When the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office looks at a more restricted budget, the Santa Maria Police Department’s officers start making more trips down to Goleta.
Starting at midnight on July 16, that will be the new normal for the SMPD and other law enforcement officers serving North County, as that’s when Sheriff Bill Brown will be closing the Santa Maria branch jail on Foster Road due to budget constraints. During June’s budget hearings, Brown asked the county Board of Supervisors for a one-time allocation of $939,642 (in addition to the Sheriff’s Office’s $138-million operating budget) to keep the jail operating, but it wasn’t granted.
“We had gotten those one-time allocations for the past two fiscal years,” said Kelly Hoover, the Sheriff’s Office public information officer. “With the additional reduction of 10 custody deputy FTEs [full-time equivalent positions] and no increase in our overtime or extra-help budget, we simply do not have the resources to provide staff coverage to keep the [Santa Maria jail] open.”
The allocation would have paid for six FTEs at the Santa Maria jail, a facility that Hoover said should be staffed with 12 FTEs. The jail operated with eight FTEs for the past couple of years, with overtime and extra-help budget making up the remainder.
Sheriff Brown chose to close the jail for similar reasons—budget constraints—on June 27, 2011, according to the Sheriff’s Office’s 2015 response to a Santa Barbara County grand jury report. Hoover said the closure was part-time, meaning the jail didn’t operate 24/7 and was only open during the nightshift. The county was facing a $72 million deficit at the time. A Santa Maria City Council staff report from June 21, 2011, said closure of the Santa Maria branch jail was being discussed as a budget saving measure. The report stated that the California Highway Patrol and the Guadalupe and Santa Maria police departments book about 4,000 detainees into the North County jail annually.
“It is estimated that the North County jail closure will result in additional costs to the city; namely the cost to transport prisoners to the South Coast jail facility in Goleta,” the report stated.
That trip is about 140 miles round trip, according to Mark van de Kamp, the city of Santa Maria’s public information officer. He indicated that the city’s police officers made more than 1,100 trips to Goleta between June 2011 and December 2013, when the northern branch of the jail re-opened full time.
“That equated to 160,000 miles, or six times around the circumference of the Earth,” van de Kamp told the Sun. “Based on the increased number of arrests now compared to back then, the number of arrestees transported will also increase.”
According to crime statistics on the city’s website, Santa Maria police officers made 6,034 arrests in 2015 and 5,943 arrests in 2016. From January to March 2017, the police department had already logged 1,472 arrests.
But not all of those arrestees were booked into the county’s system through the Santa Maria branch jail. During public comment preceding budget hearings on June 14, Santa Maria’s acting police chief, Phil Hansen, asked the county Board of Supervisors to grant the sheriff’s one-time funding request, saying his officers made 700 trips to Goleta last year due to booking restrictions on Foster Road. Hansen told the Sun that the jail doesn’t accept females, combative arrestees, or detainees who have medical issues—and that trio makes up a “large percentage” of Santa Maria’s arrests.
“It’s not running at full capacity to begin with, and closing it down just exacerbates the problem,” he said. “It’s one of those things that seems to get sacrificed when there are budget issues.”
Hansen said the change will cost his department overtime, as well as cause officers to spend increased time behind the wheel on Highway 101—each trip takes between two to four hours—rather than in Santa Maria patrolling the streets.
“I kind of feel like we’re the ball in the football game that keeps getting tossed back and forth between the supervisors and the sheriff here,” Hansen said. “Their position is that they’ve given him enough money to do what he needs to do, and his position is that they didn’t.”
Sheriff Brown made his position clear to the Board of Supervisors during his June 12 presentation on the budget: “Our capacity in the Sheriff’s Office to absorb any more cuts is exhausted,” he said.
Assistant County Executive Officer Jeff Frapwell said that although the sheriff’s budget has increased by about $8 million year-over-year, rising salaries and increased pension contributions are putting pressure on budgets countywide and will continue to do so for at least the next four years. The Sheriff’s Office did receive $9.1 million one-time funding for the 2017-18 fiscal year to help fund staffing and training in anticipation of the 2019 opening of the North County Jail, now under construction.
On June 12, county supervisors recommended that the sheriff utilize some of that money for staffing the Santa Maria branch jail—saying that eventually those deputies could make the transition to the new jail. Brown said it simply wouldn’t work out timing-wise to hire and train new staff.
In the past, the board has granted the sheriff’s “one-time” allocation requests to keep the jail running. There was no money to give this time, 4th District Supervisor Peter Adam told the Sun. And things are only going to get harder, he said, adding that the sheriff gets to decide what to cut in tough times, because all the board can legally do is vote to give the department a budget—it doesn’t get to tell the sheriff, an elected official, how he can spend it.
“He puts us in charge of whether or not there’s a Santa Maria jail, but that’s not the way it works,” Adam said. “If he thought it was important—which I think it is, I agree it’s really important—but he’s just holding us up to give him $900,000, when he wants to fund other things.”
Executive Editor Camillia Lanham can be reached at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 6, 2017.