Cuts mean residents to get less
During his presentation, Reniff showed a video including a chilling 911 call from what turned out to be a double homicide. In that video, a deputy warned that their already understaffed department was unable to respond quickly enough to many areas of the county, leaving residents essentially unprotected. Already, the sheriff is forced to put detective and gang officers on patrol duties to cover some shifts.
“Someone will come,” he said. “It’s just how long they will take.”
The new budget takes 16 positions away from the sheriff, including two school resource officers, four deputies slated to patrol the upper Ridge and a pair of deputies trained to handle mentally ill offenders. Reniff also warned that the county’s failure to fund its vehicle replacement fund this year will increase maintenance costs and further erode officer response time to 911 calls.
Speaking after Reniff were District Attorney Mike Ramsey, who stands to lose 13 positions, a Probation Department spokesman and California Department of Forestry Fire Chief Bill Sager.
By press time, only Reniff had completed his remarks, but the issue generating the most heat in this round of budget negotiations has been the cuts proposed in fire services. The county, which blames the state budget crisis for its own $10.2 million shortfall this year, is begrudgingly giving the CDF a $2.2 million increase, half of what CDF asked for, to cover an increase in overtime that the county considers a pay raise. CDF workers dispute that, claiming that their latest contract merely brings firefighter overtime wages into compliance with federal regulations.
Whichever it is, there are likely to be fewer firefighters in Butte County, at least one fire station will probably close, and residents of unincorporated areas may have to wait longer for fire and medical services after calling 911.
County residents with medical problems or mental-health issues will also face a bleak future for the next year or two, with huge cuts in the social-service sector being proposed. While those services eat up something like one-half the entire county budget, they are mostly state and federal mandates, some of which are funded and some not. There is actually more money for those programs coming in this year, but because the costs for providing them have surged, the county is being forced to eliminate 50 positions in that sector and transfer $1.2 million in realignment revenues from the Public Health Department to the Employment and Social Services Department, which oversees foster care, In-Home Supportive Services and public assistance.
The latest version of the soon-to-be-adopted county budget contains cuts in both services and personnel that administrators admit are painful. But what is perhaps most remarkable about the $318 million budget is the relatively small amount of controversy surrounding its passage. While there was no word by press time whether the Board of Supervisors has signed off on it yet, most indications showed that the new budget would pass without much difficulty.
What will be controversial are proposals to raise local sales taxes, which are already circulating in other cash-strapped counties and, as Sheriff Reniff noted, will almost have to be at least considered here. One D.A.'s Office employee, Helen Harberts, has already floated a .25-percent increase to keep the county’s treatment court programs alive.
Knowing ahead of time that this fiscal year would be a bad one, county administrators seem to have adopted a strategy that entails releasing a worst-case-scenario early on, then working behind the scenes with department heads to scale back on threatened cuts. The Sheriff’s Department, for instance, was originally faced with $2.5 million in cuts but managed to chip that back to $1.8 million, partly by threatening to let 240 inmates out of jail. The D.A. employed a similar tactic to save some positions in his own department, saying that the cuts the county originally proposed would force his office to stop prosecuting misdemeanors.
