New Options for Sheriff Budget

For years, officials of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department warned of one or more of the following whenever their budget was threatened: lawsuits, deputy layoffs, early release of inmates, jail closings. For years, the county Board of Supervisors had insufficient budgetary details, much less the backbone, to ask tough questions about the department’s finances.

That began to change last November with a Times series that raised many questions about internal spending. The articles suggested that in reality Sheriff Sherman Block had quite a few more fiscal options at his discretion. Now, the second part of a three-stage audit confirms as much, and its disclosures ought to irritate taxpayers.

KPMG Peat Marwick, the private accounting firm that conducted the audit, says the Sheriff’s Department could save up to $22 million annually by trimming management, closing unneeded operations and putting medical and food services out for competitive bidding. If that seems like small change for one of the county’s biggest budgets, guess again. It’s enough to reopen a 1,000-bed jail (closed for budgetary reasons), with about $10 million left over to jump-start an automated inmate tracking system.

That’s welcome news indeed for a jail system in which inmates serve just 23% of their prescribed sentences on average and for a system that has mistakenly released inmates and failed to release others on time. And that $22-million figure might be conservative. State Auditor Kurt Sjoberg said last November that the department could save $44 million a year.

Sheriff’s Department officials aren’t sulking over the audit. They say they have embraced the Peat Marwick findings and recommendations. But this is no time to relax.

Earlier, in the first stage of this audit, the county auditor-controller said that the Sheriff’s Department budget should be broken down into seven smaller and more detailed elements that would give the supervisors more of the information needed to monitor and control spending.

There’s also pressure building in the Legislature. Assembly Majority Leader Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) has pushed a reasonable bill through the lower house that would require tighter reins on the department’s contracting process for goods and services and require outside audits every five years. Maybe all this will lead to county residents being able to have more faith in the fiscal workings of their government, particularly the department that runs the jails.