WELFARE OVERHAUL ON DECK : WILSON TO REVEAL PROPOSED CHANGES.

Byline: Paul Hefner Daily News Sacramento Bureau

Elizabeth Neville is the kind of welfare mother Gov. Pete Wilson is looking for.

After a hit-and-miss nightclub singing career and four years on public assistance, Neville - armed with some knowledge about welfare reform - says she is ready to get the skills to keep her out of the North Hollywood shelter where she now lives.

``Some people have an attitude about welfare; they feel, `This is owed to me.' I never felt that way,'' said Neville, 37. ``I agree with the concept of getting people to go to work that are able to work.''

Wilson is poised to release his proposal for reforming the state's welfare system today, along with the state budget.

The plan will offer Wilson's version of how to bring the state into line with federal welfare reform passed last year. Details of the plan were still under wraps Wednesday, but elements of the package already outlined by state officials make clear that sweeping changes are in the works.

Among them:

Control of welfare programs would be shifted from the federal government to the state, which will have unprecedented power to decide who's eligible for benefits and what they should be.

Wilson wants new restrictions on eligibility, requiring applicants to name the father of any children due to receive grants. Recipients also would have to keep their children in school and fully immunized.

There will be new work requirements to meet federal rules sending a steadily rising share of recipients to work. The state must put one in four single welfare parents to work this fiscal year and raise that ratio to one in two by 2002.

The plan will include new time limits on aid beyond the five-year lifetime limit imposed in federal legislation. Wilson will call for limiting families already in the system to two years of assistance and new families to just a single year, officials said. The plan would allow families who hit those limits to get back on the program later, but only after a hiatus of at least 12 months.

``Really, to me, that's not setting these people up for success,'' said Joanne Baltierrez, a member of the San Fernando City Council, who herself once received welfare assistance.

Baltierrez, a single mother, quit her clerical job and went on Aid to Families with Dependent Children while attending Mission College in Sylmar. It took 2-1/2 years, but the education she got helped her raise her income enough to move her family away from an apartment riddled with drug dealers, she said.

She said she's worried that the proposed time limits will be too short to give people much help long term.

``Even for people who are educated, we've got to have that window of help,'' she said. ``If we don't give people a place to go, there's going to be fallout somewhere.''

Wilson's plan will be far from the last word on welfare reform, since whatever he proposes will have to be approved by the Legislature. Democrats hold a majority in both houses, and lawmakers already have said they will look upon Wilson's plan as only a starting point for negotiations.

The stakes are high for Los Angeles County, where more than one in three of the state's 2.6 million welfare recipients reside. County lobbyists and welfare officials are waiting to hear details of Wilson's plan.

One key issue for the county is whether the state will continue to pay benefits to legal immigrants who become ineligible for federal funding. The county has identified 95,000 elderly or disabled legal immigrants slated to lose federally funded benefits later this year, said Gale Swensson, an administrator for the county's Department of Public Social Services.

If the state fails to address the issue, the county could be forced to offer them general relief, a county-funded program that already costs $198 million annually.

``We'd have a problem - a big problem,'' Swensson said.

Swensson also said the county will be looking to the state for the flexibility. In particular, the county will seek to expand a program already established to place recipients into jobs.

``I think people think we don't put welfare recipients to work, and we do,'' she said.

Some changes that may help over the long term may create problems in the short term, said Neil Gilbert, a professor of social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although he acknowledged that the governor's plans to require the fathers of children seeking welfare to be identified might discourage unwed births years from now, he was concerned about the immediate impacts.

``The real difficulty is creating a situation where you're not too harsh on unwed mothers now, because the people who in the end get hurt the most is the kids,'' he said.

Gilbert predicted that many welfare recipients won't need much in the way of new services, since most stay on the program only a short time.

``There's a large group you can leave alone,'' he said. ``They'll get off on their own.''

But others will need help, especially in the form of child care. Democrats chided Wilson for making only a passing reference to the issue in Tuesday's State of the State address.

Tevin Neal, 30, whose family of five had its monthly welfare check cut this month to $666, isn't opposed to reforming the welfare system. But for changes to work, he said, families will need child care and the ability to earn some money without losing benefits.

On welfare since August after he was injured in a car accident, Neal is attending school full time to learn a trade working with computers. But the current system makes sending his wife to work almost counterproductive, he said.

``If my wife goes to work, we fall deeper back, because they cut her aid,'' he said. ``For the program to work, they need to give people options.''