Mental-Health Budget Cuts Less Than Expected : Funding: San Diego County has long complained of not receiving its fair share of state funds. But, when the budget ax fell, the county fared better than most.

After years of under-funding from the state, San Diego County’s mental health programs will be spared the brunt of Gov. George Deukmejian’s budget cuts, losing only $538,897 in state money for local programs this fiscal year.

The governor vetoed $61 million from the state Department of Mental Health’s $520-million budget, leaving individual county reduction decisions up to the department.

The cut will leave San Diego County with $37.4 million for local programs, while several counties that have long received higher per capita state funding than San Diego will suffer devastating cuts.

One example is San Francisco County, which will lose more than half its budget for local programs, or $11.9 million, leaving it with just more than $11.1 million.

For San Diego County officials, it’s the first spell of relief from a funding mechanism they have long resented.

“We’ve been taking it on the chin so long,” said County Mental Health Department spokesman Pat Stalnaker. “Maybe equity is here.”

The decision on where to make the county’s cuts will be left up to the County Board of Supervisors, he said.

Historically, officials say, San Diego did not receive nearly as much funding for mental health programs as other counties for three reasons: initial state funding levels, politics and growth.

While other counties made an intense early effort to get as much outside funding for their own mental health programs, counties like San Diego and Orange held off, said Peter Schaafsma, a legislative budget analyst in Sacramento.

“The initial allocations were made in a large part on what the counties were doing at that time,” he said. “There hasn’t been a lot of recognition in the changes of needs.”

Increases in funding were based on how much each county was already receiving, resulting in something of a snowball effect. For counties that initially got small amounts, such as San Diego, the result was a deep funding disparity.

“If you got in early, you tended to get more than the county that jumped in later,” said John Sweeten, director of intergovernmental affairs for the county.

“We’ve been at a disadvantage ever since.”

Tom Rietz, a department deputy director, said the Bay Area, for example, had a head start.

“It goes to the whole history of when the programs were first established in areas like San Francisco and the Bay Area,” he said. “They were active in . . . the programs at an earlier stage, and they built up a larger base of operations.”

But San Diego had other things to contend with. The political power of many Northern California counties--including many already getting more money because of early requests for outside funding--outmatched the clout of San Diego-area legislators in Sacramento.

“There’s a certain amount of political strength in the Bay Area that everybody recognizes,” Sweeten said.

“It’s a political reality.”

The third factor is easier to understand:

While San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties, which all got a lot of state money early, have had only slight increases in population in the last 20 years, San Diego County’s has skyrocketed 85%.

Meanwhile, state funding hasn’t come close to making up for the growth. (Four years ago, San Diego filed suit to get the state to balance out the payments, based on current need. That trial is slated to begin Sept. 17 in Superior Court, said Stalnaker.)

This time around, San Diego got a boost from a state regulation that took effect in September, 1988.

The “equity law” mandates that, if cuts in the department occur, the primary guideline to decide who loses what is “the issue of equity,” said Janet Eaton, a spokeswoman with the state Department of Mental Health.

Although no counties are getting what they fully need, she said, San Diego was identified as needing more than it was receiving.

Twenty counties--which had allocations of $1.1 million or less--were spared the budget knife completely because their smaller programs would have been severely damaged by any cuts, said Rietz.

Twenty other counties, including San Diego, sustained cuts between 0% and 5%. Eight, including Orange County--which will lose 6%--had reductions between 5% and 10%.

But 11 counties are losing more than 10% of their allocations, the highest being San Francisco, Rietz said.

Three nearby counties--Marin, San Mateo and Napa--will lose more than 30% of their allocations.

Los Angeles County lost the most in terms of dollars, with a $21.9-million reduction, but it is still left with a $131.2-million allocation.

San Francisco County will have to shut down 23 programs--resulting in more than 300 layoffs--if no other source of funding is found to replace the cuts, said Monique Zmuda, director of business and operations for San Francisco’s mental health programs.

“It’s going to be very, very difficult to manage with the little amount we have left,” she said.

Funds allocated to each county for the use of state mental hospitals, the other basic source of county-level funding, were unaffected by the cuts.