Social services has new air of safety

By Timothy Pratt

Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2003 | 9:14 a.m.

The most heated moment Monday morning at the new Clark County Social Service office in Henderson was when a security guard asked a member of the public not to lean on the metal detector.

With a smile, the person shifted his weight.

It reflected a quiet opening at the new office on Boulder Highway to replace the old one on Lake Mead Parkway that closed Dec. 10 after a customer stabbed a guard and two employees.

The customer had waited more than an hour to see his caseworker when an employee announced to those in the waiting room that no more appointments would be taken for the rest of the day.

At the time, social service officials said the office had suffered under an increasing workload that made it difficult to help everyone in a timely fashion.

There was no trouble getting quick help Monday morning. Customers for the saloon across the way outnumbered those at the county office at least 2 to 1 when the agency's doors opened at 7 a.m.

"This isn't the office where the stabbing happened, is it?" one guard asked another shortly after the office's first four clients sat in the otherwise empty room.

It wasn't, exactly. The old one had no metal detector and the new one has a separate entrance and exit for employees, as well as thick glass separating workers from the public.

The need to build a new office safer for workers and customers left other agency offices in the Las Vegas Valley absorbing about 450 clients a month while the Boulder Highway office -- the first new one to open since March 2001 -- was being outfitted.

The stabbing also prompted some discussion in the agency about the potentially volatile mix of long lines, unemployed people, bureaucratic runarounds and chronic shortages in staffing.

The agency saw 90,000 people in 2002, an increase in 15 percent over the year before, with no new employees. The agency is now hiring 16 new employees, said Bertha Warrick, assistant director for the agency -- including an eligibility specialist at the Henderson office.

Dale Wofford, 51, was at the new office Monday morning for help paying his rent, after being laid off from a security guard job when he began getting dizzy spells. The spells were from diabetes and hyperthyroidism, he said, and he had been to the main social service office on Pinto Lane three times for help with medication.

"What a nightmare," he said. Wofford rode a scooter from Henderson to Las Vegas at 4:30 a.m. and found about 100 people waiting in line at the agency's main office.

"There were some very upset people on line," he said. "Especially the very ill people."

Wofford eventually got help with medicine, but now he needs help with the rent, though he also hopes to get back to work soon.

He found the trip of several blocks to the new office and the wait of several minutes a relief.

"This is just great," he said.

Before Wofford, Amber and Angel King, sisters who both had babies in the last four months, were also seeking rental assistance. They work in a Strip casino but need a hand while on three-month maternity leave, which is unpaid.

"This is the first time we've been in one of these offices, and hopefully the last," Angel said.

But apart from the lack of lines and a safer building, Linda Lera-Randle El, a member of the agency's new Citizens Advisory Committee, said she hoped the new office developed more efficient ways of helping people.

"You can incorporate ... technology, beautiful buildings, and so on, but if you do not have ... the right methods in place, none of the other stuff matters, at least not insofar as real people with real issues are concerned," she said.

Bernadette Sena, social work supervisor at the new office, said she would try to keep people's time in the office down with changes such as extending medical benefits from three to six months for longtime clients. Warrick said the office should be able to issue checks directly from the office in several weeks -- something the old office couldn't do and a time-saver for people for whom time is short.

Lera-Randle El said she hopes greater efficiency is also accompanied by more humane treatment than is sometimes seen in government offices.

"People who come to these offices are often at the end of their rope," she said.

"If they are not treated with a certain comprehensiveness, then it can trigger distraught people who feel they have nothing more to lose."