'State' of the county

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the nineties with your host, Rich McGlinchey. Hello again, everyone. Welcome to this edition of Sonoma County in the 90s on this particular program. Going to be talking to a friend of mine for about 22 years I think gentlemen, that's been with the county government for quite

a long time. Mike. Crystal is the assistant county administrative officer and we're going to be talking about the state of the county if you will. Hi Mike. Real pleasure to have you back a long time. Two or three years and you just went to a little

cardiac problem last year. Didn't you just a little glitch. I'm feeling fine now. You're looking great. Thank you Mike. Why don't you give us a little bit of your background briefly before we get into questions and answers about the county. Sure, I'd be glad to. I've

been in county government now for about 28 years. 10 of those years, I was the general services director for Sonoma County and the balance. I've worked in county administrator's offices in various capacities, both in marin and Sonoma counties. So you had about 28 years experience in

administration. Right. All of that was an administration, correct? Okay. Let's get down to the nitty gritty, let's talk about the fiscal year 95 96. The county budget, first of all. How large is it? And next, what in general does it provide for? Well, the the total

95-96 budget is on the order of $643 million 400 million is the county general fund, which finances most of the day to day operations of county government. And and that involves a whole wide array of services. Uh those that are probably the best known would include

uh criminal justice, uh the sheriff and detention facilities and the courts, district attorney, public defender. And we have all of the health and human services, social services, health services. We also have development services which would include uh building inspection and planning and parks, public works. Roads.

We county actually, I think they've, they've sort of condensed it down to about 30 departments. Now it used to be 40 or so, but it covers a wide spectrum of services to the county people. That's correct. I believe we had close to 40 departments at one

time and we're Down below 39. I think the number is 28 or 29. Okay. Because I know the permit center, I knew permit center over their houses two or three former two former department that I can think of the building inspection and planning and then some

people from various other departments that were responsible for permits, correct? Yeah, that's correct. And hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about that a little bit later today. Why Mike is Sonoma County so dependent on actions at the state level? Well, first of all, and many

people don't realize this. We are a subdivision of the state county government. A general law County, like Sonoma County is an arm of the state. That's, that's the primary reason. That's the whole thing in a nutshell, right there. Yeah. And, and, and we're under state law,

we're obligated to carry out what they call state mandated programs. The difficulty that we've had over the, over the last number of years is that the state doesn't always provide funding for mandated programs. So we're faced with having to carry out these programs and use local

funds which are very limited mike, is there a major difference in the manner in which the state and the county approach the budget process? I think there's one major difference. The state is able to deficit finance on a year to year basis. They're not obligated to

balance their budget. We, on the other hand, under state law are required to balance our budget every year. You know, this is really a little bit of a double standard aside from the fact that I know you're the Assistant Ceo and all that, this is really

ridiculous. The federal government can be trillions or billions or whatever it might be in debt. The state can do go for deficit financing and and the counties cannot. Well, actually, the wise part is the fact that counties cannot. It's just we could wish the state and

the federal government would borrow that page from our book and have to. Yeah, I think we feel that the people who make the rules that we have to abide by or to, you know, have to have to obey the same rules. You would think they would,

wouldn't you? You know, uh I don't know the states states has a deficit now too. I think several billion dollars. And of course the, what is the federal deficit? It's in the trillions and I don't even know how to calculate it that high. I'd rather not

talk about it. Why is the beginning balance now? You folks always talk about that? Why is that such a critical factor in the Sonoma County budget process? Well, first of all, beginning balances is the money that's left over at the end of one year. That can

be used in the next year. And traditionally we have managed to save each year something on the order of 3 to 5% of our general fund budget. That's a it's a sizable amount of money this year was 6 $16 million. So it's, it's critical Every year

that we save that amount of money because if we don't, we have to cut a proportionate amount of services which we don't want to do. And you said this year neighborhood of $16 million, correct. I mean, in essence, and you give everybody a dollar and hope

that they're only gonna spend 95 cents of it. And I think it speaks well for our department heads that they are able to carry out their operations and end up the year with a few dollars in the bank. Well, we do have good department. I've worked

with you and tender meetings with the department heads or idea until before I retired for 25 years almost. And uh, I was always impressed by the caliber of people we had in charge of the department and that proves what you're saying that they can operate and

save a little money out of that budget instead of, It seems like once again at the other levels, if it's in the budget team, we've got to use it before the year ends and it's, it's a real team effort and I think more so than what

I experienced 20 years or so when I came to work here. I think the group of department heads that we have right now, whether they're elected or appointed work with the board of supervisors in our office as a real team. And I think we've been able

to accomplish some things that are real positive. Yeah, I certainly wouldn't go along with that. Um, what is the concern about one time funds and the ability to finance baseline services? I've been reading and hearing about this baseline services, basically those services that we are providing

right now and we're always concerned about what is it going to cost next year or the year after to provide those services. Problem that we've got today is that we had $8 million of one time funds revenue that came into the county last year, but We

don't believe it's going to be available again next year. We use that $8 million $8 million dollar revenue gap next year. If that's true again, we're gonna have to look at reducing services and that's something that we're taking a good hard look at and we expect

to report to the board on that issue sometime after the first of the year. I haven't spent time with you over the years. And listen here, heard what you had to say. I know the answer to this, but I don't think the folks out there, why

is the property tax no longer such a significant factor in financing the county budget? Well, there are a couple of reasons over the past three years, the state has shifted about $31 million dollars of our property taxes elsewhere to schools and to pay for State operations.

That's a that's a significant amount of money. The other factor recently is if you look at the past 15 or 20 years, property assessments and property tax revenue has traditionally gone up something on the order of 5-10% a year. That's not happening right now. The property

taxes went up about 2% last year. And in many cases, property tax assessments are actually going down mike. Maybe it would be a good idea to digress a little bit here. How do we arrive at our budget each year? First of all starts with the department's

right to kind of give folks an idea of what happens to begin with the county. I mean department starts to figure out what it needs from this year as opposed to last year and then what had submitted to you. The process starts in january where we

send budget instructions out to the county departments, quite a bit of work and it takes them several months to prepare. In May april or May, the county administrator goes to the board of supervisors and gets policy direction from the board in terms of priorities and what

programs that we're going to attempt to fund and which ones we're not gonna be able to fund. Uh We then go through a process of meeting with the county department heads in april and may reviewing their budgets in the county administrator. Um Usually the first Tuesday

in june uh presents the proposed budget to the board, we schedule budget hearings in august, there's there's a great deal of public involvement and input at that point and the board adopts the budget in september. I mean essentially what you've got is almost a one year

cycle and as soon as we finish one budget, we're starting with the next one. Now when you say the proposed budget is approved in june that actually allows the departments to function uh in other words it's not a final budget granted but it allows because july

1st comes the physical start of the new fiscal year, it allows them to function for that month or so, even though their final budget hasn't been approved. That's correct. Under state law, the county can operate under the proposed budget even though it hasn't, it hasn't been

reviewed by the board of supervisors just been accepted and you can operate under that until the final budget is adopted and then reconcile the two at that point. Um I was gonna make another digression for a moment. I was trying to think of when you and

I know I started working in the county in 17, I think you were in the early 70s. Uh what was our budget back then days? Do you have any idea? I million or less, wasn't it? Yeah, your guess is as good as mine because I mean

it's it's just that everything that we have to do. And I say we've been part of the county for so many years have to do cost more money every year. We're being required to do more things by the state. So that budget is just just, Well,

there are a number of factors. I mean inflation up until a couple of years ago was was 5% a year. So you double your budget and whatever that is, you know, 20 years. Also, there's been a tendency on the part of both the federal government and

the state to transfer program responsibility and some funding to the county. So it's not apples and apples in terms of the budget that we had 20 years ago and today. Sure has it sure has changed mike. There's something that I've heard of and I don't, I

don't really know this about this either. What is proposition 1 72 and how does it or will it affect the county of Sonoma's budget? Proposition 1 72 was approved by the voters in 1993 and it assures a steady flow of sales tax dollars to pay for

public safety services. I mean, essentially the sheriff, the, the jail and district attorney. Uh, the good news is that's $20 million of, of dedicated revenue, but it can only be utilized for public safety. The bad news is we lost $31 million of our property taxes. So

what we've got is a deficit of 10 million, 10 or 11 million dollars. And, you know, as our financial situation titans, we've we've got to assure that that our money goes first into law enforcement and then public safety, whatever is left over goes to everybody else.

So we've got an awful lot of county departments competing for the leftovers, mike. Maybe you would take a moment to tell us. We, the state now takes, I think $31 million dollars of our property taxes as a result of actions they've taken the last few years.

I've read of it, but I'm not exactly. And I know we are an arm of the state government. I mean, we're part of it. So for the moment, I guess you'd say, but how can they do that? Well, as I indicated earlier, we're, we're a subdivision

of the state. So I would argue that they can do just about anything that they want to do. That's that's lawful. And, you know, one of the things that occurred as everybody is aware in 1978 with the adoption of Proposition 13, we lost half of our

property taxes at, at that point, you know, all local governments did. And the state stepped in and provided state funds to basically maintain all the services that we're providing at that time. And now the states run into some physical problems. And basically they've made the decision

to take the money back. And it's as simple as that. And we, uh, we have to give them that money every year, their right to legally to demand it from us. Right. We certainly put up a fight. But in essence it's it's like a, you know,

a subdivision of a large corporation fighting with their parent company. I mean ultimately they've got the law on their side and we tend to lose nine times out of 10. Then we can do about it. One of the things like one of the M. A. C.

Cuts and how do they affect the county budget? What we call the Mac Funds, which are federal funds that prior to 1995 the county was receiving to help local residents gain access to medical funding. The federal government retroactively decided that the counties are no longer eligible

for these funds. We've had to give back $9 million community-based operators have been providing to residents under this program for the last three or four years. What does that stand for? I think it's medical administration or something like that. And how much did we have to

give back $9 million? 31 million to the state. Nine million. 40 million, awful generous people are all of a sudden well mike, we have a whole lot more things I want to ask you, but I think this might be a good place to pause for a

public service announcement. Ladies and gentlemen Mike Crystal, the assistant county administrator for Sonoma County and I will come back. We'll talk a little bit more about the state of the county and all the things affecting it. First this important message. Northern Sonoma County is the perfect

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the sunscreen and enjoy. There's more than sun and sand their kids having fun in the outdoors. There's fishing in the Russian river and there's music in the park. Northern Sonoma County Come visit, you'll be glad you did. Welcome back to this edition of Sonoma County in

the nineties. We're talking about quote the state of the county and we're talking with assistant county administrator Mike Crystal, we've talked about the budget and some of the reasons why the state takes $31 million of our tax revenue and why the feds made us given nine

million back again. That's 40 million they picked our pockets for. I say that I'm not putting those words in Mike's mouth. Um, The county was recently informed of a similar, similar cut in federal, I think it was titled for funds. Now, what's that all about? What's

another situation where the federal government Several years ago approved some financing about $2 million Juvenile Hall. And the basically, the federal government notified us about a month ago that they made a mistake. They shouldn't have approve these funds. And it's not just for us, it's statewide

as many millions of dollars statewide and basically are cutting us off as of January one. And and we have no alternative but to reduce services accordingly. We are no in all honesty, the county government, the county entity itself is really at the mercy of the federal

and state government to this degree that, as you said earlier, that we're an arm of the state government for one thing. So we are under their direction. Ultimate direction then, of course, the federal government, as you said, they give us something and they tell us now

we shouldn't have. So we won't get it anymore or call $9 million 40 million that we want to get. The other 100 million. Yeah, I follow you. Um What is the policy now, presently of the board of supervisors regarding federal and state funding reductions. Well, I'm

sure that it sounds cold to most people, but given our fiscal situation locally, the board has no alternative. Their position is that if we lose federal funding, if there are reductions in federal, uh, programs, we're not going to supplement those programs with local funds. We just

reduced services. So we're gonna, okay. So that that barrel has been emptied and so to speak. And I think it's been in place for the past six or seven years. Is that right? Yeah. All right. Um, so far it seems all bad. Is there any good

news on the budget scene? You know, there's really a lot of good news and a lot of things that have happened in the last couple of years that will happen this year that, that we're very proud of them. And let me just sort of give you

a couple of examples. We continue to buy thousands of acres of open space that, you know, it's going to be preserved for future generations and we're very proud of that. And We, we've got the new permit center up and operating and talked a little bit about

that that later. Um, we, we survived the floods of 1995 and I think, you know, the citizens of the county got just excellent services from all of the public safety departments and all the county departments that were involved. I mean, I think everybody feels pretty good

about, you know, how we got through that, that whole process. And we've managed to provide about $2.5 million of one time funds for youth activities in the community just this last year. And that's just an example of a whole array of things that we continue to

do despite the budget problems. So there is some room for optimism here mike. I think we have to talk like you mentioned a moment ago. Well, I don't know if he said this in so many words, but recently the county reorganized and we went from maybe

40 some departments down to 28. Tell us a little bit about the county reorganization. Sure. This is an effort that got underway in 1993 and it's, it's fairly well complete now and it involved county departments and management and labor and and representation from the public and

the intent was to see if we couldn't reorganize county government to make it more efficient and more responsive to to the public and hopefully that's what we've accomplished. Again, some of the examples of the things that have been done, we've integrated all, all of our courts

and are moving towards consolidation. The, the new permit center again, which we'll talk about later and we've integrated and combined mental health and public health and all of our human services, the social services and such are all now combined and moving under one roof and and

there and we've done more than that. But those are the major examples. Well, first of all reducing the departments from 40 or more than 40-28 is a tremendous factor in reorganization, bringing things down, tightening them up, so to speak. Well, it's less people for the board

of supervisors and for our office to have to deal with. But I think more important than that is less places for the public to go to, to have to go to to get a problem taken care of and when they get bounced from place to place,

it really creates a negative image for county government. And our goal is to have them one time to one office and hopefully get taken care of. Well, I have heard mike several times, uh people talking about in the past, they had to go to the planning

department building inspection department, had to go to public health, they had to go to the water agency, public works department, these were all locations at a different spot and now those people go to one building basically and and get uh the permits or they provide whatever

information they must and get to permit that they formally had to get by going to five or six different people like that. Right. And I mean that's, that's the permit center which is more or less the flagship of our reorganization effort and basically what you have

in one building would be building inspection and planning and surveyor and environmental services where one county staffer would be responsible for intake of a project and would follow and monitor that project all the way through. And hopefully a member of the public would not have to

go out and deal with any other departments. And then the one that's, that's under the permit center roof permitting resource center set up on it. And now that is located in the form of what used to be the personnel and and superintendent of schools building we

used to call it correct and the building has been remodeled and it was open about a month ago. Yeah. And it's it's a beautiful center and really the fact that I know building inspection and planning are are entirely over there and then members of all these

other groups are there too. So it really is a ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't visited uh, just for for your own edification, you want to go see this center because it's marvelous and what they do really saves you and me a lot of time. Um,

how are you planning to deal with the public now that the county has been so extensively reorganized? Let me improve the way you deal with them. You think what, what we're attempting to do is get all of our employees or as many as possible trained in

in public. You know, dealing with clients and and dealing with the public and rather than reinvent the wheel and customer services training. What we're trying to do is is use approaches that have been found to be successful by private enterprise and adapt those approaches to county

government, customer service training is, is a big issue for us right now. So that's really, that's amazing because one of the complaints we've had over the years is that people would come up and they would, they would be hurt or, or feel that they didn't get

served quite properly or somebody was abrupt or somebody was too busy to wait on and these things, you actually are resolving all those things very nicely. I've been in the permit center and watched the operation and it seems to be going very smoothly. We think it

is, we have a long way to go. We've got a number of departments that have not yet been trained, but it's our intent to get around to all of them and really to sort of benefit from what's worked real well for private enterprise. Okay, now here's,

here's another hot issue. What's the status of the effort to find a partner for community hospital and why is the action necessary? The Board of Supervisors received two bids on September 26. The the board is going to hold public hearings on November three and November 17

copies of the bids, the responses to the request for proposal are available to the public in all public libraries throughout the county. Why is this taking place because the community hospitals lost five million or $10 million over the past five years. And because at least in,

in the opinion of the board of supervisors in the county administrator, uh community hospital is not gonna survive unless we can find somebody with the kind of resources that can bring paying customers to the hospital and can compete in the managed care environment and help us

maintain and enhance that facility to be competitive. Can you comment on the extraordinary homicide cases being tried in Stone County or that something moved? I think what, what, what, when these kind of cases are not these specific ones, but when these kind of cases happen, what's

the effect on the county budget? It's a, it's a real significant blow to the county budget. We have one case underway now and as you're aware, this case involves a change of venue, which is going to be very expensive. Two others that are in the offing,

we've budgeted this year $1.2 million there's some help from the state if on an individual case annually, we go over $1.7 million, but the 1st 1.7 is on us and that's coming out of money that would be available for other county programs. So it's, it's a

real blow. There was a real blow when this, when this happens, we're never quite ready or prepared for these cases such as the Davis case and these other cases that come up and he's suddenly were whacked with the idea of like spending $123 million for things.

We hadn't planned on that much. But you guys really in the hole doesn't well, it does and you can go along for three or four or five years and never have a case. And now all of a sudden we have two or three. I think we

would argue that this is something that the state, the state really ought to be paying for the courts 100% and covering these kind of costs. But uh as it is right now, it's our responsibility and we've got, we've got to find some way to cover it.

All right, mike. One final question. We got about a moment left. I know you were involved in the construction of the being adult detention facility. Has the jail situation calmed down now that that faculty is occupied? Yes and no. I think on the positive side we've

got a constitutional facility or several of them. I don't believe that we'd ever get ourselves in the situation that we did previously Having the federal court come in and run the place. But unfortunately, the inmate population is increasing at something like 10% a year. We're expecting

uh something on the order of 1000 inmates at the end of this fiscal year. The cost of operating those detention facilities is $30 million dollar this year. It's the single greatest expenditure we have in the county budget. So you know, there's good and bad news on

that front. It seems like a good and bad news. All the wrong. Thank you. Mike. My pleasure for coming in. Ladies and gentlemen, we're talking to Mike Crystal, the assistant county administrator for the County of Sonoma. We're talking about the state of the county. And I

hope that if you've been with us the program, you've learned some of the things about the budget. Some of the things about the permit center. Uh, now how the detention facility is seeming to work okay. We may still have problems. We never know. Ladies and gentlemen,

my name is Rich McClinton program. Sonoma County in the nineties. Back with you next week with another member of the county government, family or related agency. Until then. Good night, good luck and good health to each and every one of them.