Follow Hufford’s Advice

When the Ventura County Board of Supervisors brought in Harry L. Hufford as interim chief administrative officer, no one expected his job to be easy--or his prescription for shaping up the county’s fiscal affairs to be palatable.

Sure enough, the strategy he recommended Friday is a painful one. To avoid a $5-million deficit and get its finances back on track, he advised, the county must allocate all of this year’s tobacco settlement dollars, extend the hiring freeze he imposed and put all new projects on hold.

Supervisor Frank Schillo was first to balk, remaining adamant that none of the tobacco windfall should be used to atone for the board’s disastrous decision to merge the mental health and social service departments and reluctant to delay his $4-million plan to expand services for the mentally ill, especially much-needed housing.

We share Schillo’s dismay but we urge the board to vote unanimously to follow Hufford’s advice.

The board hired this veteran manager primarily to address two critical issues. The first, of which the budget deficit is merely one symptom of many, is a sloppy system of slipshod budgeting, phantom employees and inadequate auditing that has left county government reeling from crisis to crisis for years. The second is the “corporate culture” that encourages department heads to bypass the CAO and pitch their projects to individual supervisors, who often act independently rather than as a unit.

We praised the board for acting unanimously to call Hufford, a vastly experienced and well-regarded former CAO of Los Angeles County, out of semi-retirement to address these bad habits. We are not surprised that his recommendations are so drastic. How the supervisors respond will show the citizens of Ventura County whether these five elected officials are serious about fixing what is wrong with county government, or not.

We certainly agree that the mental health merger was a costly mistake, pursued for political reasons, that the board should not have made. But the board did--the nay votes of Schillo and Supervisor Judy Mikels notwithstanding. And so the county is stuck with the bill to pay the best it can.

Insisting that this debt be considered differently than the county’s other outstanding bills is the same sort of petty politics that begat the merger in the first place.

We agree that housing and the other proposed service for the mentally ill are long overdue and should be funded sooner rather than later; the same can be said for other programs that would have to wait under Hufford’s cold-turkey prescription.

We are also troubled that the first installment of what is expected to be an annual payment of about $9 million for 25 years will not be used as it should: for directly health-related programs that prevent or treat the effects of smoking.

But larger than these very real concerns looms this one: Ventura County needs to fix the flaws in its system. The board wisely hired Harry Hufford to guide it. It ought to follow his advice.