Community Care Licensing Division (CCLD) is reorganizing to, as its website states, "maximize its ability to meet its mandates and protect health and safety." This includes consolidating the Adult and Senior Care Program (ASCP) "so that all ASCP employees will work with both the adult and senior care facility categories." The reason for this change, is to "improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase flexibility," and to "provide greater assurance of health and safety to vulnerable persons residing in adult and senior community care facilities."

Cost savings, efficiency, health and safety protections.... Let’s hope this effort to protect our vulnerable adults and seniors in care is successful. This is the right direction for CCLD, and it is the demand of California’s government and its citizens.

In law school, one learns about "foreseeability." That is, what could possibly happen? To have LPAs cross-trained to conduct inspections of both adult and senior care facilities is admirable, but what is foreseeable? What is likely to happen? Here’s an opinion: LPAs will be citing senior care facilities in adult regulations, and will be citing adult facilities in the wrong Title 22. How overburdened, then, will supervisors and managers be when hundreds of appeals come flooding in? Will appeals be addressed in a timely manner, or addressed at all? Even now, appeals have not been addressed going on years. Will supervisors and managers be trained in both adult and senior care regulations, too? More importantly, will they be trained in the right laws?

Efficiency? If this foreseeable opinion comes true, it will hamper CCLD staff to accomplish anything. A recent appeal found that an LPA spent 10 hours in a six-bed facility and that stunned her supervisor. The LPA claimed that not all deficiencies were cited even after 10 hours! CCLD cannot be efficient until its staff embraces this reorganization, and attempts to understand the differences between adult and senior regulations and laws. LPAs have stated they take guidance from the evaluator’s manual and not laws and regulations. The evaluator’s manual cannot never be cited for compliance.

Let’s hope what is foreseeable does not happen, but with CCLDs history!

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Here’s what is known at this time regarding the reorganization of CCLD. The Woodland Hills office will cover adult and senior facilities in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura and portions of north Los Angeles Counties. A Greater Los Angeles office, probably out of Monterey Park, will take on central LA County. The Orange County CCLD office will inspect Orange and San Bernardino County facilities. The San Diego office will oversee Riverside, San Diego and Imperial Counties. The CCLD offices in Riverside and Goleta are not shown on a current reorganization map. It is not known if these offices will close or take on a lesser role of governance.

Given the division of labor noted above for CCLD, recent statistics show that Orange County’s Licensing office is not having its work load reduced, but increased. There are approximately 900 senior homes (RCFEs) and 366 adult facilities (ARFs) in Orange County. The Orange County office will now be inspecting San Bernardino’s RCFEs and ARFs, which adds over 510 more homes to inspect. The San Diego office will be taking on more facilities, too, numbering upwards to 800 more. It remains to be seen what will happen to the Riverside office, and if staff will be reduced, the office closed, etc.

In February 2011, Governor Brown instituted a hiring freeze, but the Sacramento Bee reported that he granted an exemption to most state agencies that asked for more staff. It has been reported that the statewide hiring freeze has been lifted as of January 2012. CCLD and other state agencies are now allowed to hire more staff, or to replace staff. If this is true, the state is not in step with the rest of California’s employers who may be slowly rehiring, but California and Nevada remain among the states with the highest unemployment rate. If California is hiring more employees in light of its budget shortfalls, something is wrong in California. Nationwide, government employment changed little in January, 2012. Over the past year the government sector lost 276,000 jobs, with declines in local and state government. California is facing a multi-billion dollar revenue shortfall, so hiring more state workers cannot be solving this problem, and if you wish to vote for the tax hike the governor is proposing, are you paying for more state employees, not for more teachers and police officers.

There are LPA job openings in most CCLD offices with a starting pay of $2,738 per month.