As Orange County confronts a budget gap, the OC Board of Supervisors’ discretionary spending and staffing levels have “continued to grow without clear alignment to countywide and citywide priorities,” OC Grand Jury members question in a newly released investigation.
The report, released June 11, noted that supervisors approved a more than $600,000 increase last year in their departmental budgets to offset a 25% salary raise they gave themselves. (Two supervisors turned around and asked their raises be donated to charities.)
Each supervisor district is currently earmarked $2.5 million to support up to a dozen staff members and “a range of discretionary spending” in the respective districts.
“This administrative expansion has increased supervisors’ reliance on politically appointed staff for policy guidance and operational insight,” the grand jury argued, along with raising concerns about discretionary spending without clear policy objectives. “Without reform, administrative costs are likely to rise due to internal political considerations rather than operational necessity.”
The expansion in the board’s individual department budgets and political appointees “occurred during a period of significant countywide fiscal constraint,” the jurors added, including hiring freezes and legal settlements related to the 2024 Airport fire.
In prior periods of fiscal constraints, the grand jury noted, the board has reacted by reducing spending.
When the county declared bankruptcy in 1994, the board slashed appointed positions from eight to six in order to “prioritize limited resources,” the jurors said. The staff expansion under the current board “warrants renewed scrutiny,” they said, to determine whether it’s “aligned with the county’s operational priorities and fiscal realities.”
The county’s spending has been outpacing its revenue growth, and officials have had to draw $75 million from one-time reserves to balance the general fund, CEO Michelle Aguirre said at the budget hearing Tuesday.
“Simply put, we’ve exhausted all resources available to us, but we are resilient,” Aguirre said. “You will see that we have no general fund requests for additional resources because there are none to be given.”
The county’s $10.5 billion budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which the board tentatively approved this week, is nearly $300 million less than the current budget. The spending plan also includes a 5% reduction in the county’s general-funded departments — roughly $32 million.
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The jurors recommended that supervisors “limit discretionary grants to county-related purposes within its direct service and governance responsibilities” as well as “adopt uniform eligibility and reporting standards to ensure transparency and eliminate the appearance of political favoritism.”
Discretionary grants have often gone to organizations or purposes that “reside in incorporated cities and are already served by their own city councils. While many of these grants support worthwhile programs, the practice effectively allows supervisors to allocate public funds to groups and constituencies outside the county’s direct governance responsibilities,” the grand jury report argued.
Staffing levels within board offices should also be reviewed for “redundancy relative to the county executive office and department-level subject-matter expertise,” the jurors recommended.
The report found that the board’s reliance on appointed staff “undermines the value” of the county executive team and department leads in a way that “complicates coordination, slows policy implementation, and contributes to fragmented decision-making.”
Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento said in a Friday statement that while he welcomes conversations about “government efficiency and accountability,” he found the grand jury’s findings to be lacking.
“I believe this report reflects a limited understanding of both the scope of a county supervisor’s responsibilities and the regional nature of serving the third-largest county in California, with more than 3 million residents,” he said.
“I believe the grand jury’s time would be better spent examining some of the more serious challenges facing our county, including campaign finance reform (more than $16 million spent by corporate interests seeking to influence two Orange County assembly races), environmental justice concerns (including the recent chemical leak incident in Garden Grove), threats to healthcare access, unconstitutional immigration enforcement, and the rising cost of living, all of which have been exacerbated by state and federal funding reductions,” he said. “These are issues that directly impact working families’ quality of life and deserve substantial public attention.”
Supervisor Don Wagner said the $600,000 budget increase reflects a combination of buckets of money, including discretionary funds and the budgets for events and services. He said discretionary funds, specifically, make up a “mere drop in the bucket” in the county’s $10.5 billion budget.
“That kind of inflates the numbers and in separate categories,” he said. “It takes a little bit of wind out of the criticisms of the grand jurors.”
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