Now It’s the Board’s Turn

Bravo to Harry Hufford and the Ventura County Board of Supervisors for working out a budget that will keep nearly all of the county’s vital services in operation despite multimillion-dollar fines and legal fees from past mistakes.

Now comes the larger challenge: changing the way Ventura County routinely does business, so the bad habits that have undermined its fiscal stability in the past do not reappear when interim Chief Administrative Officer Hufford retires next year.

The board must follow through by passing an ordinance that will make permanent the resolution it passed last month to strengthen the chief administrator’s control over nearly every aspect of county government’s finances and leadership. It gives the CAO the power to hire and fire agency and department heads, to serve as the official spokesman on county policy and closed-door meetings, to be present at all collective bargaining sessions, to be told in advance of all meetings between department heads and supervisors and to review any issue before it is taken up for a vote by supervisors. Perhaps most significantly, it shifts fiscal forecasting and other budget duties from the county auditor to the administrator’s staff by creating a new position of chief financial officer directly under the CAO.

In addition, to make sure the county’s budget can be fully and fairly allocated to meet changing needs in the decades ahead, the board also needs to:

* Defend Ventura County’s share of the tobacco-settlement money from being siphoned off by private hospitals via a self-serving ballot initiative. Losing that one could cost county health-care operations $260 million over the next 25 years. That money belongs to the public and should be used for public health programs, under full public scrutiny and accountability.

* Empower Hufford to sit down with Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury, Sheriff Bob Brooks and others to negotiate an improved version of Ordinance 4088, the county measure that guarantees 100% of the local proceeds from 1993’s Proposition 172 half-cent sales tax exclusively to four agencies engaged in law enforcement: the Sheriff’s Department, district attorney’s office, public defender’s office and Probation Department. This ordinance also grants those four agencies annual increases from the general fund far in excess of the national rate of inflation. Ordinance 4088 has created a widening budget gap between these well-funded law enforcement agencies and all other county departments--a gap that is inappropriate in such a low-crime area and doomed to grow ever wider until this ordinance is revised.

* Reconsider its decision to make the parks department pay its own way. A diverse and well-maintained parks system is an important quality-of-life amenity that earns its keep by contributing to the physical and emotional health of all county residents. The strategy of forcing parks to produce income has spawned one bad idea after another, from the proposed golf course and amphitheater on environmentally sensitive land near Camarillo to the recent scheme to turn the popular public beach at the Rincon into a paid parking lot for recreational vehicles. The more fees and paid uses are imposed, the fewer people will use county parks. The fewer people use them, the less safe they become and the easier it is to rationalize poor maintenance. We urge the county to find a new income stream for the parks with the goal of making them more inviting, more heavily used and better maintained.

Better physical fitness for county residents, better fiscal fitness for county government: The new budget is a good first step but it will take hard work and discipline to triumph in the long run.