Funding Found for Probation Camps

It was, as the saying goes, deja vu at the county Hall of Administration Thursday as the Board of Supervisors was given dire financial forecasts for the upcoming year, and then promptly dodged a more immediate problem by dipping into one-time revenues rather than cut services and employees.

The five-member board voted unanimously to use reserves and one-time revenue sources to patch a $49-million hole in this year’s budget, which arose when federal funding for juvenile probation camps fell through.

That money will keep the county’s vaunted program for thousands of juvenile offenders running through the fiscal year, which ends June 30.

But even as they voted to approve that stopgap measure, the supervisors were given a detailed report on exactly how bad next year’s financial problems are. And immediately, the squabbling began about whether county officials are putting off serious fiscal problems until they become crises.

Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen told the supervisors that they face a projected $356.7-million deficit for the next fiscal year, but that such a budget gap could be offset by using one-time sources of revenue.

In the past, the supervisors have pledged not to use such sources because they are too shaky to rely on.

Board Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky warned that the county is again risking fiscal disaster by not moving immediately to cut that deficit.

“If we don’t do anything but pay lip service to the structural problems, then we are setting ourselves up for the kind of crisis we had in the summer of 1995,” said Yaroslavsky, a frequent critic of using one-time solutions to solve ongoing problems.

Because of that crisis, the supervisors resolved to begin their budget deliberations earlier, which means they have several months before they have to make tough decisions for next year.

Janssen acknowledged the reliance on potentially shaky revenue sources in the budget, which was drafted by his predecessor, Sally Reed, before she left to head the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

“We should . . . note that the county continues its significant reliance on essentially one-time funding sources for ongoing operations,” Janssen wrote in a Jan. 22 report. “The degree to which we are yet unable to support all ongoing operational costs with stable ongoing revenues underscores a significant continuing structural deficit in the county budget.”