Cuts That Hurt the Most : Is Orange County spreading the pain equitably?

The Orange County financial debacle took the shape of real pain for real people this week, with the first county employees being told they will be out of work soon after the holidays. Hundreds more, perhaps 1,000, will be laid off in the weeks ahead as two dozen agencies and departments seek to save about $40 million overall.

The manner of deciding which employees go first appears fair. Seniority and performance reviews will be the factors. Union officials, concerned about the abrogation of their contracts specifying layoffs be based only on seniority, promised to monitor the procedure carefully, which is their right.

Department heads were given the latitude to decide who goes and who stays, but their budget cuts were imposed by a three-man management team that spent more than a week studying the county’s woes after it filed for bankruptcy Dec. 6. The Board of Supervisors, which was inattentive while the county treasurer made the bad investments that cost the county more than $2 billion, delegated the actual recommendations for cuts to a management team consisting of the county sheriff-coroner, the district attorney and the Health Care Agency director.

That trio was given a miserable job, made more difficult by questions about possible conflict of interest that emerged as soon as they announced their decisions. The supervisors could have foreseen that reaction. The sheriff and the district attorney escaped with cuts of about 1% each, but a program providing lawyers for those who cannot afford them suffered a 29% cut; the Human Resources Agency was slashed nearly 18%.

Crime and law enforcement are major political concerns, as the sheriff and the district attorney have shown over the years in skillfully fighting attempts to trim their budgets. An independent numbers-cruncher just might have reached some of the same conclusions as the management team. But asking a few major players to make budgetary decisions for all left a question of fairness.

Orange County is making extremely difficult decisions, with more to come. Part of getting beyond this crisis will be a perception that the pain is being spread evenly.