County May Seek Funding Amendment : Government: Two supervisors seek to put charter proposal on November ballot. It would require new funding sources for any newly mandated services.

Two county supervisors are proposing a charter amendment that would demand new funding sources be furnished before the county could be required to provide any new services.

The proposed “Just Say No” amendment was prompted by an initiative appearing on the November ballot that would require a minimum number of deputies to staff jails and patrol the unincorporated areas, said Supervisor Brian Bilbray, one of the amendment’s authors.

It also would send a strong--but not legally enforceable--message to state and federal governments to stop forcing the county to provide services without providing the money to pay for them, Bilbray said.

“What’s happening is that we’re getting demands from a lot of different directions--federal, state and local--that want to require you to spend money, but no one wants to tell us where the money is going to come from,” Bilbray said.

Dana Quittner, an aide to Supervisor George Bailey, the amendment’s other sponsor, said “the supervisor has expressed his frustration with ballot box budgeting many times.”

Bilbray conceded that the amendment could not block costly federal or state spending mandates, such as the Legislature’s requirement that the county provide General Relief welfare payments to able-bodied adults, which the supervisors have voted to eliminate because of fund shortages. The decision has become the center of a legal battle between the county and Legal Aid lawyers.

But Bilbray believes that the amendment, which would also go before voters in November and requires a simple majority to pass, would supersede the deputies’ initiative.

“All this is, is a full-employment initiative (for sheriff’s deputies),” Bilbray said of the deputies’ initiative. “It has nothing to do with law enforcement.”

The deputies’ ballot initiative, which qualified July 1, calls for an increasing ratio of deputies and correctional officers to population starting in 1994--with 1.5 deputies per 1,000 population--and topping out at 2.25 officers per thousand in 1998.

For years, union officials and department administrators have bemoaned the lack of deputies to patrol an unincorporated area of about 400,000 people. The ratio is now 1.16 deputies per 1,000 population, and the department has had a hiring freeze for six months.

Deputies are under contract to several North County cities, but those governments pay for whatever services they use and do not count in the ratio.

The San Diego Police Department, by contrast, which has 1.67 officers per 1,000, has been unsuccessful in trying to increase its ratio to 2 per 1,000. Earlier this year, the city Police Officers Assn. abandoned efforts to enact a similar minimum staffing requirement when it halted a petition drive aimed at placing a measure on this fall’s ballot.

Randy Dibb, president of the Deputy Sheriff’s Assn., which represents the 1,400-member force, said he and other union officials were forced to go to voters because the staffing situation keeps getting worse.

“The citizens are suffering, and it’s come to the point where we can no longer handle all the calls that come in,” he said. “The Board of Supervisors hasn’t done a lot. The supervisors have ignored law enforcement for years.”

Dibb said he only learned about the supervisors’ charter amendment proposal Thursday and believed it may be illegal. He said county officials are using erroneous population estimates and its financial projects detailing how much the new deputies would cost are exaggerated.

For instance, he said, the DSA has calculated that it will cost $7.4 million to pay for the deputies needed under the union’s ballot measure, not $19 million as the county asserts.

“Their first-year cost is off by miles,” he said. “They are estimating an average cost per deputy with benefits at $54,575 but the average is $29,000 per deputy.”

Bilbray and Bailey’s amendment would require that “all federal, state and local mandates, including ballot measures, include a new source of revenue to totally offset the cost of these mandates before the county can be required to implement them,” according to the proposal, which comes before the supervisors Tuesday.