County gives unspent funds to jails, DCFS.

Byline: Troy Anderson, Staff Writer

With $178 million left unspent from the budget adopted earlier this year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to allocate $27million to keep jails open, prevent child deaths and set aside money in a "rainy day" fund.

The county ended 2008-09 with a $178 million fund balance. Of that amount, $151 million will be needed to pay for programs and projects not completed in 2008-09.

Chief Executive Officer Bill Fujioka said the remaining money will be used to keep jails open and some will be set aside in a "rainy day" fund. A total of $5.2 million was allocated to the Department of Children and Family Services to hire 33 workers to improve child safety.

In a memo to the supervisors, DCFS Director Trish Ploehn said she needed to hire the employees to increase oversight of social workers following several recent child deaths. Ploehn also wrote she wanted to expand her Internal Affairs division to eliminate a backlog of investigations into "potential employee misconduct."

"We feel it will go a long ways in addressing some of the recent tragic events," Fujioka said.

During the hearing, representatives of group homes and foster family agencies asked the supervisors to continue making the same payments to them to care for foster children even though state budget cuts have reduced the county's reimbursements.

But Supervisor Gloria Molina took issue with the request, saying the county recently wrote off $3.7 million in what auditors described as unallowable costs by the foster agencies, including $100,000 in payments to a retired chief executive for consulting fees not permitted under the contract.

Molina said she has noticed a pattern among the agencies that owe the county large amounts of money: Many of them simply go out of business and don't pay.

"These people have absconded with our funds," Molina said. "We don't even know if they just change owners around and then re-open."

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