Santa Barbara County Executive Officer Mona Miyasato’s long-simmering impatience with Sheriff Bill Brown’s multimillion-dollar cost overruns for four of the past five years bubbled politely over as she notified the supervisors this Tuesday that she has assigned the county’s auditor to examine why the sheriff’s overtime costs keep rising as the number of vacant sworn positions has dropped dramatically.
In the past year, Miyasato noted, the number of deputies who clocked in more than 1,000 overtime (OT) hours increased from eight in 2019 to 55 last year. On average, she reported, the number of hours coded for OT jumped by 74 percent between 2019 and 2024; that translates to an average per-deputy bump in OT hours from 258 in 2019 to 448 last year.
Less than a month after county supervisors signed off onto this year’s budget in June, they discovered that the Sheriff’s Office would need an unanticipated infusion of $4.2 million to cover overtime costs that accrued last year.
Typically, the explanation has been that such OT was necessary to achieve safe staffing levels — for both patrol and the county jail — when recruitment and retention problems left so many positions vacant. Because those vacant positions are funded, the sheriff would use those revenues to cover OT costs.
But this past year, vacancies were not the issue. In fact, more than 100 vacant positions had been filled due to an all-out recruiting blitz. So why then the need for OT? It turns out, the supervisors were told, these new recruits are not trained sufficiently to hit the streets. In the parlance of the Sheriffs’ Office, they are known as “unproductive assets.” Not only must they be paid for on-the-job training, but other deputies must be paid overtime as they cover.
Most supervisors share Miyasato’s frustration with the chronic OT costs, frequently reported as last-minute surprises. But even they were surprised to learn of a deputy who was paid for 2,330 hours’ worth of OT.
“I think that’s troubling,” Supervisor Bob Nelson said.
Adding an edge of urgency to the discussion is the reality that the Northern Branch Jail expansion will cost the county $165 million — $14 million a year in annualized costs — at a time when the county’s impending budget realities are looking exceptionally grim and wholesale layoffs are on the horizon. The last time the supervisor questioned Brown about this directly, the sheriff told the supervisors they needed to put a sales tax increase on the ballot. Supervisor Steve Lavagnino told the sheriff they’d explored that already and were informed by the experts that such a measure stood zero chance of success with county voters.
