County Board OKs $15-Billion Budget With Little Debate

It took the Board of Supervisors just 49 minutes Monday to pass the $15-billion budget that will determine how health care, child support and law enforcement are delivered to the county’s 9.6 million residents over the next fiscal year.

The swiftness with which the spending plan was passed says as much about the current economic good times in Los Angeles as it does about how the nation’s largest county is run.

Four years ago, in the depths of Southern California’s recession, supervisors battled for months over which programs to slash and approved the largest job cuts in county history.

On Monday, rising property tax revenues, the result of an expanding economy, allowed the lawmakers to add nearly 5,000 employees to the county payroll and to begin long-deferred repairs on crumbling county buildings.

The budget also funds new fire stations and libraries, and lays the groundwork for building a sheriff’s station in Palmdale.

But the real secret behind the supervisors’ apparently harmonious efficiency is that they have little choice over how most of the county’s money is spent.

Most of the county’s budget consists of money from the federal and state governments, and how those funds are spent is dictated by federal and state law rather than by the five supervisors.

The generally controversy-averse board decided not to quarrel over the few crumbs left--about $83 million--and, as is its custom, passed the budget on consent, without taking a formal vote.

“It was a safe budget,” Board Chairman Don Knabe said after the vote. “There wasn’t a lot of excitement in it.”

Any excitement was deferred until the end of summer, when auditors will determine how much cash the county has left over from this year and what the impact of the state budget on county coffers will be.

“There was a consensus to put all the substantive decisions off until later this summer,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said. “The real decisions will be made later this summer and I guarantee they will take more than 45 minutes.”

One issue that Supervisor Mike Antonovich pledged to bring up later is the Sheriff’s Department budget.

Recently elected Sheriff Lee Baca had pledged to “raise hell” if he did not receive $100 million to hire 1,000 deputies. He later added several projects to his list.

Supervisors on Monday approved giving the sheriff about $85 million in new money, enough for him to reopen Biscailuz Detention Center as a rehabilitative jail for drug offenders but not nearly enough for him to expand his ranks as he had sought.

Antonovich, who has been most vocal about boosting the sheriff’s budget, did not utter a peep at the meeting but in an interview vowed to revisit the issue in September when supervisors make final changes to the budget.

“The sheriff needs additional officers to deal effectively with the crime we have,” Antonovich said.

The only other controversy that has dogged the county budget this year was neutralized Monday, when Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen decided to defer his highly criticized plan to cap the number of indigent patients county hospitals accept from private facilities.

Private hospitals said the proposal would have left them with too many uninsured patients to treat, triggering a collapse of the county’s emergency rooms.

“We are persuaded by their considerations that we should not rush into this recommendation, but we need to take a good deal of time to take a look at it,” Janssen said.

Yaroslavsky chided Janssen for dropping the plan.

“Next time you do this,” he said, “if you recommend it you ought to be prepared to back it up.”

Without those sorts of controversies to attract them, no members of the public even showed up to testify.

The deliberations consisted mainly of technical discussions by the board’s budget office.

During the discussion of the hospital transfers, however, supervisors touched upon the one lingering problem in the budget--the county’s massive health department, which serves the county’s millions of uninsured residents.

The department depends on a federal waiver to keep running, and its books remain balanced only because the county assumes legislation will be passed to revise medical reimbursement rules.

Supervisors blamed this precarious financial state on the change in their patient population, which Janssen’s proposal had sought to address.

The county has seen its MediCal patients--for whose treatment it receives state money--poached away by private hospitals.

Now the county is left with a rising number of uninsured patients, who bring no revenue.

“We are going to have to have some kind of funds to offset that burden,” Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said. “We cannot provide for all the indigent and get no Medi-Cal.”