County Seeks to Lure Disabled Back to Work

With Ventura County paying more than $9 million a year to retired government workers on disability, personnel officials Wednesday asked to create a new program aimed at getting more of these former employees back to work.

Barbara Olivier, a personnel official, asked the Board of Supervisors for authorization to spend $215,000 to start a pilot program targeting retired employees out on disabilities that did not occur while they were at work, such as accidents and long-term illnesses. Currently, 163 former workers receive such benefits.

Olivier said most of the money would be used to retrain such workers for new jobs and to pay a onetime “incentive bonus” to those employees who return to work for at least one year. The payment amount has not been determined.

“The county would benefit by getting back a productive worker and by saving retirement dollars,” she told the board.

The county already has a program aimed at disabled retirees who were injured at work, which has encouraged 252 people to return since 1993, according to Olivier. She could not, however, say how many of those workers remain on the job.

Supervisors said they wanted to do whatever they can to make it easier for people to come back to work, but questioned whether the county should give them a cash bonus to do so.

“I don’t think people should need an incentive,” board Chairman Frank Schillo said. “If a person doesn’t want a job, no incentive is going to help them. They may end up taking the incentive for a year and quit.”

But Schillo, who also sits on the county’s retirement board, said he is concerned about the growing number of employees retiring on disability. In the last three years, 107 employees have been granted retirement disability benefits, bringing the total to 542 today. This represents 19.5% of the county’s 2,775 retirees.

Between 1980 and 1992, Ventura County had an average of 24% of its retirees receiving disability benefits, the highest percentage of any California county. In 1992, the most recent statewide figures available, Ventura County, with 22.1%, ranked third in the state behind Kern and Mendocino counties.

Of the current former employees receiving retirement disability benefits, 379 are out on job-related injuries, according to county records. Of those, 242 are former public safety workers, meaning that they were either sheriff’s deputies or firefighters.

The overall monthly retirement payments to retired county employees total $3.5 million, with more than $791,000 of that going to people out on permanent disability.

And the number of employees lining up for retirement disability benefits is growing, officials said. So far this year, the county has received 77 applications for the benefits.

“Those numbers are way too high,” Supervisor John K. Flynn said. But like Schillo, Flynn said he is not sure what can be done to reduce the number of employees receiving such benefits.

Flynn said he would probably support hiring a person to work with individual departments to create “light-duty positions” to accommodate former employees wishing to return to work. But he said he opposes giving them incentive pay.

“I don’t want to get into any incentive program,” he said. “In the past, they’ve proven that they just don’t work. I think people ought to want to come back to work.”

But Olivier said incentive pay is needed to persuade people to return to work before become accustomed to staying at home and collecting benefits.

“If you get them in the very beginning, you have an excellent chance of getting them back to work,” she said. “But if they’ve been out six to 10 months on disability, it’s going to be very hard.”

Robi Klein, the county’s risk manager, agreed with the need to act quickly. He said many disabled retirees receive as much as half of their regular salary tax-free in addition to their disability payments. They can continue to receive these payments even after they have found another job.

“A lot of these people may not want to come back to work,” he said. “When one gets disability retirement, you’re looking at 50% of your pay with no taxes. That’s an incentive in itself.”