Baca’s Budget Woes Raise Policy Issues

In his four years as Los Angeles County sheriff, Lee Baca has closed a jail and bought an airplane. He has delayed the promotions of some high-ranking officers, while at the same time trying to increase his command staff. He has opened a jail for drug and domestic violence offenders but has not allocated the money to finish it.

Baca has launched and protected programs close to his heart, but also has overspent his budget so severely that the county now requires him to submit monthly expenditure reports.

The sheriff, who exceeded his $1.4-billion budget last year by $25 million, is the only county department head on such a watch, and his spending habits have become fodder for his campaign opponents, Sgts. Patrick Gomez and John Stites, both of whom work for the department. March 5 is election day.

Baca said his decisions are deliberate and reflect his determination to move the department in new directions. He said that he takes the budget situation seriously and that he has a much clearer understanding of the department’s finances today than he did when he was first elected.

“This is a real learning experience for all of us in the county,” Baca said. “I’m very flexible when it comes to balancing a budget based on need. I understand that I can’t just barrel on oblivious to the fact that these [are] precious dollars.”

Still, his choices have led some county officials and others to question whether he has a clear budget strategy. Instead, those officials say, Baca appears to be making some bold moves while maintaining a host of other, less traditional law enforcement programs. Gomez and Stites have repeatedly said that the first thing they would do upon election is order an audit of department spending.

Operating in an Unusual Financial Environment

The county sheriff operates in an unusual budget environment. He is an elected official, and the county supervisors have no direct authority over him. As a result, he can spend money largely as he pleases, but the board can limit the overall amount provided to the department, giving the supervisors substantial power over the sheriff. In Baca’s case, they are using that power to try to change his spending habits.

“We really haven’t had a department in the recent past come up this short,” said Sharon Bunn, chief deputy in the county’s Chief Administrative Office, who formerly worked in the Sheriff’s Department budget division. “Everyone is taking this very seriously.... He’s got to realize his resources.”

Department veterans say that the sheriff’s budget difficulties are no worse than those of his predecessor, Sherman Block, and that Baca inherited some debt carried over from his former boss’ tenure.

Further, Baca was hit with a large lawsuit settlement--$27 million for detaining people in jail past their release dates--that adds to his budget difficulties. The department is paying that amount over three years.

Baca and his budget officers attribute last year’s shortfall to a number of things: debt carried over from previous years, higher-than-expected workers’ compensation claims, increased training costs because the department hired more deputies than it had set aside money for; and increased costs during the Democratic National Convention, held in 2000 at Staples Center downtown.

Promise to Repay County Over 2 Years

Baca and other department officials say they were caught off guard by the budget shortfall. As a result, the sheriff has promised to repay the county coffers for the deficit over the next two years.

But some confusion remains as to the money he will use--and how much latitude he will be permitted.

Baca, for instance, has proposed diverting federal money that the county receives in return for jailing illegal immigrants.

But the county chief administrative office says that money may not be spent on debt reduction, and is holding the money in a trust fund until it can resolve that dispute.

Sheriff’s officials complain about what they say is the county’s improper withholding of state sales tax revenue from the department. That, too, is a source of friction between the agency and its county parent, with county officials arguing that they have other priorities as well.

Amid the disputes about how much money the sheriff receives are related debates about how he spends what he gets. He recently purchased a $2.4-million airplane, whose funding he said mostly came from narcotics forfeitures that could not be used for other, general fund purposes.

In an interview, Baca’s budget czar, Chief Marvin Dixon, said the costs were initially going to be shared with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department but that agency backed out after the issue became public.

Baca says the airplane is primarily for use by investigators to get to and from homicide scenes and interviews, for example, but he and other top brass use it as well.

Meanwhile, the department quietly closed the south jail in the Pitchess Honor Ranch complex in the north county, saving $11.2 million a year. Groups of inmates have been transferred to other facilities over several months; 79 deputies, along with 52 civilian workers, have been reassigned. Only a year ago, Baca was seeking to add to that jail by creating special classes and counseling for female inmates.

The department also recently closed a floor at the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood to save nearly $2 million.

But at the same time, Baca opened a dorm there for veterans to receive special programs while they are incarcerated. The sheriff plans to hold an official opening of the 96-bed dorm on election day. That’s just one of the ways that Baca has tried to expand programs for inmates even as he has reduced jail beds. Although some have been shelved, Baca has pushed for drug- and alcohol-recovery courses and anger-management classes.

One particularly ambitious--and still unrealized--effort is the so-called Miracle Program. Baca has proposed construction of a women’s jail in the north county where inmates could live with their infants and take parenting, anger-management and other classes while serving time. The cost of that facility is estimated at $4.1 million, but so far Baca has been unable to come up with the money.

And he touts the Biscailuz Recovery Center, which offers drug and domestic violence offenders the chance to live in low-security dorms taking classes in a group therapy-type atmosphere. But half the dorms sit empty, painted and furnished without the funding to staff--or open--them. Last year, the sheriff requested $2 million to open 120 additional beds. The supervisors declined to appropriate the money.

Grappling with his budget shortfall, Baca has, on his own, elected to delay remodeling and reopening of the Sybil Brand Institute women’s jail, a move that saved him $10 million this year. Female inmates are now housed at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, a maximum-security setting that Baca has said is inappropriate for most of the women there.

Although jail construction and operation eat up a large share of the sheriff’s budget, Baca is using his spending decisions to adjust staffing as well.

To save more than $1 million, the sheriff is delaying the promotions of some commanders and captains, but he is also trying to win voter approval to increase the size of his top command staff at a cost of about $600,000. Baca succeeded in placing Measure C on next week’s ballot requesting approval for an assistant sheriff and four division chiefs; voter approval is needed under the County Charter.

Those positions are necessary, the sheriff said, because the command structure was created more than 30 years ago when the department--and the communities it serves--was smaller. In 1967, 23 cities contracted for department services, compared with 41 today; the department had about 6,000 employees, compared with nearly 15,000 today; and the jail population has just about doubled, from 10,000 to nearly 20,000 on average.

To accommodate the tight budget, Baca is pulling back on some of his favorite initiatives, including a project that put new deputies through leadership classes. Training Division Capt. Dennis Conte said the academy has cut its program by a week, sprinkling the sheriff’s leadership classes throughout the now 18-week curriculum.

Outside the department, Baca may be best known for his decision to start the Office of Independent Review, a group of outside attorneys hired by the county at the end of last year to oversee internal Sheriff’s Department investigations. Baca persuaded the Board of Supervisors to absorb the costs of that office in the county budget, rather than in his own. But although he said the rationale for the office was to add integrity to internal reviews of deputies, he is now proposing to transfer four sergeants from Internal Affairs to save money.

That has caused some to question Baca’s budget strategy.

Cmdr. Bill McSweeney, for example, oversees Internal Affairs and other investigations. He argued that those four sergeants, who are building profiles of problem deputies, are an important part of the tracking program in the department.

“Would the quality suffer without them?” he asked. “Absolutely.”

While cutting officers assigned to identifying problem deputies, Baca has found the money to reinstate his “off the streeters” program, in which the department conducts background and medical checks on prospective deputies and then assigns them to the jails before sending them to the academy for their formal training.

That program, which officials predict will help decrease the high costs of overtime, has raised concerns among some in the county Hall of Administration who worry that the new hires are too inexperienced for the jails.

Some County Officials Puzzled and Annoyed

Some of the moves--buying the airplane while closing jail beds, for instance--have puzzled and annoyed other county officials. One department observer called them “penny-wise and pound-foolish.” Others have suggested that Baca thinks more about political ramifications than law enforcement needs.

County Supervisor Gloria Molina credits Baca with improving his approach, but said the sheriff still sometimes surprises the board.

“It’s when we see him coming in and asking for money and proposing new programs,” Molina said. “That always creates a bit of a problem. It makes it hard for us to understand his priorities. Sometimes he throws a curveball to us.”