State Law Makes It Impossible for 1 Plus 1 to Equal 2 in County Budgets

Looking up from his copy of the proposed 1988-89 Orange County budget, a supervisor’s aide shook his head recently and sighed, saying, “It’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.”

Sometimes cliches are appropriate.

Last week, the Board of Supervisors adopted the inch-thick, green-covered 1988-89 proposed budget that is now the foundation for operating the whole county.

But as county officials will say, the numbers in that book are so preposterous they might as well have adopted the price list from a restaurant menu.

And they’ll also say it’s largely due to that confounding and insensitive bunch of yahoos in Sacramento. What are the county supervisors supposed to do?

The trouble is that the state requires the counties to adopt a balanced budget by July 1 each year. But the state does not tell the counties how much money they will receive from Sacramento until after July 1--sometimes weeks after.

It’s like ordering a chef to cook a hot dog and then supplying hamburger meat.

Well, last year, county officials put together their best guess as of July 1. The budget they tentatively adopted would have required hundreds of layoffs and the closing of some important programs.

But by the time the state had approved a block grant for counties and then--months later--devised a formula for distribution of the funds, almost all of the county’s dire projections were averted.

This year the county decided not even to attempt a guess.

Instead, it passed a budget that officials called a “place holder,” meaning that most of the numbers are unreal. But it’s balanced. And it will work for a few weeks, long enough for the county to see what the state Legislature and the governor have done to county finances, so that county officials can trash this plan and adopt a real one.

The official Orange County record will show, however, that the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a budget June 29 that would, on paper, eliminate every position in the Sheriff’s Department sometime next spring.

That’s how absurd the current version of the official Orange County budget is.

Prisoners would be locked in their cells, and the gatekeepers would walk away.

The money set aside to compensate employees who are resigning with sick leave or vacation time on the books is also not in the budget. And some of the insurance the county is required to carry is not fully funded.

But the budget balances.

When the supervisors sit down at the end of this month to adopt their final version of the budget, all of those fantasy cutbacks will have to be replaced with cuts that affect real live people.

At this point, Hall of Administration insiders figure that some jobs and programs are likely to be lost. But then, in this business of adopting budgets, you buy something and then figure out how you are going to pay for it.

Please folks, don’t try this at home.