Santa Barbara County Supes Face Budget Bloodbath

Bracing for a budget bloodbath on the magnitude of the 2008 Great Recession’s drastic cuts, the board of supervisors spent much of Tuesday, March 3, engaged in a preliminary fiscal fire drill. County administrators hoped to get a clearer idea of what programs the supervisors would most likely fight to protect and what ones they were most willing to gut. Supervisor Bob Nelson summed up the situation, asking, “Do we have to pick which one of our kids we love the most?”

In a nutshell, the supervisors are staring down the double-barrel end of a $66 million deficit. Though it will be spread out over the next five years, it will not be as gradual as that sounds. The next two budget years are by far the worst, accounting for more than $50 million in cuts. 

The two departments facing the most violent hits are the bulwark of the county’s social safety net; $25 million is slated to come out of the hides of the Public Health Department and another $28 million from County Social Services. 

For the most part, the supervisors wanted to protect programs designed to protect children at risk, and they were more inclined to cut programs that they were not mandated to provide, such as funding for library systems owned and operated by city governments. Other considerations mentioned were possible furloughs, layoffs, and a freeze on wage increases. Also discussed was whether supervisors would be open to dipping into the $50 million set carefully aside to help finance the building and operating a new north county jail. Yes, they said, under some circumstances.. 

Supervisor Steve Lavagnino talked about deep-sixing the Sustainability Department, which, he said, sets aspirational goals for greenhouse-gas-emission reductions, goals the county has never come close to meeting. Supervisor Joan Hartmann wondered about an across-the-board one-percent spending reduction. 

When a representative for the Service Employees International Union Local 620 suggested a sales tax ballot initiative for the November ballot, supervisors praised the union for its spirit of constructive engagement. 

The 8,000-pound elephant in the board chamber, it quickly became clear, was the Sheriff’s Office and its dramatically escalating overtime expenses. This year, the department has already almost exhausted its overtime budget of $9.9 million.

Right now, the department is projected to spend $10.4 million more in overtime. A recent internal audit revealed a large chunk of these charges were accrued by savvy sheriff’s deputies who have learned how to maximize time-and-a-half overtime pay while not actually working any overtime hours. While one high-ranking sheriff has been criminally charged, this practice is legal under contract terms negotiated with the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association. 

Once again, the idea of creating an inspector general just to bird-dog the sheriff’s spending habits was raised, as well as initiating regular audits. Supervisor Laura Capps expressed incredulity that she had just learned that UCSB is out of compliance with its contract with the Sheriff’s Office to staff the Isla Vista Foot Patrol and that the sheriff has done nothing about it. How many years has the university been out of compliance, she wondered? Is it too late for the county to demand compensation? 

No one from the Sheriff’s Office was on hand to reply, as this was not a hearing to which department heads were expected to attend. Given that the sheriff just recently experienced similar contract enforcement failures with Wellpath, the private vendor providing medical services in the county jail, this latest revelation only fuels the growing perception among board members that the Sheriff’s Office is a fiscal train wreck.

Because the sheriff is independently elected by county voters, he does not answer to the supervisors or to County Executive Officer Mona Miyasato. As a result, Miyasato has been forced to find less confrontational work-arounds to corral the sheriff’s spending and accounting challenges. In this week’s menu of options, she proposed three unprecedented financial review procedures designed to prevent last-minute cost overruns by the sheriff. 

One would charge a county administrator to rigorously review hiring practices inside the Sheriff’s Office, as well as all departmental purchase orders for urgency and necessity, and to require the sheriff to submit a list of all extra help employed by the department.

The staff report noted that the Sheriff’s Office had identified $6.6 million in cuts the department might make, but in the same breath asked that $5.7 million of those cuts be restored. While Capps expressed her exasperation openly, Supervisor Bob Nelson sought to project a more equanimous façade, insisting, “There’s plenty of blame to go around,” and acknowledging the enormous challenges confronting the head of any department that runs so large and sensitive 24-hour operations.

The fact that Tuesday’s deliberations took place at all is atypical in the extreme. Typically, the supervisors take a three-day sneak peak of the year’s budget issues in April so that when it comes time in June to adopt a final document, they’re all familiar with the key movable parts. This is the first time, the supervisors met in February to hold a budgetary dress rehearsal for the normally scheduled dress rehearsal. This reflects the enormity of the cuts coming. 

Driving the looming shortfall are major cuts in state funding and even more massive cuts caused by HR 1, the White House’s Big Beautiful Budget bill that dramatically curtails not just how much money the county will receive from the federal government but how that money can be spent.

Summing up the county bleak budget choices, Supervisor Steve Lavagnino sounded almost biblical. “I don’t want it to be. None of us wants it to be,” he said. “But the day’s coming. And we’ve got to get ready.”