Courage and Public Safety

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors took a bold and crucial step toward defusing a budgetary time bomb when it applied a reality check to the inflation clause that has helped four law-enforcement agencies to corner more than half of the county’s annual budget.

By voting to limit law enforcement’s annual increases to the actual rate of inflation, the board began to rein in policies that have pumped up budgets of the sheriff, district attorney, public defender and probation agencies while the rest of the county’s responsibilities languished.

It was the right thing to do, although it took courage to override the wishes of the politically powerful sheriff and district attorney.

Even tougher tests may well lie ahead.

The change was engineered by interim chief administrator Harry Hufford, a savvy and seasoned retired Los Angeles County administrator hastily recruited in December 1999 to restore the county’s financial stability.

From the beginning, Hufford argued that hefty guaranteed increases for law enforcement were eating up more than half of the county’s discretionary funds, leaving too little for departments such as public health and planning.

It was Hufford who persuaded Supervisors Steve Bennett, John Flynn and Kathy Long that the county’s financial safety demanded a change in the six-year-old policy. Supervisors Judy Mikels and Frank Schillo remain opposed.

“You can’t have two parts of county government, a public safety part and the rest,” Hufford told the board before last week’s vote. “[The funding formula] has created a moat between public safety and everything else.”

But in just two weeks, Harry Hufford will be history--riding off into retirement, at least as far as the Ventura County administrator’s post is concerned. There is danger that the sheriff and district attorney may see Hufford’s successor, longtime county government insider John Johnston, as a less formidable foe and mount a fear-based campaign to undo the change.

Since 1995, the sheriff, district attorney, public defender and probation agencies have split all of the proceeds from a statewide half-cent sales tax approved by voters as Proposition 172. It generates more than $40 million annually. Ventura County supervisors adopted a local ordinance that guaranteed general fund money would be used to cover salaries and benefits for public safety employees as well as inflationary increases for raises, equipment and programs.

As a result, budgets for these four agencies have ballooned about 70% while the overall county budget grew only 29%. Hufford’s plan pegs inflationary hikes to the consumer price index, now about 3.75%. That is expected to save the county about $4.2 million next fiscal year.

Although adopting a more realistic inflation benchmark is an important step, other problems remain to be addressed.

Ventura County was the only county in California to adopt an ordinance guaranteeing 100% of the Proposition 172 “public safety” funds to such a narrow group of agencies. The ordinance leaves none of the money available for such clearly safety-related operations as fighting fires, treating drinking water, disposing of sewage, monitoring hazardous waste and farm chemicals and controlling infectious diseases. It also excludes municipal police departments in Oxnard, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula, Simi Valley and Ventura.

Ventura County deserves to get the most from its public safety tax money. We applaud supervisors Bennett, Flynn and Long for their votes and urge further efforts to spend this money on true public safety, not just ever-tougher law enforcement.