ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Sharing the County Budget Pain

Although it missed the opportunity to do the right thing in the first place, the Orange County Board of Supervisors is correct to back down on its plan to grant its five members a $3,282-a-year pay raise. The decision, which is expected to be made official at a board meeting today, indicates that the board belatedly understood that everyone must share the pain of these tough budgetary times.

More important, the board also plans to drop its effort to tie future raises to increases given the county’s top managers. This would have had the effect of allowing supervisors to avoid facing the public to justify their future pay raises.

Supervisors already make $82,054, one of the highest salaries of any county governing board in California. But Orange County is a large, urban county where governmental decisions are ever more complex. A higher-than-average pay level in itself is not something to worry about.

This year, however, even a modest 4% pay increase raised eyebrows among taxpayer groups, especially in view of last summer’s $67.7-million shortfall in the county’s $3.7-billion spending plan. To balance the budget, the board trimmed or eliminated many valuable programs and services and cut 260 positions from the county staff (although in the end only 20 people were laid off).

Board Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez and Supervisor Roger R. Stanton led the move to forgo the raises after they were already approved unanimously by the board a week ago. Vasquez and Stanton say they were impressed not so much by the taxpayer groups who had angrily confronted them at the board meeting as by angry constituents who later telephoned their offices. Supervisors Don R. Roth, Harriett M. Wieder and Thomas F. Riley also have indicated support for rescinding the pay raise when the vote is taken.

Pay raises for public officials are never popular, and they are even less so in these times of recession and budgetary deficits. But even in good times, supervisors should always have to make their case to the people who elected them to office.