Supervisor Paul Biane
Point of View
Supervisor Paul Biane
Posted: 01/28/2010 05:56:51 PM PST
Imagine this – you run a nonprofit business that helps a lot of people. Each year, your budget shrinks, but demand for your services increases, forcing you to dip into your bank account to keep things running.
Meanwhile, your personal expenses steadily increase, yet you still have to run the nonprofit to continue providing people with services they need.
California’s most populous counties – including the County of San Bernardino – find themselves in a similar situation with the numerous state and federal social service programs counties are required to administer.
Since 2004, the state’s largest counties have seen their financial support for state and federal programs such as Child Welfare, Medi-Cal, In Home Supportive Services and others increase about 14 percent. At the same time, state and federal funding for the programs has dipped or flattened in spite of rising demand.
And this lopsided funding situation shows no signs of abating.
According to a study released Tuesday by the Urban Counties Caucus, which represents the state’s 12 most populous counties, the financial contribution from counties for state and federal social service programs is increasing about 5.7 percent annually while state and federal support is growing at an anemic rate of about 2.8 percent.
This ongoing funding pattern cannot continue without seriously jeopardizing needed services and the fiscal wellbeing of the state’s largest counties, which are already struggling to compensate for sharp declines in property and sales tax revenues as well as state takeaways of local funds.
In response to the weakening economy, my colleagues and I on the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors took steps to prioritize funding and imposed cost-saving measures to deal with declining revenues. Last year, with the aid of salary concessions made by county employees, the Board was able to mitigate a $61million budget hole.
At the same time, San Bernardino County continued providing the same level of county services such as law enforcement, fire protection, public records retention, solid waste disposal and more.
Counties want to be good partners with the state and federal governments in administering critical social service programs to those in need, but we cannot continue subsidizing them without putting our budgets and our own vital local services in peril.
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And if I could get the money back from Burum on the colonies deal I would. Really, if Bill and I could just take that all back with a do-over, we would. Sincerely, and I do mean sincerely, Paul.
P.S., don’t pay any attention to the papers on that little flight with me and Deveraux. That was nothing, really. I promise to pay that all back. Honestly.
SB-90 established a payback channel for “state mandated programs”. We should defund programs the state mandates, but does not pay for, citing that they (the state) is not following the law (SB-90). Of course, before doing so you’ll want to notify The Comission on State Mandates. This will save the county quite a bit.
Eliminate the car allowance currently enjoyed by many county employees, including The Board. I know certain elected officials are “on duty” 24/7, but that doesn’t mean the tax-payers should have to pay for them to have a car.
Find a way to cut the pay of school administrators.
Close non-essential county offices every other friday.
We should have implemented furloughs this fiscal year, so that we could have had a savings to cushoin the blow next fiscal year. But we didn’t, in the name of “maintaining levels of service”. Let’s learn from this mistake. Don’t lay people off, which increases the unemployment rate and makes the economy worse, do furloughs instead.