The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office is getting a new payroll system! Hopefully one that will prevent the overtime cost overruns that have plagued the law enforcement agency for years.
How is it going to do that?
Umm, that part isn’t exactly clear.
“We’re still working on exactly how the system is going to be put together and the benefits of the system,” county Auditor-Controller Betsy Schaffer told supervisors in August. “We do hope that there is better reporting.”
Hopefully, whatever is happening to change whatever is currently happening will be more effective and not contribute to “multi-million-dollar budget deficits for the county”—something the grand jury pointed out about the sheriff’s “overtime excesses.”
Third District Supervisor Joan Hartmann was ready to be done with all of this.
“We talk about overtime it seems like almost every hearing,” she said.
Well, with arrests for timecard fraud mixed in with the audit of the Sheriff’s Office’s overtime use issues, the county Board of Supervisors has been talking about it since December!
Hartmann asked staff for some details on how Workday (the system the county would like to use) will improve payroll routines.
“Just a lot of different ways of inputting data into the system and better overall accessibility,” Schaffer said in response.
Ah! That’s crystal clear. Hope and accessibility ought to take care of things!
Nothing is really that straightforward with government, is it?
State Attorney General Rob Bonta can’t even get proper name spellings right in court documents. California is suing a Cuyama Valley landowner and his business partners for their part in starting an August 2023 fire that consumed more than 5,000 acres of land across 60 different properties.
“Fire investigators observed sycamore tree branches from trees located on defendants’ property overhanging, intruding into, and/or contacting the electrical conductors southwest and southeast of [the fire’s origin point],” Bonta explained. “Electric arcing due to electrical equipment failures on and around power lines and nearby vegetation is a known cause of fires.”
Oh, that sounds not good.
“When electric arcing occurs near a receptive fuel bed such as vegetation, it is foreseeable that the electrical discharge may eject sparks, molten metal, and/or hot material into the adjacent vegetation and cause a fire,” Bonta stated.
It does. That’s why PG&E has had so many issues with fire over the years and why it has paid out millions of dollars in settlements to wildfire victims. As an aside, the state was considering letting utilities off the hook for liability after their equipment sparks wildfires!
“[Wayne Goldwyn’s] failure to properly and safely maintain the property, electric lines and equipment, and vegetation caused or contributed to the Plaint Fire,” Bonta wrote in court documents. “That failure was a substantial factor in proximately causing Cal Fire’s damages.”
It’s actually the Plant Fire, something Bonta gets wrong 60 times in his 10-page complaint suing Goldwyn and “Does 1-50” for $3.3 million, which is how much it cost to put the fire out.
How much does it cost to correct a name in court documents?
The Canary is here to help. Send spelling errors to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in September 3 – September 10, 2026.
