MAKE IT STOP: The acoustics up in the County Board of Supervisors’ chambers are totally impossible. The kindest descriptions are muddy, muffled, and murky. Without the subtitles scrolling across the bottom of the TV screens on the wall, I would have been lost. But then, who really wanted to hear? The day’s special session — the first of three scheduled for this week—can only be described as a dress rehearsal for the coming bloodbath.
Thanks to Donald Trump and his Big Bad Beautiful Budget Bill coupled with cuts Governor Gavin Newsom and the California State Legislature have seen fit to pass our way, the county supes will spend the next few weeks figuring out how to hack 447 full-time positions off the county payroll. In dollars and cents, that translates to 71 million fewer dollars to spend.
To mangle a line from the late, great Senator Everett Dirksen, “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” In this case, real pain, too.
Of the 23 departments that make up county government, just two will account for 326 of the layoffs and $55 million worth of the cuts. They are Public Health and Social Services. Combined, these constitute the heart and soul of the county’s safety net. Food stamps, welfare, child welfare inspections, medical care for the poor? They’re about to get a lot less accessible.
Yes, even here in Santa Barbara — the land of prancing polo ponies and self-defenestrating, marmalade-making British royalty — reality has an unsettling way of intruding.
Of the 58 counties in California, Santa Barbara ranks first when it comes to child poverty.
When it comes to overall poverty, we’re number two.
Put another way, one out of every five kids falls beneath the federal poverty line. So, what does that look like when it comes to women and orphans — not to mention the frail, the infirm, the elderly, and yes, even a few single, able-bodied but chemically challenged adults. The new rules make it easier to say no and harder to say yes.
In Santa Barbara County, we have 58,000 residents — 33,000 households — who rely on food stamps. These families will have to jump through infinitely higher hoops to qualify and do so way more frequently.
When it comes to medical care available now being dispensed at the county’s five medical clinics, the picture is grim. Eligibility rule changes and insurance subsidy reductions will push 25,000 county residents off their insurance rolls by next year. By 2029, that number is expected to double to 50,000.
A high-ranking administrator from Cottage Health expressed alarm at these implications. Cottage’s emergency rooms are already swamped, she warned. What will happen, she asked the supervisors, when these people lose their insurance and the Public Health Department is gutted by the proposed layoffs?
Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, who represents Santa Maria, was looking a bit on the ashen side. He already knew the answer. Last week, he’d spent seven hours waiting in the local emergency room, he said, helping a family member get some urgently needed care. After seven hours, they gave up and went home. Two hours later, they were forced back by his relative’s medical condition. Finally, they got treatment.
And he’s a county supervisor.
The good news — if you can call it that — is that there’s room for improvement at the county clinics. If I read my subtitles right, 22 percent of clinic patients don’t show up for their appointments; another 45 percent call in to cancel.
The other good news — if you can call it that — is that our Commander in Chief Donald Trump also turns out to be a medical professional. Who knew? Or at least, that’s what he said he was depicting himself as in one of his increasingly untethered late-night AI-generated social media posts for which he’s become increasingly famous. It’s the meme anyone might reasonably mistake as a picture of Trump portraying himself as Jesus, performing one of those “heal the sick” miracles for which he became so famous.
It was posted in the midst of the losing war of words Trump has been waging with Pope Leo — the first American and Creole Pope ever — over America’s war on Iran. When Trump famously celebrated Easter by threatening, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Pope Leo objected to what he termed Trump’s “delusions of omnipotence.” When Trump affirmed God was on his side, Pope Leo replied that such thinking is “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.”
Based on recent poll numbers, Trump’s approval rating with Catholic voters — a majority of whom supported him in 2024 — has tanked. Among the white Catholics, his approval fell from 59 to 52 percent. Among Hispanic Catholics, it dropped from 31 to 23 percent. Belief that Trump is acting ethically dropped to just 34 percent among white Catholics. To avert any greater loss of support, Trump took the offending graven image down. Just as well. If patients at the Santa Barbara clinics thought he might be providing primary care, the no-show numbers would go through the roof.
The real good news is that Marina Owen of CenCal — a woman who runs one of the most pivotal health insurance providers in the county that nobody has never heard of — has convened all of Santa Barbara’s healthcare providers together to find life-saving solutions to this looming crisis. It’s an all-hands-on-deck exercise, which, if successful, will save many of the widows and orphans from being chucked overboard.
Owens is notoriously soft-spoken and diplomatic. When she addressed the supervisors this Monday, she was next to impossible to hear. Thank God for the subtitles.
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