Riverside County Supervisors Consider 'Deeper Dives' into Budget Challenges

By PAUL J. YOUNG, City News Service:

RIVERSIDE, CA - The Board of supervisors this week directed the Executive Office to determine whether it might be advantageous to form standing committees to monitor Riverside County agencies' budgets to keep them operating in the black each fiscal year.

"The budget has been a problem every year that I've been on this board," said Supervisor Kevin Jeffries on Tuesday, who introduced the proposal but ultimately cast the sole dissenting vote against it after his colleagues declined to set a timetable for possible implementation.

"There needs to be more leadership and greater discipline," he said. "We have an obligation as board members to literally dive in and ask more questions."

The plan, as Jeffries originally envisioned it, would establish four committees convening at regular intervals throughout each fiscal year. At least two supervisors would sit on each committee, providing "oversight of cost savings proposals."

Supervisor Chuck Washington supported the idea, but Supervisors Marion Ashley, John Benoit and John Tavaglione expressed misgivings after Chief Executive Officer Jay Orr and County Counsel Greg Priamos noted that additional costs would be incurred because of the staff time involved and the fact that the state's public meeting law would require the meetings to be open and recorded.

"We might be creating a big bureaucracy within a bureaucracy," Ashley said. "This might bog us down a little bit."

Benoit said he agreed that "more and better and deeper dives are needed" to resolve the county's structural budget deficit, which has been an overhang for the last seven fiscal years, including this one. Public safety agencies, which consume two-thirds of the county's discretionary income, are largely to blame. But Benoit said that "permanent committees" may not be the answer, considering their costs and "overly burdensome" nature.

Tavaglione concurred, saying that he believed the Executive Office was in the best position to track budgetary issues.

"There's another way to do this without taking a bunch of staff time," he said.

Jeffries countered that any discussion about money and stretching staff resources didn't carry weight with him after the Board of Supervisors' decision on March 29 to authorize an $18.4 million contract with an overseas auditing firm to conduct a two-year study on how to make public safety departments run more efficiently.

"I find it absolutely amazing we'd hire an external firm to do our work for us," the supervisor said. "Year after year, like today's discussion, the theme is, 'let's keep it the way it's been.' I couldn't disagree more. This needs to be done in public. We need to have more dialogue. After three and a half years of sitting on this board, nobody's had an opinion about what we should do. We need to move forward."

As a compromise, Washington suggested forming an "ad hoc committee" that would not be subject to open meeting laws and would have more flexibility on when and where budget discussions occur.

"We have budget issues, some steep challenges and efficiency problems," Washington said. "We can't make decisions based on a two- or five- hour presentation before adopting a budget."

To keep the matter alive, the board, against Jeffries' wishes, ordered Executive Office staff to confer with auditors about viable options for tracking and correcting budget-related deficiencies.

"This can't be about creating a big bureaucratic animal that's going to bog things down," Ashley said. "We can bring this idea back for the next budgetary cycle."

No deadline was identified, but Ashley asked the Executive Office to return with recommendations in September.

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