Ventura County Budget Battle Puzzling to Business Experts
Some of Ventura County’s top managers are resisting budget cuts by either trying to pass the buck or paint disaster scenarios, prompting this wry comment last week from Chief Administrative Officer Harry Hufford:
“In the corporate world, you’d get canned if you did that.”
Although at $1.06 billion the county’s new budget will be larger than ever before, much of the $111-million increase from last year has already been eaten up by inflation and salary raises.
Hufford is asking county managers to cut $12.4 million from their departments to help balance the budget and end a trend of overspending. And he has asked them to do so in a way that minimizes impacts on services.
But Sheriff Bob Brooks warned that the prospect of laying off dozens of deputies may lead to a rise in crime. Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said he would be forced to scale back misdemeanor prosecutions.
Both elected officials--two of the most powerful politicians in the county--reminded supervisors during a budget meeting last week how important public safety is to voters.
“I want to cooperate,” Brooks told the board. “However, not all services provided by government are created equal. Public safety is the first priority.”
Meanwhile, Health Care Agency director Pierre Durand and his mental health chief, David Gudeman, both of whom are appointed, also resisted budget cuts. They essentially ignored their orders, putting the onus on county supervisors to decide what services should be cut.
Business experts agree that such tactics are far less acceptable in the corporate world, where insubordinates are quickly replaced.
“In the private sector, they probably would have just fired Durand,” said Herbert Gooch, chairman of the political science department at Cal Lutheran University. “If I were the manager of someone who said, ‘I haven’t got a clue in the world how to spend less,’ I’d say you’re only half a manager.”
At Thousand Oaks-based Amgen Inc., the nation’s largest biotechnology company and the county’s largest private employer, managers deal with the budget they are given and make the best of it with minimal grousing, said company spokesman David Kaye.
“If you’re not willing to take responsibility for managing your budget, you’re probably not going to become a manager,” Kaye said.
Private sector managers also have a strong financial incentive when their own divisions take a hit for the greater good of the company, Kaye said.
“We’re all shareholders in the company,” he said. “Wall Street has expectations for earnings per share, and we’re committed to doing whatever we can to deliver on those expectations.”
Companies live and die by the bottom line, but governments rarely go bankrupt, some officials point out. And while consumers and investors can turn their backs on one company in favor of another, government is a monopoly, and taxpayers don’t have the choice to stop funding it.
“In a corporation, the last thing they’ll do is cut services through their products, because their products bring in the money,” said Supervisor Frank Schillo, who runs a financial planning company that designs pension plans for corporations.
If a corporation has to save money, it will slash employees from the top down but maintain production, Schillo said. But in government, where the commodities are more abstract and employee unions are generally more powerful, services are cut even as salaries and benefits go up, he said.
Joel Fox, president emeritus of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., said if services must be cut, government managers should be straightforward about the consequences rather than crying wolf.
“People like me will say you’ve got to run government like a business. And [bureaucrats] will say ‘But government isn’t a business,’ ” he said.
“The answer is between those two absolutes. But the fact is, there’s only so much water in the bucket. Government must learn to be a little more responsible with the budget and make some difficult choices.”
In particular, Fox criticized the budget presentation by Durand and Gudeman, a presentation that sent supervisors Judy Mikels and Susan Lacey into a rage.
“What were these guys hired for?” Fox said. “It’s their job to tell the supervisors what the priority is,” rather than force supervisors to make a choice without enough information.
But Samuel A. Culbert, a business professor at UCLA’s Anderson School and author of books about government and corporate management cultures, said the truth is more complex.
“In the public sector, department heads put themselves at peril if they come in with concessionary budget proposals,” Culbert said.
“The police chief doesn’t get evaluated on how well he did with crime given that his budget was cut 20%. And the parks guy doesn’t get evaluated on the fact that his parks closed early in the face of cuts. So [it’s] self-defeating if they cut back to what the county can tolerate.
“There are very few rewards for being a team player, and there’s everything to lose.”
