problem becomes: How do you get there? There’s always going to be points of contention.”