County OKs $1.3-Billion Budget : Duffy Snubs Hearing, Supervisors Reject $13 Million Extra He Wanted

Walking away from a fight he started but realized he could not win, San Diego County Sheriff John Duffy on Tuesday refused to attend a hearing at which the Board of Supervisors rejected his request for a $13-million budget increase.

By a unanimous vote, the supervisors approved Chief Administrative Officer Norman Hickey’s recommended $90.5-million fiscal 1989 budget for the Sheriff’s Department. In so doing, the supervisors pointedly declined to provide the extra $13 million for which Duffy had strenuously lobbied since Hickey’s budget proposal was unveiled last spring.

However, Duffy, after weeks of verbal sparring with the supervisors and Hickey in his bid for a bigger budget, avoided a final showdown at Tuesday’s wrap-up session, at which the board tentatively approved the county’s $1.3-billion budget.

Letter Sent to Bilbray

Accurately anticipating that the supervisors would side with Hickey in a dispute that had become increasingly acrimonious and personal, Duffy sent board Chairman George Bailey a letter late Monday in which he said he did not “intend to waste my time or yours” by attending the meeting.

“Nothing I can say or do . . . will influence your decision,” Duffy said in the three-page letter. “I expect you . . . are already predisposed to adopt the CAO’s proposed budget.”

Last week, Duffy had warned that many high-profile services within his department would be reduced or eliminated unless more funds were forthcoming.

Sheriff’s spokesmen said Tuesday that some of those potential cutbacks--which include the closure of three substations; curtailing or eliminating special vice, narcotics, gang and juvenile details; redeploying deputies to handle tasks such as answering phones; and restrictions on helicopter service--could be phased in by early next year.

In Duffy’s absence Tuesday, the supervisors, some of whom have been frustrated by what they view as his persistent grandstanding on the budget, criticized him for failing to appear before the board in person to defend his funding requests. Questioning some of Duffy’s spending and management policies, several supervisors also emphasized that they plan to more closely scrutinize his expenditures, as well as those of other departments.

“The sheriff . . . seemed to feel (the meeting) would be a media event,” Bailey said. “Since he seems to be an expert in that area, I’ll leave that up to his judgment.”

Noting that other top county officials have cooperated with the board in making difficult budget decisions, Supervisor John MacDonald added: “We have two or three other elected department heads who have been part of the team. I’m discouraged that we have one who doesn’t seem to be part of the team.”

Tuesday’s actions--and, in particular, Duffy’s non-attendance--provided a somewhat anticlimactic conclusion to a controversy that the sheriff himself had done much to escalate.

In a sharply worded memo to the supervisors last month, Duffy pressed for a multimillion-dollar increase in his own budget by attacking many other county departments as either non-essential or inefficient, reserving some of his most caustic comments for Hickey.

Hickey’s own office, Duffy wrote, is “full of fat to trim,” and the sheriff added that what he saw as misdirected budget priorities stemmed from Hickey’s “bureaucratic baloney” about the board’s lack of discretion over state or federally mandated programs.

At another point in the protracted budget debate, Duffy sought to dramatize the dangers his deputies face in crowded jails by using a hallway outside the supervisors’ chamber to display weapons seized from prisoners. Then, last week, when it had become obvious that his arguments had left the supervisors unmoved, Duffy threatened the widespread cutbacks if the board approved the $90.5-million budget, which he argued would enable his department to provide “only the basics . . . and not much more.”

In the end, however, the supervisors agreed with Hickey’s analysis that Duffy’s request for a 16% increase over his fiscal 1988 budget of $88.4 million could not be justified at a time when other vital county services, including mental health and child-abuse programs, face substantial cutbacks.

“Law enforcement is the No. 1 priority of the Board of Supervisors,” Supervisor Brian Bilbray said. “But this is a big county. And law enforcement to the board, unlike to the sheriff, is not our only responsibility.”

Dismayed by Duffy’s threats to cut services, Bailey pointed out that, while the sheriff’s budget has more than tripled over the past decade, the population in the county’s unincorporated area--Duffy’s primary area of responsibility--declined from 405,000 to 339,000. Over the same period, the population in cities where the sheriff provides law enforcement under contract has grown from 79,000 to 295,000, Bailey said.

Those figures, he said, raise the question of whether the Sheriff’s Department has been essentially subsidizing contract cities at the expense of law protection in the unincorporated areas. If that is the case, the supervisor added, “as far as I’m concerned, the contract cities can (form) their own police force.”

Focusing attention on another of Duffy’s spending policies, Supervisor Susan Golding questioned why the sheriff has not adhered to an earlier pledge to spend 20% of the funds his department gains through asset seizures in drug cases on drug-prevention programs. County administrators said Tuesday that, of the $671,394 received to date, none has been spent on drug-abuse programs.

However, Assistant Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen explained that Duffy has used that money to automate his office, a priority supported by the board.

One of the impending budget cutbacks that has drawn particularly vociferous complaints from Duffy involves his department’s 31-member crime-prevention unit, which consists largely of non-sworn personnel who act as a liaison with the nearly 4,000 Neighborhood Watch programs throughout the county.

Decision Questioned

Under Hickey’s original budget recommendation, a proposed $1-million cut would have imposed a two-thirds reduction on both the crime-prevention unit and the sheriff’s nine-member public affairs team. When county officials later added $660,419 to the sheriff’s budget, Duffy opted to completely reinstate his public affairs office, as well as the sworn staff in the crime-prevention unit.

Citing Duffy’s own vigorous defense of the crime-prevention unit, the supervisors questioned that decision, with Bilbray noting that Duffy’s choice of how to spend the extra dollars “doesn’t seem to reflect what I hear him saying.”

Although Duffy has final authority over personnel decisions within his department, Janssen told supervisors that they can target the added money for the crime-prevention program if they feel the dollars would be better spent there than on public affairs. With that in mind, the supervisors noted that they plan to study that possibility before taking final action on the budget Aug. 16.

Sgt. Bob Takeshta of the sheriff’s public affairs office explained that Duffy decided against spending all of the extra money on the crime-prevention office because “only a skeleton would have been left anyway,” with 20 of the 31 positions cut. Duffy has the discretion to redeploy the sworn personnel in the public affairs office to other duties, an option that he would not have with the non-sworn crime-prevention specialists, Takeshta said.