Michigan child support pleas flood courts

Job losses, pay cuts push more parents to seek lower payments

Catherine Jun / The Detroit News

Parents pinched by the recession are flooding courts across the state with requests for reductions in child support payments.

In Wayne County, requests for payment adjustments have doubled. Courts there and across southeast Michigan are prioritizing such cases to expedite relief to strapped payers, officials said. These requests, called modification motions, illustrate the ripple effect of the state's economic contraction that reaches across multiple households and reduces the dollars available for children.

"I feel sick," said Terry McCleery. The 48-year-old dad said he would like to pay more child support but sought a reduction in Wayne County after he was laid off from an auto supplier in May. "That's less money going to my daughter. I ran out of money. I had no choice."

If unemployment doesn't let up in Michigan, the picture could grow grim, some courts say. With tens of thousands of Michigan's jobless this year expected to exhaust their unemployment benefits, noncustodial parents still jobless may stop paying their child support since courts won't have an unemployment check from which to garnish payments.

"There's just not enough money to go around for families, and they're struggling," said Suzanne Hollyer, director of the Friend of the Court in Oakland County. "The issues are just painful to resolve."

The requests are often made by fathers without custody who have fallen on tough times, like job loss, cutbacks in work hours or a home sale that fell through.

There's the Detroit father who owns a taxi and whose business has plummeted 50 percent this year. And the father from Roseville whose overtime and full-time hours were cut at his auto parts shipping company.

Oakland, Wayne cases up

Oakland County is set to outpace last year's total of requests for child support adjustments filed without an attorney, indicating more people are seeking relief and can't afford legal representation, Hollyer said.

Wayne County, where nearly 1 out of 5 residents are out of work, is feeling the greatest impact.

Court referees there process twice as many modification requests a month -- nearly 1,000 -- as last year. "We started opening those cases right away," said Zanell Brown, friend of the court in Wayne County.

Since the summer, staffers were directed to tackle the backlog of cases, moving those in which a parent lost a job or exhausted jobless benefits to the top of the stack, Brown said.

As a result, other motions, like parents' demand for health care payments, can sometimes take longer to process, Brown said. Two additional staffers were transferred from other sections in the office to help process child support requests.

Some parents are seeing their child support payments reduced within a month of filing their request, Brown said. This process once took well over six months, according to several attorneys familiar with the process.

"For living in Wayne County, that's probably the fastest we've ever had it happen," Brown said. "We realized we're only leaving them so much to survive on."

Kyle Grendys said that though he lost his job as a forklift driver in June, he delayed seeking a child support payment adjustment because he wanted to continue providing for his 4-year-old daughter. "That's why I never really did it," said Grendys, who finally filed a request last month.

The 24-year-old from Melvindale has been collecting unemployment and is on the wait list for the state's retraining program, No Worker Left Behind.

The amount of child support in Michigan is calculated through a formula that considers the income of both parents as well as spousal support, child-care costs, medical costs and the number of nights the child spends with either parent.

Friend of the Court is the administrative arm of family court that handles issues of custody, child support and parenting time in each county. When a parent seeks a change in child support, the staff at the county Friend of the Court makes changes according to the formula. If the other parent protests the reduction, the parties receive a hearing before a referee to plead their cases.

Child advocates say children inevitably lose in this tug of war.

"The children's needs don't go away because the job did," said Jeanne Fowler, founder of the nonprofit Big Family of Michigan, which provides essentials to needy and foster children. "If you were still in the home and in the marriage ... you'd still have to put food on the table and buy the children clothes."

In early October, court administrators reduced McCleery's monthly child support payment from $522 to $270 and his contribution to his daughter's uninsured medical expenses, too.

Without McCleery's health insurance, which covered his 14-year-old daughter when he was working, she will likely have to sign up for Medicaid.

"That was my main concern, her health care," said Cheryl Sunman, McCleery's ex-wife, who has primary custody of their daughter.

With a mortgage, utility bills and car and home insurance payments, Sunman has managed to stay afloat by cleaning homes in the Novi area two days a week. Her work schedule as a home health care aide in the last year was cut back this year, to two months from 10 the previous year.

"I'm getting hit when I'm down," she said. Whatever cutbacks she needs to make, Sunman said she will prioritize her daughter's needs.

"If it's a choice to buy myself a pair of jeans or ... clothes or necessities for (my daughter), she gets it," Sunman said. "Always."

Owed child support grows

As Michigan families struggle, the amount of child support that has gone unpaid in Michigan has grown.

Between 2005 and 2008, child support arrearages steadily grew by $113 million, even as the number of parents paying child support has decreased.

Nonpayment could become more widespread in the next year, some experts speculate, since as many as 100,000 are set to exhaust their unemployment benefits by year's end.

Federal lawmakers are discussing bills that could give such people an extension of benefits.

With jobless parents falling off the unemployment rolls, courts will face more difficultly garnishing child support, which is automatically deducted from paychecks and unemployment checks. "The floodgate hasn't opened up yet," said Jack Battles of the Friend of the Court in Genesee County, which has watched the loss of scores of manufacturing jobs in Flint in the last decade. "I expect it's going to be a huge problem.

For fathers like McCleery, a reduction in child support is a crucial but bitter pill.

"Nobody wins in this situation," he said.

cjun@detnews.com (313) 222-2019 Associated Press contributed.