Board Acts Today on New Child Welfare Chief : Social services: Choice to run county department is called intensely motivated, but a demanding taskmaster. Only one supervisor opposes appointment.

Gerald Peter Digre is known to those who work for him as an intensely motivated--some would say brilliant--expert in child welfare, but also as a taskmaster who demands as much of others as he does of himself. Two years ago, Digre almost lost his right arm in a boating accident. While he was recuperating, he learned to write with his left.

“Oh my God,” his staff joked when he returned. “Now the guy can write with two hands.”

That story says a lot about Digre, who is expected to become the next director of the troubled Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services. The County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to take a final vote today on whether to hire him; only Supervisor Ed Edelman, citing concerns about Digre’s demanding management style and the track record of the Florida agency he now works for, has said he will vote against the appointment.

The man the board is considering is a 46-year-old, highly educated, somewhat shy Midwesterner who calls himself by his middle name, Peter. He is the second-in-command at the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services, a sprawling agency that administers a vast health services system for not only children, but also the poor, the mentally ill and the elderly.

His current boss says Digre (pronounced degree) attracted his attention years ago because he was known to stay at his desk late into the night. Those who have worked for him complain he expects them to do the same. One former employee said Digre is the kind of guy who gives an assignment at 2 o’clock, wants it done by 3 and won’t take no for an answer.

“He is perhaps one of the brightest people I have ever known,” says Luci Hadi, a former top child welfare administrator in Florida who says she enjoyed working for Digre. But, she adds, “He was extremely hard on his immediate staff to the point of being totally insensitive at times. . . . He’s burned out a number of (people) who simply couldn’t take it anymore.”

Digre makes no bones about what he calls his “personal style,” saying: “Some people find it invigorating. Some people may well find it tiring. But I believe there is nothing more important in this world than public service in general and child welfare in specific . . . It demands our best every minute.”

Digre has a reputation for being able to turn around troubled child welfare agencies, and if he is hired in Los Angeles, that is exactly what he will find. State officials, who at one point threatened to take over the county Department of Children’s Services, found that social workers routinely failed to visit the children they supervised and that county officials permitted foster children to remain in homes where they had been physically or sexually abused.

The county agency is now undergoing a massive reorganization under interim director Elwood Lui, who stepped in when the former department chief resigned under pressure in July. If he is confirmed, Digre will take over for Lui in January. He has been offered $115,000 a year for the job.

In Philadelphia, where Digre served as deputy commissioner at the city’s Children and Youth Agency from 1984 to 1987, he faced a similarly troubled agency. His colleagues there say that not all his efforts were successful; they cite a computerized child abuse tracking system that is still not on line. But on the whole, they say, he set in place a reorganization that has since served the department well.

“Considering that he was coming into a system where he really didn’t know anybody, he really did a dynamite job,” said Rita Urwitz, a union leader who said she was often at odds with Digre on management-labor issues.

In Florida, Digre worked for an organization that has a history of problems stretching back long before he got there. More recently, the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services has been the target of criticism on a variety of fronts--from cronyism in the way Digre’s boss handed out contracts to the way the department handled cases involving abused and neglected children.

In speaking out against Digre, Edelman has cited these troubles. “We need to have someone who doesn’t leave a state with those kinds of problems,” the supervisor said in an interview last week.

Last year, Florida passed child abuse reforms and boosted spending after the widely publicized death of a 2-year-old foster child, who was returned home in spite of abuse. More recently, Florida’s governor-elect, Lawton Chiles, appointed a citizens commission to look into revamping the health services department.

Despite the reforms, said Jack Levine, one of Florida’s best-known child advocates, “our children are in horrible shape in Florida.” But Levine and other child advocates in Florida blame the state Legislature and Gov. Bob Martinez--as well as the state health agency--for the problems.

Observers say Digre would likely lose his job once Martinez is out of office.

Asked whether Digre can be personally held responsible for his agency’s flaws, Levine said: “I don’t know if you can lay a dead child on the doorstep of Pete Digre. We’ve got more than 80,000 children in Florida who are needing services who aren’t getting it and that has nothing to do with Pete Digre. That has to do with the Legislature.”

But Budd Bell, another noted child advocate in Florida, finds fault with Digre and his boss, Health and Rehabilitative Services Secretary Greg Coler.

“I don’t know how courageous Mr. Digre is and I don’t know his politics, but he certainly was acquiescent to the status quo,” Bell said. “My feeling with these people is if they acquiesce and do what Pete Digre had to do, then they are part of the problem.”

Digre, however, takes credit for helping to double his agency’s budget while he worked there. One Florida child welfare official says it was well known that Digre so annoyed Tallahassee legislators by demanding more money that they told Coler not to send him to hearings any more.

Digre has remained largely in the background during Florida’s debate over the welfare of its children. As deputy director for operations of the vast, $7.4-billion agency, his job has been to supervise the department’s 11 districts and their 38,000 employees. He does not make policy; he carries it out.

Those who know him well say that Digre’s interests are eclectic; he can converse as freely about saltwater fishing as Greek mythology. He is not flashy. He drives an old car and lives with his wife, an administrator in the Florida Department of Labor, and two children, ages 10 and 13, in a comfortable three-bedroom house.

Digre holds a doctorate in theology and a master’s degree in social work. He began his career in the mid-1960s working with Chicago street gangs and by the late 1970s was climbing up the ladder of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, where Coler was in charge.

Coler promoted Digre several times, eventually making him deputy director of the department. Coler says Digre’s knowledge of the intricacies of the child welfare system is unmatched: “This is a man who not only knows how to draw the blueprint and do the design but knows how to cut the lumber and drive the nails into the board.”

In May, 1984, Digre left Illinois for Philadelphia. When he arrived, the agency was under fire from state and federal officials who insisted on reforms. Urwitz, the union leader, said Digre was not very good at building a consensus among opposing factions. “He tries to please everybody and what ends up happening is he pleases nobody,” she said.

However, Beatrice Posner, who at the time chaired the citizens commission that oversees the Philadelphia agency, disagreed. She said Digre “showed great talent” in working with child advocates and politicians.

That talent will be especially important if Digre comes to Los Angeles, where the Commission on Children’s Services, a 15-member citizens board, has long been at odds with the department it oversees. In Philadelphia, Posner said, Digre provided confidential information about individual cases. Commissioners in Los Angeles have been demanding such information, saying it would help them gauge the department’s performance.

In March, 1987, Digre changed jobs again, this time to follow his former boss, Coler, to Florida. Coler--whom colleagues said Digre considers as his mentor--recounted the conversation in which he offered Digre the job: “He said, ‘Is this the one, chief?’ I said, ‘This is the one.’ ”

To some extent, Digre’s close association with Coler may have been detrimental to him. Coler has been criticized in the Florida press for handing out no-bid contracts to his friends under “the buddy system”--a charge he vehemently denies. Digre’s name comes up only once in these articles, in connection with a contract the department awarded to a man named Robert Palm, who had worked with both Digre and Coler in Illinois, and with Digre in Philadelphia.

Palm, who died this year, was hired to design a computerized child abuse tracking system that Digre counts as among his biggest accomplishments in Florida. (Digre said this system is a more advanced version of the one he put in place in Philadelphia.) Among Digre’s other accomplishments are the creation of a statewide toll-free child abuse hot line and a “performance indicator” system, which the agency uses to evaluate the work of each of its 11 districts.

As administrator of one of those districts, Chelly Schembera said she sometimes thought Digre had unreasonable expectations, but was often proved wrong. “Even Pete’s detractors acknowledge that he has made tremendous gains,” said Schembera. “If he has a flaw it is that he thinks anything is possible no matter how limited the resources are.”