San Luis Obispo County may not be a great place to be a deadbeat parent. For the fifth year in a row, it’s the best county in the state at collecting child support.
Christine Johnson is the assistant director of San Luis Obispo County’s Child Support Services department. Johnson said of the department’s 30 staff members, nine work on enforcement cases - collecting owed payments.
“So enforcement workers really are the ones that are getting on the phone calling people if they're late on their payment, they're sending out garnishments to employers if they're working,” Johnson said. “They're the ones doing a lot of locating to try and find people that maybe are not paying and they're not contacting us back things like that.”
Child support services has the power to garnish wages, intercept tax refunds and even revoke business licenses. Johnson says last month, the department collected a payment of $120,000 dollars on one case.
“In this particular instance this person was going to lose their [business] license and then they would not be able to work,” Johnson said. “And they had the money so they paid it off.”
In 2016-2017, San Luis Obispo County distributed nearly $14 million to families by enforcing child support orders and collecting support monies, according to the department.