Supervisors Urged to Set Budgeting Priorities : Finances: Acting administrator says the board should rank programs by importance. The county faces a $41.7-million shortfall.

Drawing up plans to erase a $41.7-million deficit, the county chief administrator has recommended that the Board of Supervisors approve a priority list that ranks dozens of county programs and spells out which ones can be cut in the next fiscal year.

In a report to be discussed by the board Tuesday, Acting Chief Administrative Officer Robert C. Hirtensteiner supports placing county programs into three tiers, based on importance.

“This method was chosen . . . because of the magnitude of the deficit,” Hirtensteiner wrote. The shortfall “requires a fundamental rethinking of the mission and activities of the county.”

And while Hirtensteiner and a panel of department heads and elected officials said the ranking system is only a suggestion, it will be the basis for supervisors’ debate until the 1995-96 budget is approved by summer.

Other recommendations to trim the $514-million general fund budget include:

* Renting or selling county-owned land, buildings and other assets.

* Contracting out some services to private companies.

* Monitoring jail inmates electronically or expanding work-furlough programs.

In addition, county departments could be consolidated to save on overhead and more commercial development could occur at county parks--such as building more public golf courses--to beef up revenues.

The panel recommends closing the budget gap by cutting $15 million in expenses and using $25 million from reserve funds, which would be similar to using money set aside in a savings account for day-to-day expenses. Additional spending cuts would be needed in the next two fiscal years to bring the reserve funds back up, the panel said.

“With this structural deficit, the board has to have some major reductions,” said county Budget Manager Bert Bigler, who helped prepare the recommendations.

Hirtensteiner’s plan echoes a “white paper” released Wednesday by six top Ventura County elected officials, who said supervisors should no longer consider across-the-board cuts. In past years, supervisors have approved their final budget only after considering cuts for all departments.

“Well, a chimpanzee can cut across the board,” Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said. “That’s not the kind of leadership we need.”

In fact, just which programs will be cut is already a point of sharp contention.

The purpose of the white paper was to lobby against cuts in the offices of district attorney, sheriff, assessor, tax collector, auditor-controller and county clerk.

Bradbury and Sheriff Larry Carpenter have argued that law enforcement funding provided by Proposition 172, approved by the voters in 1993, should not be drained off for use elsewhere.

The initiative established a permanent half-cent state sales tax to fund public safety programs. But Ventura County supervisors have used some of the money for other purposes.

Hirtensteiner says, however, that sparing courts and law enforcement from cuts will place an enormous burden on other departments. That “certainly means there has to be additional cuts throughout the rest of the organization,” he said in an interview.

For his part, Bradbury insisted that Hirtensteiner’s figures are misleading. “They’ve played a lot of games with the figures over there,” he said.

Typical of debate that may erupt as supervisors begin to rank county programs was a disagreement last week between Bradbury and Supervisor Maggie Kildee over the $5.5-million annual subsidy for the county hospital.

“We should be talking about getting out of the hospital business,” Bradbury said. “It’s costing taxpayers more and more money. Private hospitals are willing and able to take over the responsibility of indigent health care.”

But Kildee said that if the county contracts with private hospitals to take care of poor residents, “we’ll have no control over the costs. That’s shortsighted.”

Supervisor John K. Flynn said he would use recommendations from both Hirtensteiner’s report and the white paper in balancing this year’s budget.

“We’re going to take the best parts out of that plan, the white paper, and seek some relief on mandated programs at the state level,” said Flynn, who sits on a task force watching Orange County’s plan to reduce programs.

“We’re going to let Orange County plow the ground, but we’re going to be right behind them and catch what we can,” he said.

Kildee said she would not know which services to cut, if the board were forced to prioritize 40 key programs listed hypothetically in Hirtensteiner’s report.

“Every item on there is a good one,” she said. “There is not one there that I don’t think we need.”

Auditor-Controller Thomas O. Mahon, who participated in writing both the staff report and the white paper, suggested eliminating some of the chief administrator’s staff and moving the task of analyzing the annual budget to his office.

“There is duplication between what we’re charged with doing and what the CAO is charged with doing,” Mahon said. “Let the CAO do the number-crunching, and let the auditor do the analysis.”

Flynn agreed that the two offices may be doing some of the same work.

“We need to look carefully at the CAO’s office and see what kinds of duplication is going on there,” he said. “Duplication costs money.”

Times staff writer Carlos V. Lozano contributed to this story.