Budget workshops in Santa Barbara County are underway, the last step before the county releases a recommended budget in May and begins budget hearings in June. Workshops kicked off on April 12 with public safety department heads each making cases for their financial needs to the Board of Supervisors, a conversation that largely centered on the need for data and technology improvements.
County Public Defender Tracy Macuga spoke first, emphasizing how outdated information technology infrastructure, support, and processes are hindering her department and the county from achieving a fair criminal justice system.
“Here in our county, we are a data desert on this issue,” Macuga said. “Community activists and public defenders know that individuals in North County face harsher sentences and longer terms of probation than similarly situated South County residents. That suggests we have a problem.”
Macuga asked for $382,200 in expansion requests to allow the Public Defender’s Office to bridge some of those gaps. Fifth District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino voiced support for stronger data collection within the county’s public safety departments.
“I’m looking at this budget as the time to get right with technology and data, and that is going to feed us the proper information that we need to make the tough decisions going forward,” he said.
District Attorney Joyce Dudley also emphasized IT inefficiencies and barriers within her department. She said she anticipates that upcoming large-scale cases—such as Operation Matador, the 2016 sting operation on gangs in Santa Maria, and People v. Pierre Haobsh, a triple homicide murder case—will only further strain her department’s resources. Dudley’s expansion requests amounted to a little more than $1 million total, and included money to hire data discovery clerks, a data analyst, and to upgrade the digital storage system.
The Sheriff’s Office, which has an operating budget of more than $176 million, requested $1.7 million in additional ongoing funds, and $480,000 in additional one-time funds. Like the public defender and district attorney’s offices, much of the Sheriff’s Office’s challenges are rooted in data and technology needs, Sheriff Bill Brown said. The opening of the Northern Jail Branch, which Brown said may not happen until late summer or early fall, is also straining the department.
Brown hopes to establish a Data Unit within the Sheriff’s Office to enhance data-driven decision-making. The department’s expansion requests include money for a data center future replacement fund, hiring a data analyst, cannabis compliance team expansion, and body-worn cameras.
Chief Deputy Sheriff Craig Bonner called body-worn cameras, or BWCs, “an incredibly important tool that will greatly assist in the provision of effective and transparent policing services within our communities.”
“Researchers that have studied agencies such as the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and others have found evidence indicating that the mandated use of BWCs can potentially lower the number of use of force incidents and the number of complaints against deputies, and it also increases efficiency within downstream criminal justice processes,” Bonner said.
However, he continued, the maintenance costs of the devices has stopped his department from implementing them in the past. Bonner said the Sheriff’s Office is prepared to designate $130,000 of its current funding to cover the upfront cost of purchasing 135 BWCs, but it requests another $313,000 of ongoing funding to maintain them.
Some community members and racial justice organizations took the workshop as an opportunity to call for a decrease in the Sheriff Department’s budget, pointing to findings from a 2020 operational and performance review study on the Sheriff’s Office. The county contracted with KPMG to conduct the study on all its departments.
Laurence Severance, a member of the CLUE Santa Barbara Criminal Justice Workgroup, pointed to increases in the Sheriff’s budget over the last few years during public comment.
“The KPMG study found that our Sheriff’s Department spent more than $26.7 million and had 165 full-time equivalents more than comparable counties,” Severance said. “So it seems that, over time, our Sheriff’s budget has growth disproportionate to what most counties have that are comparable.”
Similarly, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Santa Barbara wrote in an April 11 Instagram post that it demands the Board of Supervisors to cut the Sheriff’s budget by $26.7 million.
“Currently, the SB Sheriff’s budget is far greater than any other comparable county in California,” the organization wrote. “Cutting $26.7 million would put SB County on par with the funding that sheriff departments in comparable counties receive.”
