Block Rails Against Cuts, Warns of Budget ‘Disaster’ : Deficit: Sheriff says if $152 million in cutbacks go through, he will have to close nine stations and lay off 1,500 deputies.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block on Wednesday said a proposed $152-million budget cut would devastate his department, resulting in the closure of nine stations, layoffs for more than 1,500 deputies and the release of thousands of county prisoners.

“I fear that we are on the brink of a (law enforcement) disaster of such major proportions in Los Angeles County that we might not ever recover from it,” Block said at a news conference.

Overall, the county is facing a projected $1.16-billion budget deficit--in large part because of reduced funding from the state, which is having its own fiscal difficulties.

The sheriff called upon the public to pressure the Legislature to lessen the impact of cuts by “rolling over” the state’s budget deficit, freeing up more money for counties.

Even if state officials agree to roll over the deficit for five years, as some propose, funds available for the Sheriff’s Department would still decline in the next fiscal year, necessitating an 8% salary reduction for 7,500 sworn personnel, Block said. He called this a “best-case scenario,” under which five of the sheriff’s 22 stations would still have to close.

If there is no rollover, county officials have told Block to expect a $152-million cut in his annual budget of about $700 million.

On Wednesday, Block issued a list of cutbacks he said he would have to make under the worst-case scenario: releasing all inmates in jail for misdemeanors, halving the number of jail beds, and eliminating rescue units and the department’s “operation safe streets” anti-gang force.

This is not the first time the sheriff has threatened such cuts. Last year, most of the reductions were averted when the Board of Supervisors borrowed from the county’s employee savings plan and instituted an early retirement. Critics suggested then that Block had been playing budget games, threatening to cut popular services as a way of pressuring the supervisors to minimize the cuts.

Even so, there were millions of dollars in cuts last year, and Block insisted Wednesday that this year’s prospects are more serious.

“In my 37 years in law enforcement, I have never had to deliver the dire news that I must today,” the sheriff said.

“The Sheriff’s Department already has one of the lowest officer-to-citizen ratios in the United States,” he said. “Crime, violence and the debilitating sense of fear (in the community) have increased, but our numbers to face these challenges have not. We have essentially been engaged in a ‘holding action’ for years.”

Now, he said, further cutbacks would have a devastating effect on deputy response time and crime fighting in general.

Block also warned that layoffs could harm the department’s affirmative action efforts because younger deputies--many of them minorities and women--would be the first to go.

Block said he had not yet determined which substations he would shut down.

If jail closures were necessary, he said he would close parts of the Pitchess Honor Rancho in the Santa Clarita Valley, as well as the entire Mira Loma Biscailuz Center facilities.