The Orange County Board of Supervisors in June approved a $10.5 billion budget that is balanced, but remains precarious. The county warned that “budgetary pressures driven by ongoing state and federal policy changes, an unpredictable economic environment, limited revenue growth and rising costs of doing business persist.” Now news reports provide further insight into the county’s fiscal accounting — and it doesn’t inspire confidence.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Department has dramatically overspent its budget each year for the past three years. It overspent by $29 million last year alone. The department claims this is by design. If correct, that suggests a level of fiscal irresponsibility that’s unfathomable.
Per Voice of OC, a sheriff’s official argued that, “To start the year the CEO’s office underfunds our budget. This is a strategy they use to kind of keep pressure on certain departments to do what they can to keep costs in check.” A county spokesperson told the publication that this is done because the sheriff’s department relies so heavily on unpredictable sales-tax revenue.
Taxpayers are kept in the dark about public-spending
So taxpayers are kept in the dark about public-spending matters, as supervisors later approve the overspending without public discussion. It gets even more troubling. As a sheriff’s spokesman explained to the publication: “The reality is that even the documents they provide to the public are hundreds of pages and that is only a high-level pass. If they printed up the entire detail of the budget it’d be tens of thousands of pages, it’s a difficult thing to understand.”
In other words, the sheriff’s department believes members of the public are too dim to have access to budget documents that are rightly theirs to review — and county supervisors are OK with rubber-stamping these spending requests. Only Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento criticized this budgeting approach: “Given the economic realities we are facing as a county, it is critical that all departments, including the sheriff, function within their budgets.”
Indeed. If the county wants to handle those “budgetary pressures” — and operate within the spirit of the state’s open-records laws — it needs to reform the way it handles budgets.
