Proposed Cuts to Wreak Heavy Toll in County, Officials Predict : Welfare: Representatives from agencies expect huge increase in malnourished, homeless and sickly.

No matter which welfare reform plan Congress adopts in coming months, the results will devastate Los Angeles County in unprecedented ways, a variety of social service providers told the Commission for Public Social Services on Wednesday.

In a daylong hearing scheduled to elicit comments, 31 representatives from public and private agencies predicted an explosion of malnourished, homeless, and sickly people turning to a decimated county for help.

“Anybody can tell you that in Third World Los Angeles, when options run out and money is hard to come by, people are going to opt to pay rent rather than buy food, and some may not have enough to do either,” said Tanya Tull, executive director of Beyond Shelter, a group that aids the homeless.

“That’s a situation we have now and it’s only going to be exacerbated with the cuts we’re facing,” she said.

California, and Los Angeles County in particular, would be the most affected by the proposed welfare cuts because the population here will continue to grow while federal funds will remain stagnant, said Irene Riley, head of governmental relations for the County Department of Health Services. She predicted that various programs, health clinics, food pantries and public child care centers may eventually have to shut down.

The county health services department is already looking to cut $100 million in costs by closing High Desert Hospital in Lancaster and seven of its 39 health clinics--including two in Canoga Park and Burbank, Riley noted. The proposal, which goes before the board of supervisors today, is not related to the welfare measure.

However, the move to cut medical services is a reflection of what’s to come, Riley said.

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Another social-service provider, Carolyn Olney of the Interfaith Hunger Coalition, said health care, food pantry donations and federal nutrition programs would be so minimized that they would be forced to turn away people who would not meet extreme requirements for help.

Furthermore, Olney said, senior citizens would be pitted against children as the federal funding for nutritional programs diminishes.

And private organizations such as the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities, already tapped to the brink, will not be able to pick up the spillover of people turned away from public agencies.

“There needs to be a partnership between public and private agencies,” said the Rev. Gregory Cox of Catholic Charities. “But if the government pulls out, it’s going to put more of a strain on the private sector and we’re already breaking under the weight from what we deal with now.”

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From the information culled from Wednesday’s hearing at the L.A. County Natural History Museum in Exposition Park, the 15-member public services commission plans to make recommendations to the County Board of Supervisors on how to deal with the anticipated funding cuts. The commission, made up of lay people, evaluates the county social services department’s programs and serves as liaison with the supervisors.

Exacerbating the grim portrait is a recent discussion by the supervisors to dismantle the county’s General Relief program, which could add another 100,000 people or more to the list of the county’s indigent. Supervisors are pursuing state legislation that would permit eliminating general relief, which provides cash grants to poor adults and is solely county funded.

“Whatever is decided, it’s going to have a catastrophic effect on the services we can provide to people,” said Ray Garcia, the Social Services Department’s assistant director, “and some people who may really need the help are going to get lost in the shuffle.”