Editorial: Where are all the Prop 47 savings? L.A. County has no idea

The Los Angeles County auditor reported Tuesday that Proposition 47 has generated millions of dollars in cost savings, but the most significant part of his findings had to do with the county’s jarringly inadequate grasp of the basic numbers that describe and measure its workload.

You will recall that Proposition 47 was the 2014 ballot measure that converted several felonies, such as drug possession, to misdemeanors. The immediate effect was to reduce the caseloads of county departments that deal with criminal justice issues, such as the district attorney’s office and the Probation Department. But by how much? And what were the savings?

The bottom line is that no one really knows, because the departments couldn’t do the math.

“Our review noted that none of the affected departments reviewed have methods to capture, track, and measure the costs, savings and/or service improvements (or reductions) attributed to the Prop. 47 population,” Auditor-Controller John Naimo wrote Tuesday to the Board of Supervisors. “As a result, departments cannot accurately estimate and/or quantify the cost savings (or increases) and impact to their current and future operations at this time.”

Seriously? County departments don’t track the ebb, flow and varying costs of their work? Apparently not, at least not in any particularly useful manner.

For example, the district attorney’s office can’t estimate changes in its workload, Naimo wrote, because it tracks its cases separately at each courthouse, using different metrics in each location. The auditor spent months trying to make some sense out of other departments’ figures and estimated that the Probation Department’s workload reduction may be worth about $3.4 million — and that it was immediately absorbed by other projects (although whether due to the department’s craftiness or mathematical cluelessness the report does not specify). The sheriff estimated a workload reduction hypothetically worth $41.6 million, money that was diverted for non-Proposition-47-related “emerging critical needs.”

Government agencies always have “emerging critical needs” and to-do lists that seem to suck up any savings produced by changes in operations or policy, such as those resulting from the decreased arrests, prosecutions and convictions brought by Proposition 47. Those needs are generally legitimate. But it’s the job of elected officials to determine — publicly — how to prioritize those needs and that makes it essential for departments and agencies to accurately measure their work and productivity. Without regular tracking and analysis of data, government is free to spend based on educated guesswork or political expediency.

In November, a year after voters approved the measure, The Times called on the county to report on the money its departments had saved, because we suspected that department chiefs and bureaucrats were hiding their windfalls in order to prevent the Board of Supervisors from snatching away the money to use it for things like drug rehabilitation and programs to reduce recidivism.

And there may indeed be some of that phenomenon at play. But the auditor’s report suggests that most county departments lack a basic facility with data. That made them unready for Proposition 47 but, even more importantly, unready to perform any of their tasks with a level of nimbleness and wisdom sufficient for the 21st century. They must work hard to catch up.

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