The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office is now spending more money on custody operations for the jails than it does on law enforcement services, officials revealed during the Board of Supervisors budget workshops Tuesday.
Public safety departments — the Sheriff’s Office, the Fire Department, the Probation Department, the District Attorney’s Office and the Public Defender’s Office — make up 30% of Santa Barbara County’s proposed $1.4 billion spending budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year, which starts July 1.
This week’s budget workshops provide an overview of the Board of Supervisors’ funding and policy decisions and serve as progress reports for each department.
Click here to read Santa Barbara County’s 2022-23 budget documents.
The Sheriff’s Office’s proposed 2022-23 budget includes $80.8 million for custody operations and $76.3 million for law enforcement. As an elected department head, Sheriff Bill Brown has different authority over his funding and policy decisions than other county leaders.
The Northern Branch Jail near Santa Maria started operating in January to reduce the in-custody population at the Main Jail, which had a large COVID-19 outbreak at the time.
On Monday, one day before Brown’s budget presentation, the facility started accepting inmate bookings. Before this week, the facility was holding people in custody that were transferred from the Main Jail, but North County law enforcement agencies could not directly book people into custody there.
The Northern Branch Jail accepted their first booking today. The facility has been housing inmates who transferred from the Main Jail since January. First through the intake doors was @SMPDHQ who saved several hours in drive time by booking their arrestee much closer to home. pic.twitter.com/2goKbrtnaj
— PIO Raquel Zick (@SBSOPIO) April 11, 2022
The facility was built near Santa Maria partly to cut down on transportation time for booking agencies and North County court appearances.
“We had the challenge of opening, finally, the Northern Branch Jail and now our challenge shifts to the Main Jail and the need to remodel and refurbish it and repurpose parts of it as we move forward,” Brown said Tuesday.
The Northern Branch Jail cost about $120 million to build and is estimated to cost about $20 million per year to operate, which is in addition to the operating costs of the larger Main Jail.
As of March 31, the Sheriff’s Office had 260 of the 376 Northern Branch Jail beds occupied and 543 people in custody at the Main Jail. The in-custody population has been increasing in recent months after historically low numbers during the pandemic.
Criminal justice system county departments have been collectively working on efforts to reduce the jail population, including diverting people to pre-trial supervision and treatment programs.
During the pandemic, there were multiple COVID-19 outbreaks in the jail that infected hundreds of people in custody.
The department had tens of thousands of hours of “lost time” because of employees contracting the virus, being in quarantine or other pandemic-related issues, Brown said Tuesday.
He said 338 employees have been infected, which is about 45% of the entire department. Infected employees likely caused at least one of the jail outbreaks, according to Undersheriff Sol Linver.
As of November, before the most recent outbreak, the Sheriff’s Office reported a 62.5% vaccination rate for its employees, which was lower than the countywide employee rate of 72% (which has since increased). About 245 sheriff’s employees are included in the Human Resources Department’s COVID-19 testing program for unvaccinated employees.
‘Significant Overtime’ Hours
In the current fiscal year, Brown said the Sheriff’s Office used significant amounts of overtime hours, as it has every year for at least the past decade.
County supervisors have consistently approved funding for unbudgeted overtime hours, and multiple grand jury reports have criticized the Sheriff’s Office for its mandatory overtime policies and recruitment issues. The department currently has 38 vacant positions, partly because of a surge in recent retirements, Brown said.
In 2018, then-Undersheriff Barney Melekian said the overtime costs had averaged $7.5 million during the past five years, which was about $4.7 million over budget each time.
A 2018 Santa Barbara County Grand Jury report on mandatory overtime in the department, which had been in effect for most of the previous 15 years, stated: “For over a decade, substantial overtime budgets and contingency overtime budget requests have been regularly approved by the Board of Supervisors, a budgetary trend that appears to provide few incentives to address this chronic problem.”
Performance Measures
One of the department’s performance goals was to have co-response teams respond to 50% of mental health crisis calls received and dispatched, and the department did 43% in the current year, Brown said. However, it was 72% during operating hours, and the co-response teams work for only 10 hours per day.
Santa Barbara County is funding three co-response teams, which pair up sheriff’s deputies with a behavioral wellness clinician to respond to mental health crisis-related emergency calls for service.
Chief Deputy Craig Bonner said the three teams are generally able to provide services from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week in the South County and four days a week in the North County, so they cannot respond to all mental health-related emergency calls.
If the county funded additional teams, it would expand the coverage, Bonner said.
The department also has a performance measure goal of responding to 90% of in-progress calls within eight minutes of dispatch, which it has not achieved in the past three years.
“This is due to the staffing deficit and geography of our areas of responsibility,” Brown told the Board of Supervisors.
Dispatch staff “exceeded” their performance measure for quickly answering 9-1-1 calls, he noted.
The next budget workshop is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Thursday.
The Board of Supervisors will give direction to budget staff, who will come back with a recommended budget in May. Supervisors will adopt a final 2022-23 budget in June.
Click here to read Santa Barbara County’s 2022-23 budget documents.
— Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.