The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office logged 298,740 hours of overtime in the 2024-25 fiscal year, bringing its total cost to $20.4 million. That’s an increase of 8%, or 23,000 hours, compared to the previous year.

The number was shared on Tuesday during a meeting of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, who heard Sheriff Bill Brown request — and, ultimately, receive — an additional $4.2 million to cover salary and overtime costs in last year’s budget.

Brown told the board the overtime was primarily caused by a lack of staffing, and most of the hours were used to staff the county’s jail system.

Out of the $4.2 million, $1.8 million was planned for salary increases and voluntary overtime incentives for the Deputy Sheriffs Association and $2.4 million for unfunded overtime costs.

The average cost per hour of overtime in the 2024-25 fiscal year was $68.32, according to the county.

Undersheriff Craig Bonner said another issue was custody deputies not filling out timecards correctly. He said the Sheriff’s Office plans to fix that issue and pay back the revenue to the county’s general fund.

Brown said his office missed the budget shortfall, which is why they returned to the Board of Supervisors now for additional funding.

“Unlike during the last few years, the majority of the costs for this operational overtime could not be mitigated by or hidden behind budgeted vacancies and … resulting salary changes,” Brown said.

Multimillion-dollar overtime costs are an ongoing issue for the Sheriff’s Office, which spent more than $11 million on overtime in 2024. A Grand Jury report on the county’s jail system found that low staffing was making the issue worse since custody deputies were forced to work longer hours.

The longer hours also made keeping employees and hiring new ones more difficult.

Brown noted that during the past 18 months, his office has hired 69 new custody deputies and 34 sheriff’s deputies. He said that as of last week, there were only two vacant positions for custody deputies, bringing his office’s vacancy rate down to 0.08%.

Despite the new hires, Brown said the deputies are still in training and require six to 12 months before they are ready.  

“Once these new personnel complete their initial training, the amount of backfill overtime is expected to decrease dramatically as we move into the second half of the fiscal year 25-26,” Brown told the board.

The sheriff said the new hires also will align the county with findings from a lawsuit that accused the county of violating the constitutional rights of people in custody because of poor conditions at the Main Jail in Santa Barbara.

During the board’s questions, Supervisor Steve Lavagnino expressed frustration that the shortfall was not caught before the board approved its $1.69 billion budget in June.

He asked why someone from the Sheriff’s Office did not communicate with the County Executive Office to alert it to the issue.

“You got to see it from our perspective. It’s either that you didn’t know, your team didn’t know, which is bad. Or you did know, and we didn’t know, which is even worse,” Lavagnino said.

He expressed his support for the new hires and said he was proud of the bonus that the county was offering to the Deputy Sheriffs Association. However, the Sheriff’s Office knew the training would take time and that overtime would be needed in the meantime, he said.

Lavagnino finished his comments later by saying that the Sheriff’s Office and the county need to be on the same team moving forward.

At the end of the discussion, the board approved the budget request in a 5-0 vote.