Court ruling deals blow to families on welfare

In a setback for families on welfare, the state Supreme Court ruled Monday that their application for benefits must include income that one parent is required to pay to support a child who lives outside the home.

Lawyers for a San Mateo County household argued to the court that it was unfair to consider the childsupport funds as income “reasonably anticipated to be received” by the family — the law’s definition of income — because it was automatically deducted from the husband’s paychecks and unemployment benefits to support three children living elsewhere.

But the court unanimously upheld regulations of the state Department of Social Services, in effect since 1997, that count such payments as income to determine eligibility for the benefits program known as CalWORKS.

Previously, the department had discounted income earmarked for outofhome child support in calculating welfare eligibility. That changed after Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, a 1996 law that required states receiving federal funds to include work requirements in their welfare programs, along with limits on the duration of payments.

In determining a family’s income, CalWORKS disregards $225 per month plus half of an applicant’s earnings, higher amounts than under the previous rules. The court said state officials had argued that their approach “was intended to encourage work” — and so was the inclusion of income that one spouse owed for child support.

“Families paying courtordered child support whose earned income is insufficient to make ends meet may ultimately decide to seek more earned income,” Justice Goodwin Liu said in the 70 ruling. He noted that the Legislature, while changing other CalWORKS rules over the years, had left the childsupport provisions untouched.

The family’s lawyer, Richard Rothschild of the Western Center on Law and Poverty, said it was a formula for hardship.

“The Department of Social Services has adopted a policy that pretends the money that the new family never sees is somehow available to them,” he said. “We hope that the state government will undo this policy, which undermines not only the goals of public benefits laws but also of childsupport statutes.”

The ruling denied CalWORKS benefits to the family of Angie Christensen, who lived with her husband, their three children, and her three children from a former marriage.

Christensen applied for benefits in 2010. She was ineligible on her own because she was receiving federal Supplemental Security Income, and the couple’s three children were excluded from benefits by provisions in the law limiting payments for children born to families already receiving aid.

Her husband, Bruce, worked part time and also received unemployment benefits, payments that were reduced each month to cover support for three children who lived outside the home. When those payments were included in the family’s income, it exceeded the $828amonth maximum for eligibility.

A Superior Court judge ruled in the family’s favor and said the state’s policy was illegal because it contradicted the Department of Social Services’ own definition of income as funds that were “currently available” to needy members of the family. But a state appeals court overruled that decision, and the state’s high court said the department had acted within its authority.

Rothschild, the family’s lawyer, said the ruling would also apply to CalWORKS applicants whose sole source of income was either unemployment or disability benefits.

“It doesn’t make sense to describe harming unemployed people, and people with disabilities that prevent them from working, as a work incentive,” he said.