Lately, there has been a lot of digital ink spilled on the proposal to increase salaries for the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. As a recent participant in the county supervisor business, I think I should weigh in on the subject.

Much to the displeasure of my colleagues at the time, I voted against each attempt to raise our own pay. This was because, as I routinely pointed out, we had tremendous unfunded liability and deferred maintenance issues.

I told them repeatedly that if they were the Board of Directors of a very successful billion-dollar, publicly traded company, they would certainly deserve the raise. Maybe they’d be cheap at twice the price.

But as it was, with more than $2 billion of deferred maintenance and unfunded liability, they didn’t deserve ANY raise at all.

Then, when they went ahead despite my objections and approved the raise, they suggested that I not take it if I didn’t vote for it.

I declined to take them up on that offer on the theory that if they were going to take it and run the county into the ground, I sure as hell wasn’t going to take less than them for insisting they ran it better.

That was then and this is now. I can argue both sides of this issue.

First, despite what some gadflies say, done properly, being a supervisor is indeed a full-time job. In fact, many of my best ideas came in the middle of the night or in the shower, first thing in the morning.

This is not an assembly line job. Much of the job consists of thinking about how you view the workings of government and its employees, and how they should be interacting among themselves and with the public.

As a supervisor, you “work,” ie. think, involuntarily, most of your waking and some of your sleeping hours each day. Including holidays and weekends.

Just because there are no televised meetings on Tuesday doesn’t mean that scheming (in the least pejorative context possible) and planning has been stopped.

There are rare but very important events that we are required by convention, if not necessity, to attend to, such as mudslides, wildfires and failures of major roads during storms causing human suffering.

These, like babies, come on their own schedule and wait for no one. And it DOES NOT include campaigning for re-election. That is specifically prohibited on county property with public resources.

The fact is that it is a hard job that takes a lot of energy. We do want the people who serve to be of a high ethical and intellectual caliber.

I would think most of us would rather not have someone representing us for whom this would be the highest paying job they could ever expect to attain.

So on one hand, if not now, when? If the supervisors don’t give themselves a raise now, who will run for the office in the future? Only the independently wealthy?

It is indeed an act of service. If most people think that it should be on a volunteer basis, someone could put an initiative on the ballot and take away ALL of their salary.

Who will that attract? That would certainly change the landscape. Perhaps not in a good way.

The optics will always be horrible for supervisors to raise their own salaries. Yet, at the moment, that is what the system requires.

I am not necessarily defending the 48% increase. I have always objected to the methodology by which county human resources staff suggests such increases.

Supervisors do not make this stuff up themselves. The fact is, that system is a ratchet-like system in use for all classifications of county employees.

If county X and county Y, “comparable counties,” pay more for a particular position, then we are expected to increase, too. A government version of monkey see, monkey do.

And a convenient excuse for an ever-increasing spiral of employee pay. I considered it invalid when I was there and I still despise it.

I tell you what I would support. That is a less significant raise predicated on the following: that all of the supervisors who vote for the ordinance also agree to:

• Demand transparency from our Behavioral Wellness Department. Make them produce an anonymized report (at least) annually that discloses what the number of distinct individuals who interact with the department is, what level of care they are requiring, and how many of those people become self-sufficient and graduate from the system. In other words, how many people are we actually helping? I asked for this information for most of my eight years on the board and never received any good faith answer at all. This should be unacceptable for staff to stonewall the elected officials until they leave. The elected should be able to have access to legitimate information with which to analyze whether a(ny) county department is being successful.
• Commit to reducing the number of funded and filled positions. When I left the county, there were approximately 4,300 employees. Now there are 4,700. According to the assistant in my iPhone, Santa Barbara County’s population has DECREASED to 438,599 in 2024 from 448,229 in 2020. If that’s the case, we should be shedding employees rather than gathering them.

These are a couple of difficult things that the Board of Supervisors could propose to prove that they are the worthy, responsible stewards of a $1.6 billion company and should be worth a commensurate salary.

The fact is that the situation is different than when I was there. The budget has grown. Costs have risen. Right or wrong, county employees’ salaries have risen.

Maybe, in the interest of not having to double or triple the salary at some point in the future, we should allow supervisors to increase their salaries a reasonable amount, in exchange for a commitment to run the “company” properly, without throwing too many rocks at them?

Both paths into the future contain risk.