By Rick Rogers
DefenseTracker.com

SAN DIEGO - With great fanfare Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger launched "Operation Welcome Home" a month ago here as the state's high-profile $20 million answer to question of how best to transition combat veterans back to civilian life.

"Operation Welcome Home is groundbreaking," Schwarzenegger told an audience assembled aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Midway in San Diego Harbor on a brilliant early June day. "Every year 30,000 veterans come back to California … We want them to move smoothly from the battlefront to the home front," he said. "We are doing more than thanking them. We are showing them our gratitude through our actions."

Now, on the eve of the Fourth of July funding squabbles have some veteran advocates are wondering if Operation Welcome Home will ever get off the ground.

A bipartisan committee chaired by State Sen. Denise Moreno Ducheny (D), San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties, recently voted to cut the governor's Operation Welcome Home funding increase from $8.4 million to $1.11 million.

The governor's office had called the funding critical in allowing County Veteran Service Offices to meet the state's 2.1 million veterans -- including an estimated 165,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans - needs in filing for employment, education, housing, health care, family support and federal benefits.

While the $1.11 million funding compromise does represent a 35 percent increase over last year's state funding for County Veterans Service Offices, it still does not begin to offset increased demand for services, said Pete Conaty, a lobbyist for the California Association of County Veterans Service Officers.

"Without that money Operation Welcome Home will almost certainly be a failure," Conaty said. "And this would result in yet another broken promise to our veterans. The governor realized that for Operation Welcome Home to succeed, the key component was the county veteran service officers."

J.P. Tremblay, deputy secretary for the California Department of Veterans Affairs, agrees with at least part of that assessment.

"County veteran service officers are our boots on the ground," Tremblay said. "Their role in Operation Welcome Home is key and their funding is integral to the program's success. This is an important issue to them and it is an important issue for us."

Ducheny said her committee did its best while "weighing all the priorities."
"This 35 percent increase is more then they have ever gotten before both in real terms and as a percentage increase," Ducheny said in a telephone interview. "Everyone else in the budget is flat or minus. We were just trying to find a balance. We are asking senior citizens to live on less money, and the governor took $2 billion from schools."
Ducheny and other legislators face a $19 billion deficit for the 2010-2011 budget that is still weeks if not months from being passed. Political insiders suggested Ducheny's committee might be playing politics with one of the governor's pet projects in order to get a concessions elsewhere.

Ducheny denied that.

"Unless something changes, unless we find money somewhere, it is where it is," the senator said of the $1.11 million appropriation recommendation.

Conaty said that reduced funding would hurt California veterans.

He said just when veterans need more help understanding and applying for their benefits, they're getting less because of staff cuts at the county level have pared back County Veteran Service Office staff. As a result, there are just 185 such workers statewide to serve 2.1 million veterans with increasingly complex cases.

San Diego County, with the second-largest veteran population in the state at about 240,000 -- including 80,000 in North County -- is feeling the weight of those lopsided numbers.

Tom Splitgerber, County Veteran Service Officer for San Diego, said his four veteran advocates saw 550 clients between April 1 and June 18 and fielded an additional 340 inquiries. He said wait times at his office are three to seven weeks and that, "There doesn't seem to be any let up."

With Operation Welcome Home expected to add to that workload, Splitgerber predicted crippling demand should the $8.4 million not be approved.

"We in The California Association of County Veteran Service Officers believe Operation Welcome Home will probably fail without the additional funding," said Splitgerber, a two-term former president of the California Association of County Veteran Service Officers.

Operation Welcome Home grew out of Schwarzenegger's pre-Thanksgiving 2009 visit to troops stationed in Iraq, which convinced him that military personnel needed more help transitioning to civilian life.

The idea grew into a $20 million initiative that included the hiring of 325 combat veterans to contact newly discharged service members at 30, 60 and 90 days after their enlistments to check on their needs and wellbeing.

A state audit completed late last year found that California lags behind other states with large veteran populations like Texas and Florida when it comes to its former service members receiving federal benefits. County veteran service officers saw the governor's $8.4 million budget request as way of finally adding much-needed manpower to their under-staffed offices in 56 counties across the state.

According to the County Veterans Service Officers Association:

· Since 1995, County Veterans Service Officers have assisted over 1.3 million California veterans and dependants, garnering over $2.7 billion in federal monies
· Through the efforts of CVSO's, California's veterans received more than $257 million in new or increased benefits from the federal government in fiscal year 2008-2009
· Every dollar that the state spends on CVSOs translates into a return of almost $100 in federal veterans benefits