Unleashed Potential, Hidebound Realities

The dog-that-didn’t-bark metaphor, a tell-tail clue from a vintage Sherlock Holmes episode, has been dotting the journalistic landscape of late as shorthand for anything conspicuous by its absence. At a recent Times-sponsored forum in which Al Checchi, Gray Davis, Jane Harman and Dan Lungren sat up and begged for voter attention, not only did the topic of Calworks not come up, but the questioners confessed that they hadn’t even considered posing a welfare reform question.

Well, not this writer. Our redesigned, unique-to-California proposal “to end welfare as we know it” purports to bustle some 8,200 recipients off the welfare rolls and into the workplace.

Two years ago, the Ventura County Public Social Services Agency was reduced to the role of check writer, rarely addressing education, job training, child-care, transportation, health or drug / alcohol rehabilitation issues. The county aims to change all that with one-stop centers, touted by Randy Feltman, the chief architect of the county’s version of Calworks, as “the creation of a new culture for welfare reform.”

His emphasis on collaboration fits right into the 21st century paradigm portended by futurist Bill Knoke in which rigid, role-bound administrative pyramids will be flattening into free-flowing talent pools.

However, the success of Calworks, Ventura-style, may be headed for a dog day afternoon. The vote to wed the Behavioral Health Department to the Public Social Services Agency squeaked by the Ventura County Board of Supervisors on a 3-2 vote. Convinced that the move to restructure sprang from a couple of top dogs worrying the same political bone, Supervisor Judy Mikels was hounded by potential economic nightmares in the eight-figure range.

Supervisor Frank Schillo, also wagging the tail end of that vote, is leery about the size of the 1,500-employee agency created in the merger. His concern is that the Human Services Agency might become mired in its own bloated bulk and sink Calworks.

Feltman holds out high hopes that a new job description, higher pay scale and retraining will motivate tenured civil servants whose success was achieved in a top-down bureaucracy to enthusiastically embrace the give-and-take of a multidisciplinary collaboration. Perhaps he might also consider issuing foreign phrase books (such as “I’m here to help you,” “Your problem is my problem” and “We can make this happen”) to the former caseworkers.

The fact that the seven directors who signed contracts last week look nothing like traditional social service professionals augurs well for the three centers scheduled to open in June. Barbara Fitzgerald, the program’s chief administrative officer, reported her hiring criteria included credibility in the community, the ability to coordinate 30- to 40-member teams, and a flair for creating partnerships with business, education and community organizations.

Still, those of us who weren’t fooled by the so-called heart transplants supposedly mandated for the folks behind the counters at the DMV and IRS are dubious at the prospect of transforming former eligibility and social workers into “career services specialists.”

Let’s hope the fate of Ventura County’s Calworks program isn’t just another example of what happens when you try to teach an old pooch new tricks.