Santa Barbara County’s Drive-by Budget Process

by Andy Caldwell

The County of Santa Barbara weakened the county budget process, rendering it nearly impossible for county supervisors to have effective oversight of the budget, and unfortunately, county supervisors don’t seem to mind.

Traditionally, the county conducted budget hearings in June of every year with a budget book of some 600 pages that provided exquisite details of staffing levels and performance report cards of each of the divisions within each county department. It allowed the supervisors and the public to see how each division was performing and how much it was costing taxpayers. Unfortunately, however, a former county CEO gutted the document of all division-level reporting.

The current CEO then bifurcated what was left of the budget process. Every April, a so-called preliminary budget is presented with about half the information that will eventually be included in the already truncated June budget document.  Every department head now appears before the board of supervisors in April with but a very shallow cursory view of their department. These hearings are a mere shadow of their former selves. The short presentations typically include requests for more money and more staffing along with performance measures, which are mostly meaningless because the figures given are typically measures of activity not efficiency. It goes without saying that activity is not accomplishment!

After the mirage of the April preliminary budget hearings are concluded, the CEO comes back before the board for the final budget hearings in June, with a more complete budget book, but that document is simply rubber-stamped in a matter of hours. The additional information in the budget book is scarcely reviewed. The only substantive debate among the supervisors is how to divvy up any “extra” monies.

Meanwhile, financial failures abound as the failure to plan is a plan to fail. Former county CEO Mike Brown took an entirely different approach to managing the county during his 14 years of service. He sought to do two things that are currently lost on county supervisors and their staff. He sought to eliminate government waste and largesse while creating additional revenue sources the old-fashioned way, by allowing the private sector economy to grow by getting government out of the way.

SB County Borrowing Binge Continues

Alternatively, the current process employs several “business-as-usual” fatal assumptions. First, budget and staffing levels always grow. What this means in practical terms is that over one-half of the county budget ($1.6 billion) is spent on government employee salaries, benefits, and pensions ($824 million) with no end in sight. Second, the county continuously incurs more debt including maintenance debt on roads ($313 million), buildings ($163 million), and parks ($92 million), along with money they borrow without the authorization of taxpayers to buy things and build things ($400 million). In addition, the county is on the hook to pay for retirement plan income losses worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The bottom line? County supervisors – elected to manage county government – are only along for the ride, which has become the equivalent of an economic drive-by of our economy.

This economic drive-by has resulted in staggering losses and miscues. A partial list of the failures include: the effort to steal the ambulance contract from AMR resulting in costly litigation; the $250 million failed trash-to-energy resource center; the effort to stymie the oil industry (namely Exxon, which is costing millions in lost revenues); spending tens of millions experimenting on a housing-first strategy for the homeless (which has been debunked elsewhere); the cannabis fiasco (which cost Supervisor Das Williams his reelection bid); not to mention the effort to eliminate hundreds of jail beds to the detriment of public safety. The final insult? Each county supervisor is now given a $100,000 slush fund to spend on off-budget pet projects, no questions asked.

This is no way to run a responsible government. Maybe our new 1^st District Supervisor Roy Lee will spearhead a movement towards common-sense government.