The Board of Supervisors heard budget reports from public safety departments Wednesday who asked the county to fund more staff positions.

Public safety-related departments include County Fire, Sheriff-Coroner’s Office, District Attorney, Public Defender, and Probation departments.

This group of departments receives 44% of the county’s general fund contribution, which is $162 million. They account for 31% of the County Budget’s operating expenditures and employ 36% of the county’s full-time employees with 1,660 full-time positions.

For the 2023-2024 fiscal year, the operating revenue for the Public Safety division is $417.2 million coming from a combination of state funding, taxes, general fund contribution and other revenues.

Public Defender Tracy M. Macuga said her department’s challenges include a lack of oversight and leadership, funding gaps and insufficient resources to cater to the complex needs of the clients within the county. The department needs more supervising attorneys, she said when asking the county to fund more positions.

“Funding gaps and workloads in public defense has reached a fever pitch nationally and in California,” Macuga said.

Macuga highlighted the Early Representation program which was recently grant-funded and will be piloted in the Northern Branch Jail.

“This is a collaborative front door global assessment strategy to safely reduce our jail population and to identify and connect individuals suffering from mental illness with services in partnership with Probation, (Behavioral Wellness) and the Sheriff, and warmly supported by our District Attorney,” Macuga said.

During the 2022-2023 fiscal year, the Public Defender’s office so far handled 12,445 new felonies, misdemeanors and juvenile matters and held 638 immigration consultations. 

The office has 105 full-time staff members and 18 independent contractors. 

“My leadership team represents the best of the best, but they are stretched too thin,” Macuga said.

“We have embraced the vision and promise of holistic defense and recognize that a criminal justice system needs a strong public defender to achieve our shared goals to make our community safer and to realize equal protection and due process under the law,” Macuga said.

All other county departments are struggling with high turnover and high vacancy rates — some reported more than 20% of positions are vacant — but Macuga’s department boasts a 1.9% vacancy rate, she said.

During his budget presentation, Sheriff Bill Brown asked the supervisors to fund several million dollars worth of new positions in the department.

“We have an ongoing staffing shortage in our patrol and our custody operations and this results in high overtime usage,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff Brown said. “And it’s been a chronic problem.”

The sheriff’s office employs 762 full-time staff members. The department had a 9% increase in their budget from the year prior, due to increased pay and benefits for employees as well as the opening of the Northern Branch Jail near Santa Maria.

The office has resumed inmate programming at jails which was halted during the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown said.

In the current fiscal year, 653 inmates participated in the sheriff’s treatment program—a rehabilitation program for drug and alcohol abuse, Brown said. He also said 287 inmates participated in Santa Barbara City College and Allan Hancock College classes and 54 inmates completed the Servsafe program—training to handle and serve food in kitchens and restaurants. 

Another large issue for the office is addressing the fentanyl crisis, Brown said. Fentanyl overdoses have more than tripled in Santa Barbara County in the past two years, and is now the No. 1 cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45, he said.

“I believe that more illicit drugs are being sold and used in our county now than at any other time in the 28 years that I have worked in this county as a police chief and as the sheriff,” Brown said.

In 2022, the department reported 168 deaths from overdose in the county.

The Sheriff’s Office requested $1.2 million for a five-person narcotics enforcement team focused on fentanyl, and another $3.7 million in ongoing funding for additional positions.

The County Executive Office presented next year’s budget as “status quo” with no major additions or cuts, but the Board of Supervisors will have the final say and adopt a budget in June.