Red fish, blue fish, green fish.
North County Jail, Main Jail, Santa Maria Jail.
SB 1022, AB 109, Prop. 47.
One fish, two fish, three fish.
Money, staffing, numbers.
All of this stuff is too much to wrap my little pea-sized birdbrain around, except for the fish. That I can get behind. For everything else, that tiny pea brain behind my beady eyes is spinning.
Let me be more specific: It all comes down to the Santa Barbara County 2015-2016 budget talks. Yup. They (the they nobody ever can define—you know: them, they, the man/woman) have already started that discussion, and county supervisors held preliminary hearings during the second week of April. I know you weren’t glued to your computer screen like I was, because, well, it’s kind of boring. I said it: boring.
But every now and then, those hearings get kind of heated, and then it’s time to get the bird feed out, and let me tell you, I went through a lot of bird food on April 6. It was like watching one of those movies where you know that the main character is heading down a hole he or she will continue digging. On April 6, the character with the shovel was Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown.
And he was admonished by all five supervisors during his presentation. There were last-minute changes made to the presentation, so the numbers given to supervisors on April 3 weren’t the same ones discussed during the hearing on April 6. Third District Supervisor Doreen Farr said she couldn’t get her head wrapped around the difference; the additional budget allocation requested for extra sheriff’s deputies by the Sheriff’s Office was off by more than $700,000 between the two days.
Then there are the staffing allocations for the future, when the North County Jail gets completed; the staffing needed to run the current jails—one in Santa Barbara and one in Santa Maria; and what’s going to happen to the Main Jail in Santa Barbara once the North County project is completed. And don’t forget the impact of Proposition 47, which has reduced the number of bookings and the number of incarcerated individuals in the county. But that number might not hold steady, because it’s too soon to tell, according to Sheriff Brown.
At one point, 1st District Supervisor Salud Carbajal told Brown: “It’s a little challenging sometimes … when the numbers are constantly changing.
“I can tell you for me this hearing is not going well,” he added.
To which Brown responded: “It’s almost impossible for us to try to give you an exact amount; there’s just too many variables.”
It didn’t seem like he, Brown, had a concrete idea of what exactly was going to happen in the future—or at least he didn’t present that singular vision to supervisors. Instead, he was wishy-washy about what would happen to the jails, staffing, etc., once the North County branch is built. There were so many numbers thrown around, I lost track.
But boy, I kept eating that bird food, because apparently I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t stay on top of things. Fourth District Supervisor Peter Adam said the presentation needed to be better.
“This is really hard for us to follow,” he said.
Both 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino and 2nd District Supervisor Janet Wolf—normally not an allied team, mind you—said they’d been in a meeting with Brown earlier discussing some staff issues, and he told them one thing then but presented a different story during the budget hearing.
“This ultimately comes down to trust, and we have to trust what you’re telling us, and I can’t go from one meeting and into the next meeting and have two different stories,” Lavagnino said.
He also said he’s prepared to put the North County Jail project on hold until the board got some “hard and fast numbers,” adding that if the county moved forward with the project expecting $17 million in operating costs per year, and once the jail is built that number increases to $25 million or more, the county’s screwed (he didn’t actually say “screwed,” but I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant).
“We’re done. We can’t recover from that,” he said.
Both Lavagnino and Adam said they didn’t really want to get a surprise presentation sometime down the road about a new grant being used to refurbish the Main Jail or something along those lines, because ultimately the whole decision on what to do with the jails was a policy decision that needed to be made by county supervisors.
The comments reminded me of a December hearing, when Brown told the board he was expecting the department to be $1.3 million short for the 2014-2015 fiscal year. That was only three months in.
I guess, what I’m trying to say is I totally get the supervisors’ frustration. Money isn’t made of magic, and futures are something you plan for. Maybe in June, for the real budget hearing, things will be different. I would recommend it, for the Sheriff’s sake, wouldn’t you?
The Canary likes things to be organized and well-thought out. Send comments and tips to [email protected].
