Lack of Funding Threatens County Programs : Services: Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Madge L. Schaefer says every department must expect to pare down its 1990-91 spending.

The Board of Supervisors began Monday the difficult task of shaving up to $8 million from Ventura County’s 1990-91 budget, a reduction that officials said will lead to sharp cuts in health and welfare programs and to backlogs in the courts.

“The counties have been decimated,” county Chief Administrative Officer Richard Wittenberg told the supervisors in the first of several budget hearings set for this week.

The aged, the disabled, the sick and the poor are the biggest losers in the $55-billion state budget approved by the Legislature over the weekend, Wittenberg said. “They’re again going at the most vulnerable.”

State lawmakers cut $2.3 billion from the state budget Saturday, and Gov. George Deukmejian is expected to trim at least another $418 million before he signs the document this week.

County governments, which operate most state programs, have been hit with $580 million in cuts so far, and tens of millions more are expected to be blue-penciled by the governor, said Larry Naake, executive director of the County Supervisors Assn. of California.

Precisely what that means for Ventura County will not be clear until Wednesday or Thursday, county budget analysts said. But board Chairwoman Madge L. Schaefer said each county department should expect reductions.

“Everybody is going to have to take a hit,” Schaefer said. To a limited degree, supervisors can take money from some programs financed by local taxes, such as police and fire services, to support those hardest hit.

However, it is likely that the deepest state cuts--those in health care and criminal justice programs--will be reflected in the final county budget approved over the next week.

Although the $8 million is only 2.1% of the county’s general fund budget of about $380 million, officials say there is little room to cut.

Among the hardest hit county programs are the municipal and superior courts, said Sheila Gonzalez, executive officer for the courts. The courts stand to lose as much as $2 million, or up to 16% of their proposed budget, she said.

“The whole court operation in Ventura County is jeopardized,” Gonzalez said. The reductions are hard to absorb because they come at a time when the number of court cases is growing dramatically, she said.

The courts had coped with the caseload by hiring retired judges on a case-by-case basis. The cuts threaten the courts’ continued use of the retired judges, Gonzalez said.

In addition, the January opening of a $10-million courthouse in Simi Valley is threatened, Gonzalez said. The municipal courtroom at the facility can open as scheduled but there probably will be no money to staff three superior courtrooms, she said.

In another blow to the county’s justice system, about $450,000 to pay for lawyers to represent indigent defendants facing the death penalty has also been eliminated from the state budget, Gonzalez said.

Public Defender Kenneth I. Clayman said that withdrawal of that money represents a dramatic change of position by the state, which reinstated capital punishment in 1977.

“It was sort of a question of honor even by the most stringent death-penalty advocates that before we gas a person, we should make sure he was adequately represented,” Clayman said.

Now, the county alone must pay to defend accused murderers who have no money to pay for their own lawyers, he said.

If Deukmejian follows through on promised cuts, another criminal justice program will be gutted, county officials said. About half of the $1.5 million to rehabilitate teen-age criminals and to provide homes for runaways has been lost, program director Bill Forden said.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” Forden said. “We’re always the first ones to be cut.”

Of all the county departments, the Health Care Agency is expected to lose the most money. Officials said that as much as $5 million of the agency’s $120-million proposed budget could be wiped out.

Especially threatened are the county’s mental health services, which have already lost at least $1 million and could lose another $2 million from a total budget of $21.7 million, officials said.

“This is going to have a devastating effect on public mental health services,” Director Randall Feltman said. “There is no way to absorb this in administration. This is going to mean cuts in patient care.”

Feltman said that state reductions are deceptive because they will lead to much larger payouts in the long run. “It’s a false economy because it’s a cost shift rather than a cost savings.”

The cuts mean that much less money will be available to treat mentally ill children in their homes and disturbed adults in county clinics, he said. Many will now end up in state institutions, he predicted.

According to Feltman, an institutionalized child costs $50,000 a year, while the county keeps youngsters in their homes for a fraction of that.

The budget cuts may also indirectly imperil a new $4.3-million facility to house dangerous mental patients, because they put pressure on the Board of Supervisors to postpone plans to build expensive new structures, Feltman said.

Currently, police bring dangerous patients to a 28-bed unlocked wing of the county hospital. The proposed facility would have 44 beds and could be locked.

“It’s hard to be optimistic when you’re faced with these kinds of cuts,” said Phillipp Wessels, health care director. “And yet the impact may be much larger for us a year down the road, because if they reduce our operations then we will have a lower base of funding to build on.”

He explained that his department often uses state money to start programs that eventually qualify for other government aid and insurance payments.

At Monday’s opening budget session, frustrated county supervisors recessed after only 2 1/2 hours, saying they needed better information about the state budget before they could adopt their own spending plan.

Schaefer noted the county budget picture is further clouded by expected cuts in federal spending in programs such as those aiding dependent children and the homeless.

Wittenberg told the supervisors the bleak budget picture has left them with few options.

If the board halts payments to social and health programs the state has refused to pay for, the county could face legal challenges, he said.

“But that would send a message to Sacramento,” said Wittenberg, who has complained bitterly for a decade about state programs that are required but not fully funded.

Supervisor James R. Dougherty commented, “The state wants us to do the work without the money. The only answer is not to do the work.”

In fact, the supervisors have little flexibility in their spending. The vast majority of the county’s $380-million general fund comes from state or federal sources and is earmarked for specific programs. The situation is much the same for the county’s separate $300-million budget for special districts.

Before the full magnitude of state cuts was known, Wittenberg had said that only $17 million was available for the supervisors to spend at their discretion or to reserve as an emergency fund. Of that, about half has been tentatively earmarked for construction and maintenance of county buildings.

The supervisors will make no decisions on their budget until at least Wednesday. Monday’s hearings provided a glimpse at how difficult the process will be.

The board departed from its traditional practice of allowing county department heads to argue for their overall programs. Instead, directors were each allowed to name only one item that they considered their top priority for funding.

Several times, Schaefer interrupted presentations to admonish the officials to limit their presentations.

Naake, of the state supervisors association, said that county boards statewide are facing the thankless task of saving gutted programs by shifting funds from others that are equally important.

“I think it puts us in a horrible position,” he said. “We have to essentially steal from other programs to make up those cuts . . . whether they be police or fire programs or jail reductions, or the closing of parks and recreation programs.”

If county boards “aren’t able to backfill those cuts, it means indigent health services will have to suffer,” Naake said, “and the working poor are primarily the ones we’re talking about.”