Budget Cuts Are Realistic
The outside expert hired by the Board of Supervisors to shape up Ventura County’s financial affairs has shown that he has the guts to challenge its biggest political taboo: the law that guarantees ever-increasing funds for law enforcement whether there’s money for anything else or not.
We hope the supervisors have the courage to back him up.
The budget being prepared by Interim Chief Administrator Harry Hufford asks Sheriff Bob Brooks to cut $6.5 million next year and Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury to trim more than $660,000. It’s the first time in at least seven years that county law enforcement agencies have faced any reductions, and even these cuts are relatively modest: 4.3% for the sheriff, 1.6% for the district attorney.
Brooks’ initial response was discouraging. Although his department has at 115 vacancies that could remain unfilled for another year, and although he has been returning about $3 million a year to the general fund, he followed the classic political gambit of threatening to ax his most popular and effective program: the crime suppression unit. We might have expected such blunt tactics from his predecessor, but in his two years in the top job, Brooks has shown more sophistication than that.
Since passage of the Proposition 172 half-cent sales tax in 1993, the sheriff’s budget has increased by 73% and the district attorney’s by 56%; the county’s general fund budget grew by only 32%.
About 80% of the increase for both departments comes from Proposition 172, which guarantees millions of dollars to law enforcement in California each year. Ventura County supervisors agreed to reserve those funds for the sheriff, district attorney, fire and probation departments but they have the authority to change that and use some of the money for other related purposes, such as crime prevention programs, mental health crisis teams or the new juvenile justice complex.
Brooks notes correctly that voters repeatedly have said that public safety is their No. 1 concern. Fear--justified or not--is a powerful motivator. But thanks to the success of local efforts, crime is not the county’s most pressing problem--and hasn’t been in years. In fact, crime in Ventura County is at a 30-year low.
Meanwhile, the county faces more than $25 million in legal fees and penalties associated with improper Medicare billing and the failed 1998 merger of its mental health and social services agencies. It has an urgent need for more and better housing for the mentally ill. And now it is being forced to spend untold thousands on legal fees to defend its tobacco settlement money from private interests.
None of these problems is the fault of Sheriff Brooks or Dist. Atty. Bradbury. But they are problems that all of Ventura County government must unite to solve. Finding the most fair way to do that is why the supervisors brought in Hufford, a veteran former Los Angeles County chief administrative officer.
It’s time to stop tying the hands of the county administrator by forcing him to balance the books without touching the soaring budgets of a few sacred cow departments. A new arrangement that reflects today’s reality must be worked out to balance this year’s budget and, even more important, put Ventura County on an equitable track for future years--after Hufford is gone.