Public Interest Briefs

Filling out as many as 30 government forms, many requiring identical information, would be considered excessive by almost anyone’s standards. Yet, that’s exactly what Los Angeles County expects of nearly everyone applying for public assistance, including those least equipped to do so – the developmentally and mentally disabled, often former mental patients now living in the streets.

For 33 year-old Jose Garcia, a schizophrenic from Skid Row, encounters with the county’s welfare system have been intimidating, confusing and what’s worse, futile. Garcia tried to apply three times to obtain benefits but was turned away because he had no birth certificate and did not know how to obtain one.

Garcia was just one of thousands of disabled persons entitled to receive public assistance benefits but not receiving them because of bureaucratic red tape, a fact borne out by county statistics that only about 8% of all the homeless on Skid Row are getting a $247-a-month general relief check and that as many as a third of the area’s homeless population are mentally ill.

CLIPI concluded that the county’s administration of the welfare system established by the Legislature to help those most needy was in fact deterring many of those it was designed to assist.

Joined by Mental Health Advocacy Services, Inc., the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and the A.C.L.U., among other public interest law firms, CLIPI’s Joel R. Reynolds filed suit against the county to correct those injustices on behalf of Garcia and two other Skid Row plaintiffs.

Reynolds argued on two fronts: applicants had to fill out up to 30 pages of public assistance application forms written at an average 12th grade reading level, while welfare workers were either unavailable or unwilling to provide assistance in helping to complete them. Applicants also had to make the rounds of various government offices proving they were not eligible for any other public assistance. 

The county denied the claims, arguing that the problems of the homeless are “a social phenomenon that this society is just really beginning to grapple with.” But Reynolds maintained that the county has purposefully made the system “so convoluted and complex” to discourage people from applying, thereby saving itself money by not paying out benefits. 

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John Cole agreed, and ordered the county to prepare a detailed plan to facilitate improved access by the mentally disabled to public assistance.

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