County approves $760M budget

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

After three days of cutting, patching and political jockeying, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors yesterday narrowly approved a more than $760 million budget for next fiscal year.
In the end it was a $300,000 difference of opinion that prevented the board from reaching a unanimous decision on the budget, with Third District Supervisor Brooks Firestone and Fourth District Supervisor Joni Gray voting no.


Firestone objected, he said, because a last-minute allocation of $150,000 to the adult mental health division of the Department of Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health Services (ADMHS) and $250,000 to the alcohol and drug division, placed the county roughly $2.9 million in debt, which required the county to use reserves.
“I cannot accept that large of a deficit,” he said. “We are spending in excess of our income.”
Though most county departments saw some level of budget cuts, First District Supervisor Salud Carbajal, the board’s chair, said he was mostly pleased with the end result.
“It’s not perfect but I think we’ve come away with a decent budget,” he said. “It’s not the best but it’s not the worst.”
One of the most controversial cuts was $8.4 million to ADMHS, which was discussed at length each of the three days of budget deliberations. When the gavel fell, the supervisors agreed to allocate an additional $4.4 million to the department to help shore up some of that deficit.
Mike Foley, executive director of the Casa Esperanza homeless shelter, said he and many other mental health advocates are gracious on one hand, but bitter on the other as a result of the budget process, which he maintained was tainted with vast inaccuracies.
“My colleagues and I are choking and blind from the smoke and mirrors from the budget,” he said. “The board wanted to do everything it could to help the Department of Mental Health but had a budget book that wasn’t right. They did not know how much money they were supposed to be looking for.”
The marquee example used by Foley and others during the budget session was the seemingly conflicting numbers used in the budget book to determine the difference between last year and this year. The difference between 2007-2008 and 2008-2009, which was widely believed to be $8.4 million, was actually $5.6 million, the budget book showed.
County Communication Director William Boyer told the Daily Sound last week he was ensured by finance officials $8.4 million was the correct level of cuts, and the remaining $3 million missing from the budget book was disbursed throughout other departments.
During the first day of budget hearings, Carbajal asked Foley to submit a list of discrepancies and questions, which he promised would be answered Wednesday.
When Wednesday rolled around, Tom Alvarez, a county finance expert, gave a brief presentation, but few questions were answered. Later, when Foley asked that the county keep its word and answer the questions, the board remained silent and moved on.
And while it appeared the board had settled on the $8.4 million number for the purposes of the hearings, that number, and many other numbers seemed to get far fuzzier yesterday.
As the supervisors began to zone in on the $4.4 million number, County CEO Mike Brown said at that number, the county would actually be increasing the ADMHS budget by $8.2 million over last year.
Combined with the $6.9 million bailout the department received to make it to the end of the 2007-2008 fiscal year without cuts, Brown said this department alone consumed roughly $17 million of the county’s general fund in one year.
Brown called that, “A phenomenal number for a jurisdiction this size.”
While Firestone perked up when he heard these numbers, Second District Supervisor Janet Wolf expressed confusion.
“When we started this hearing I was talking about how pleased I was that we were all working from the same [$8.4 million] number,” she said. “Now the conversation has shifted. There’s just this dissonance. I don’t understand where we’re coming from.”
The actual number the supervisors allotted to the adult mental health budget was just over $5 million, but Brown said $800,000 of that would have to be placed into an existing account of $3.3 million to cover “true-ups” with the state. The “true-ups” are the result of incorrect billing on behalf of the county.
Despite the process, Foley said things could be a lot worse, and if nothing else, the public will be spurred to keep a closer eye on the budget process.
“People are going to pay attention and the needs of the mentally ill are going to be met,” he said.
According to Brown, the $4.4 million that will be used for programs will be distributed by the department once it uses an “evidence” based approach to determine where the money would be best used.
The board was also able to save a number of other programs from the chopping block yesterday.
One was the Adult Aging Network, a program within the Department of Social Services. On Wednesday, it appeared this program wouldn’t have the support needed to save it, but Carbajal discovered the Geriatric Program, which was funded to the tune of $121,000, could generate a 75 percent state match for $85,000, which could then be used for the Adult Aging Network.
District Attorney Christie Stanley managed to buy a couple of months for the DA’s truancy intervention program by convincing the board to provide $50,000 in bridge funding. Stanley said she hopes to get local school districts to support the program, which could ensure it receives full funding.
The entire budget is available at www.countyofsb.org.