State of County Address Paints Grim Financial Picture for ’91

Outlining a period of retrenchment for county government, San Diego County Supervisor John MacDonald said Tuesday that cumbersome laws coupled with insufficient funding from Sacramento and Washington have stretched the county’s resources as far as they can go.

In a rather bleak, no-frills State of the County Address, Board of Supervisors Chairman MacDonald said that dismal financial realities will force the county to focus primarily on improving existing services rather than expanding them or creating new programs.

Evoking a common theme emphasized by past board chairmen, MacDonald argued that the financial answer to many local problems lies with the state and federal governments, saying that the county must lobby for relief from the growing burden of under funded programs mandated by Sacramento or Washington.

“County governments are at the end of the pipeline for programs,” MacDonald said in his speech at the County Administration Center. “We are the level of government that is asked to make all of the high-sounding plans of the state and federal governments work.”

Often, those programs would be more effective, MacDonald said, if Washington and Sacramento “simply gave us the money and a clear goal,” rather than “mind-deadening rule books and bureaucratic mandates and procedures.” For years, county administrators have complained that excessive state and federal policy mandates have depleted already inadequate dollars in areas ranging from law enforcement to health and welfare programs.

In keeping with the belt-tightening, back-to-basics tone of his speech, MacDonald identified no new major policy initiatives for his upcoming year as board chairman, a largely ceremonial post rotated annually among the five supervisors.

Instead, he spoke largely in generalities about the need to lobby higher levels of government “to ask them to join us in taking a fresh look at the way we are dealing with society’s needs.”

MacDonald suggested, for example, that San Diego join with other border area cities, counties and school districts nationwide to lobby Washington for financial relief from the economic effect of federal immigration policies.

To try to ease the local impact of the nation’s economic downturn, MacDonald also said that he and San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor will propose that the City Council and Board of Supervisors hold a joint meeting to explore possibilities for greater cooperation between the public and private sectors.

One of the few specifics identified by MacDonald dealt with what he termed the “costly absurdities that the court system has created in the name of a fair trial.” Toward that end, MacDonald proposed that the county seek legislation limiting the cost of private attorneys reimbursed by the county to represent indigent defendants to the salary of deputy district attorneys with comparable experience.

Overall, however, MacDonald suggested that his year as board chairman will be distinguished less by dramatic change than by the fine-tuning of current services.

“We must not spend another year expressing our frustration at the shortcomings of the system,” MacDonald concluded. “We must work to make the changes that will allow the public to have better services and the taxpayers to have superior value for their money.”