Anticipating the Pain of County Budget Cuts : Government: Despite officials’ best intentions, the safety net that catches the sick, the poor and the illiterate may sustain more damage.

Ken Rose, a peer counselor for the mentally ill, is frustrated that Ventura County leaders plan further cuts in mental health services that he believes saved his life and can halt others from committing suicide.

James Leivas worries the county will eliminate the adult literacy program that helped him hang onto his federal job and overcome a form of dyslexia that has hampered his ability to read and write for 40 years.

Christel Davies, a 13-year-old volunteer library worker, frets that the proposed closure of the Oak View Library will rob her tiny community near Ojai of its only hangout for kids.

Ventura County leaders are poised to alter the lives of these local residents and thousands of others as they launch into another painful round of budget cuts.

The cumulative cutbacks in recent years have begun to disintegrate programs in a county that has long taken pride in the quality of its government service. Managers predict that if they are forced to absorb more cuts, there will be more mistakes, longer lines and delays, even in something as simple as obtaining a birth certificate, a marriage license or property records.

“It means less service for Joe Schmo on the street,” said County Clerk Richard D. Dean. “It means more screw-ups on our part, not being accurate or delivering service on a timely basis.”

County agencies already are reeling from five years of cutbacks from losing more than $44 million in tax dollars. Now, county supervisors are trying to hack another $38 million from the county’s spending for the next two years.

As elected leaders, the supervisors want to minimize the impact and spread around the residual pain.

Yet despite their best intentions, county leaders are preparing to slice bigger holes in the county’s safety net that catches the sick, the poor or the illiterate and helps them get back on their feet.

“Ventura County Mental Health was the safety net that caught me,” said Rose, a former Simi Valley marketing consultant who has clinical depression with psychotic episodes. “I was homeless, not knowing I was mentally ill. I tried to kill myself.”

Rose said that a mental health crisis team intervened, and then he received follow-up counseling and other care that helped him manage his illness over the past 3 1/2 years. Now he lives in Ventura and runs a peer counseling telephone service for the mentally ill on behalf of the nonprofit Turning Point Foundation.

Given cutbacks in recent years, Rose said, the county no longer offers the post-crisis treatment that enabled him to resume his life as a productive, tax-paying member of society.

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“A person like me wouldn’t get the same help today,” he said. And without it, he said, “I was focused on ending my life and I would have gone out and completed the job.”

The county’s Mental Health Services department is targeted for another $1.5-million reduction this year, deeper cuts that slice into hospital programs and other services for the most seriously mentally ill.

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Rose said the most seriously ill often present a danger to themselves and sometimes to others. He predicted that more will end up living on the streets or cycling through prisons.

“It is appalling to us who are mentally ill to see our brothers and sisters going over the edge,” Rose said. “These people desperately need help and we are sending them to maximum security prisons that cost two to four times as much as to hospitalize them.”

Mental health services are not the only county medical programs slated for cuts this year. But they are the deepest cuts, partly because other county medical programs get most of their funding from state and federal governments. For mental health services, the county is the primary source of money.

“The federal government is not in the mental health business and the state has shifted all the responsibility to the counties,” said John Chaudier, chairman of the Ventura County Mental Health Board. “The county is the safety net, when it comes to mental health.”

Ventura County’s libraries also receive tax dollars separately from the state, although that funding has dropped by nearly half in the past two years.

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The county stepped forward last year with subsidies to keep the libraries operating on a part-time basis. But with its own huge deficit, the county can muster only about half of the $1.6 million needed this year. Without more cash, library officials say they will be forced to close seven of their 16 library branches and end their preschool and adult literacy programs.

That’s deeply disappointing to the 400 adults enrolled in the literacy program.

“It’s pretty sad,” said Antonio Martin, a soft-spoken 44-year-old Ventura resident. “They should try to keep the programs where people are trying to help themselves.”

Martin takes delight in his progress in the literacy program after years of bluffing his way through driver’s license exams and other uncomfortable situations. “When a person cannot read, the whole world shuts you out.”

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His goal is to start his own business, he said, “and, one day, to give a Bible study class on my own.”

James Leivas, a 48-year-old Oxnard resident, said his first year of working one-on-one with a volunteer tutor in the program has salvaged his job as an environmental specialist at a naval engineer laboratory in Port Hueneme.

He hit a crisis last year when his boss confronted him over flip-flopped letters in a routine quarterly report he had written. Leivas was forced to disclose his dyslexic condition and reading impairment that has dogged him since grade school.

In negotiations that involved his union and his employer, Leivas agreed to enroll in the county’s adult literacy program. Program administrators had him tested for a type of dyslexia and arranged for specially-tinted glasses that corrected the vision impairment at the root of his reading troubles.

Since then, Leivas has progressed through four of 12 stages in the literacy program. He manages to read and write required reports without a problem. And he even received a promotion.

“This is the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Leivas said. “My goal is to complete the course and teach someone else what I have learned.”

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Heather Leonardo of Simi Valley said she and others who volunteer as tutors worry about the hole left in the community should the literacy program be shut down.

“It would create a big crack that a lot of people would fall into,” Leonardo said. “A lot of people I come in contact with, they are ready to jump into the mainstream of American living. They just need the extra help in our program that they cannot get elsewhere.”

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Friends of the county’s library also worry about the communities’ loss if seven of the smallest branches are forced to close. Those on the hit list are the Ventura Avenue, Saticoy, Oak View, Piru, Meiners Oaks and El Rio libraries and the yet-to-be built Oak Park library, which now doubles as the library on the Oak Park High School campus.

“We would be very disappointed,” said Bonnie Jenkins, an Oak Park library regular. Her 3-year-old son Quinn was resting on her hip, clutching “The Legend of Larry the Lizard.” “It would be such a hole in the community.”

As in other small communities, the Oak View Library, located in a strip mall on California 33, has become more than a library.

“This is the only place in Oak View where kids can hang out,” said branch manager Dolores Keith. “There’s no drugstore, no mall, no soda shop. This is the hub of the Oak View Community.”

On Thursday afternoon, the branch was a beehive of activity. Susan Mulqueen had two dozen children captivated with her pet walking sticks and other live insects featured in her lecture called “Bugs and Stuff.”

A group of budding teens gathered around a table, joking and munching on pepperoni pizza-flavored potato chips. They had chipped in to buy a whole banana cream pie. Soon, they took turns dragging a finger across the pie and popping wads of cream in their mouths.

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Keith, who later confiscated the pie, broke from her routine of checking out books when an 8-year-old boy from the neighborhood hobbled in, wailing about stepping on a shard of broken glass. She joined the boy in the restroom to dress and bandage his foot.

The teen-agers agreed that it’s not fair for the county to even think about closing their gathering spot.

“Our town is pretty much nothing,” said Christel Davies, the 13-year volunteer who helps Keith with the summer reading program. “If you take this library away, there is nothing else for kids to do but to get into trouble.”

Times staff writer Carlos V. Lozano contributed to this report.