Buellton, Solvang, Goleta, and Carpinteria oppose the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office proposal to increase its rates for continuing to provide contracted public safety services to the cities.
Although their stances align, each of the four contracted cities is required to draft their own individual complaints to the Sheriff’s Office. After voting unanimously, the Carpinteria City Council was the first of the four to authorize its city manager, Dave Durflinger, to sign and submit their notice of dispute on Jan. 24.
“Each city has an individual contract, so each city will be considering their own letter that must be issued separately. With that said, we’re working closely together,” Durflinger said during the Carpinteria City Council’s Jan. 24 meeting. “We’ve been meeting together as a group. … We are working together closely in coordinating a response.”
The Solvang City Council also unanimously voted to send a letter of dispute during its Jan. 24 meeting. The Buellton City Council followed suit at its Jan. 27 meeting, and the topic was agendized for the Goleta City Council’s first meeting in February.
The four cities jointly hired consultant Russ Branson to review the sheriff’s proposed cost sheet for 2022-23, in which he and staff from each city “found considerable cause for concern regarding the methodology used for developing the most recent rates,” according to Buellton’s staff report.
After hearing a presentation from Branson, Buellton Vice Mayor David King raised concerns about the city’s contract with the Sheriff’s Office that went beyond increased rates.
“The sheriff’s department is giving us a fixed cost of $331,000 regardless of whether they have anybody come up here and do any [narcotics] investigations or not … and that’s troubling to me,” King said during the Jan. 27 Buellton City Council meeting. “You know, I could buy a nice house in Bakersfield for that much money.”
King brought up the department’s fixed rates on narcotics investigations and other special services as an example, stating it wouldn’t be fair for Buellton to pay those rates if, throughout the year, it turns out “nobody does any narcotics investigations, maybe it’s just done by our patrol deputies.”
Buellton City Attorney Greg Murphy said that although those sections of the cost sheet are “consistent with the contract,” King’s points should be considered after “the dispute is finished, and we begin working on a new long-term contract.”
Before the Buellton City Council voted unanimously to submit its formal complaint to the Sheriff’s Office, City Manager Scott Wolfe requested the freedom to draft the letter “in a very broad fashion,” without addressing particular issues in the cost sheet.
“There are still things that we have questions about that have not yet been answered, and we would like to reserve the right to dispute those as well,” Wolfe said.
This article appears in Feb 3-10, 2022.