Supervisors Balk at Cutting Own Finances

After telling department managers to prepare for painful cuts necessary to erase a $20-million deficit, Ventura County supervisors began their final budget hearing Wednesday by sparing themselves from the budget ax.

Chief Administrative Officer Lin Koester had proposed that the supervisors cut $289,000 from their own budget by eliminating five staff positions, one for each official.

Supervisors Judy Mikels and Maggie Kildee said they thought that was a good idea and agreed to support it.

“If we are asking all the other departments and agencies to streamline and take cuts and heave to, then we as elected officials should be doing the same thing,” Mikels said. “I just feel strongly that we have to set an example.”

But Chairman Frank Schillo and Supervisor John K. Flynn balked at the idea of cutting the board’s budget Wednesday.

“I don’t have a cellular phone, I don’t have a car phone, I don’t have any of those things because they’re costly,” Flynn said. “And I’m trying to keep my costs down. I’m operating as efficiently as I possibly can.”

Flynn pointed out that he ended up with a $20,000 pay cut three years ago after the board adopted new salary reforms.

“No one else took a $20,000 cut, and that has to be remembered,” he said.

Schillo, whose new Thousand Oaks office costs the county $10,000 more than the previous space, said he preferred to revisit the board’s budget later in the year. He said he wanted the panel’s overall $1.8-million budget split into five accounts, allowing each board member to reduce his or her own budget.

But Mikels persisted in seeking an immediate cut, saying the board needed to send a message to all the department managers in the audience.

“I firmly believe we cannot come up with an argument on this dais that everybody else sitting out there can’t come up with as well,” she said. “I think now’s the time to fish or cut bait.”

In the end, all five board members decided to reexamine their budget at a later, unspecified date. But they declined to even keep the proposed $289,000 cut as a baseline.

The board’s failure to act was not lost on its budget-weary audience.

Said one official: “It’s like telling everyone to prepare for battle, then saying at the last minute, ‘I’d like to be going with you, but. . . .’ ”