County Moves Toward Welfare Breaks : Assistance: Most supervisors back a plan to let recipients share housing and earn $200 a month with no penalty. Board delays taking a vote.

Los Angeles County supervisors moved closer Tuesday toward allowing welfare recipients, whose monthly grants have been slashed to $212, to work and share housing without being penalized.

Most of the supervisors said they would support Supervisor Gloria Molina’s proposal to allow the county’s 102,495 General Relief recipients to share housing with one other person, to have $1,500 in savings and to earn $200 a month without having their grants reduced. Recipients would be permitted to earn another $400 a month with only minor grant reductions.

The proposal would cost the county an estimated $4 million, far less than the $70 million it would cost to restore the monthly grants to their pre-September level of $293.

“The reality is we can’t restore the grants, but we need to do something to help these folks,” Molina said.

But the board delayed approving the proposal until Tuesday, despite pleas by homeless advocates who said the cuts had left many unable to pay for shelter in cold and rainy weather.

The delay will give county attorneys time to prepare a report on the financial and legal repercussions of the policy changes. Among the concerns they expressed is whether the new policy would make more people eligible for welfare and thus end up costing the county far more than $4 million.

To avoid that, the county is exploring the possibility of enrolling people in the General Relief program using the current eligibility criteria, and extending the right to work and other new benefits once they have been on the rolls for an unspecified period of time.

Funding for Molina’s proposal would come either from the county’s surplus fund or from unanticipated savings in the General Relief program. Since the county slashed the monthly grants in September, the number of people on General Relief has actually decreased 4.4%. If the downward trend in caseloads continues, the county could save up to $40 million this fiscal year, welfare officials said.

In other actions, the board allocated about $20 million of a $40-million reserve to patch some of the county’s leaky library roofs and maintain public safety. But the supervisors postponed deciding until next week how much money to give Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who requested about $10 million to make it through the rest of the year.

Chief Administrative Officer Sally R. Reed had recommended that the district attorney’s office be allocated only about $3 million, but Garcetti said he needs more money in part to replace 145 staff members, including 40 investigators and 85 prosecutors.

In a largely symbolic move, the board also ordered Reed to put in writing by next week a policy prohibiting department heads from spending more than they are allocated in the county’s budget. The order came after supervisors expressed frustration at the limited control they exercise over the budgets of such elected officials as Garcetti and Sheriff Sherman Block, whom the board cannot fire for failing to live within their budgets.