Last week, we told you about the proposed $949.5 million 2025-26 SLO County budget, which, despite the $78 million increase from last year’s budget, came out balanced. The “balanced” part of that statement meant that expenditures were matched to revenues.
This week, the Board hears a “request to receive and file the FY 2025-26 Supplemental Budget to the FY 2025-26 Recommended Budget, which publishes the FY 2025-26 Budget Hearing schedule and recommends adjustments to the FY 2025-26 Recommended Budget”. What that gobblygook statement translates to is an additional $1,308,746 of supplemental requests to add on top of last week’s balanced budget proposal.
This, along with Supervisor Gibson’s suggestion that county reserves be tapped to provide “gap funding” to several local service providers impacted by cuts in the proposed budget. Discussion about gap funding ranged from $1,000,000 to $2,500,000, with at least one mention of $7,000,000.
Simple math tells us that when the Board meets on June 3, they will need to figure out increases somewhere in the range of $2,308,000 to $3,808,700 in additional spending (and revenue) if they approve the supplemental budget requests and pursue the gap funding idea. Should they let the reserve funding just draw down the reserve balance, the revenue requirement will be less.
COLAB has been commending the Board and county staff for taking a new and much more accountable approach to budgeting. This new approach involves going through the budget of each department in search of obsolescence, duplications and inefficiencies.
However, we were frankly a bit surprised to see a nearly 9% increase, and we are concerned that after an extensive process, we hear about an extra $1.3 million that shows up after everything was supposed to have been carefully “rebalanced”.
Those advocating for fiscal responsibility are going to have questions including:
If $1.3 million extra shows up after just one week from the proposal, how much extra will be needed in the long run?
If we tap the reserves this year for a couple million, what happens next year?
We see the state is experiencing at least $12 billion in budget shortfalls (possibly two or three times that according to some sources) – what will that mean for funding that traditionally flows to counties?
If we see significant state cuts to SLO County, how will that impact funding to our local programs? Who will decide what gets cut and by how much?
If trimming is needed, proportional cuts obviously would put a much more difficult load on some categories than on others. The administration of any cuts could be more impactful than the original budget process.
Under the 2025-26 Budget Proposal, 38 cents out of your county tax dollar is dedicated to Health and Human Services, 27 cents to public protection, 9 cents to reserves & contingencies, 7 cents to land based support, 6 cents to financing, 5 cents to support county departments, 4 cents to fiscal and administrative costs, 3 cents to community services and 1 cent to capital projects and maintenance.
Stay tuned to see how the budget proposal is addressed in the June 3 Board meeting and especially what happens during the budget hearings June 9-11.
Aside from the budget, a couple additional items on the June 3 Board of Supervisors agenda are worth noting. |