$1.45-Billion Budget Would Tighten Belts : County Hearings on Proposed Spending Plan Open This Week

The sheriff probably won’t get the 10 new vehicles he wanted, but he will keep his two helicopters. The public defender will not have to lay off 65 employees.

There will be money to buy new sofas for Juvenile Hall, but not as many as the Probation Department wanted. The request for a food mixer at the Los Pinos forestry camp for youths in trouble with the law was granted, but the wish for new sound systems in the Central Municipal Court will go unfulfilled.

Such are the items in the proposed $1.45-billion Orange County budget for fiscal 1986-87, on which the Board of Supervisors will open hearings this week.

The budget being proposed by the County Administrative Office is up slightly from fiscal 1985-86, when it totaled $1.29 billion. It would have declined by a tiny amount if not for the inclusion of the largest single capital-improvement project in county history--the expansion of John Wayne Airport.

Richard Pickryl, the county’s budget analyst, called the proposed spending blueprint “sort of a static budget,” in keeping with his order to county agencies last December that they not ask for more money than they got in fiscal 1985-86 unless it was needed to cover salary increases.

End of Federal Revenue-Sharing

“I knew we were going to have a shortage of revenues coming in,” Pickryl said, largely because of the end of federal revenue-sharing, which in fiscal 1985-86 provided the county with more than $10 million.

This year the county expects to get only $1.7 million in its final payments from the program. In past years the federal funds, which came with no strings attached, paid for dozens of new buildings and big-ticket items, and was used to cover budget deficits.

County supervisors and their aides said last week that they expected the budget hearings that open Wednesday to be relatively quiet, unmarked by some of the stormy scenes of recent years in which department heads and citizens battled for more money for their own pet programs.

The timetable calls for morning and afternoon hearings Wednesday and Thursday, and a morning session next Aug. 5, though some who worked on the proposed budget said that the whole process could end Thursday. The hearings will be held at the Hall of Administration in Santa Ana. Formal adoption of the budget by the supervisors is expected in late August.

County Administrative Office officials broke the spending blueprint into five sections, with the human services portion accounting for the largest share--$399.5 million.

That portion covers the budgets of the Health Care, Social Services and Community Services agencies, and is financed mostly with federal and state funds.

The next largest segment is general services, which is budgeted at $358.7 million, including the $167-million expansion of John Wayne Airport, which will be paid through bond issues.

The community safety segment of the proposed budget comes in at $298.1 million, including $90.5 million for the sheriff-coroner’s office, $32.7 million for the probation department and $17.2 million for the district attorney’s office. Community safety eats up 53% of the county’s general fund.

The remaining two pieces of the spending side of the budget are environmental management, at $280.1 million, and general administration and support, at $115.4 million.

Despite Pickryl’s warning to county agencies to hold the line, there were attempts to get around the limits.

The Probation Department, for instance, complied with Pickryl’s target figure by cutting its budget by $1.8 million from the fiscal 1985-86 level. But the department complained that the current budget was “very lean,” and warned that it was “unable to absorb this cut without severely impacting important programs.”

The target figures, the department said, would have forced the layoffs of up to 39 employees and abolition of a program to supervise low-risk probationers. The administrative officer then wound up recommending reinstatement of the $1.8 million.

Likewise, the public defender’s office submitted a target budget of $8.1 million for the nine-month period beginning in October, plus a note that said the figure would force it to lay off 65 employees. That would require giving cases to private attorneys, at a cost to the county of $15 million, the office said. The County Administrative Office recommended an extra $1.11 million and the retention of the 65 jobs.

The CAO, however, recommended the rejection of a request for $96,000 to replace sound systems in the Central Municipal Court. And it said that the probation department should replace 23 of its sofas in Juvenile Hall at a cost of $4,600, rather than buying 55 new ones with a price tag of $11,200.