On September 4, the County’s Budget and Finance team emailed residents under the heading “Let’s Talk Budget. Orange You Ready?” It opened a public comment period on the 2026 Strategic Financial Plan. “We Want to Hear From You,” it said, in large friendly type.
I took the invitation seriously. I looked at the County’s 2026-2027 adopted budget. But I could not make sense of it. The document is plenty long, at 672 pages. But it is woefully vague.
Consider OC Animal Care. It is a $31,353,988 operation with 143 budgeted positions. It runs a shelter, a veterinary operation, a field and patrol service, and a licensing operation, and it serves 14 contract cities plus the unincorporated county. Its complete published financial disclosure (one page of the budget’s Appendix) has just five numbers for revenue and five for spending. And in each case, two of the five numbers are catch-all other or miscellaneous categories.
On the spending side: Salaries & Benefits, $18,613,834. Services & Supplies, $11,651,841. Other Charges, $962,519. Equipment, $20,000. Other Financing Uses, $105,794. That’s all.
I cannot tell you what OC Animal Care spends on overtime. How many of those 143 positions are permanent and how many are temporary help. How much of that $11.7 million goes to outside contractors, or to whom. What portion of the cost goes to field services. I cannot tell you how much the shelter charges in adoption fees and how much in licensing fees.
A single $11.7 million line can lump together a $100,000 vehicle, a ten-cent pencil, or a consulting contract to a former employee.
County administration might say this level of detail would be burdensome to produce. But the County’s own documents say otherwise. Turn to the back of the budget’s Volume II. Pages A279 through A296 are titled “Description of Major Objects by Classification” and “Description of Revenue Sources by Classification.” Across eighteen pages the County defines more than 300 account codes it uses in its own ledger: 172 for expenditures and 142 for revenue. Among them:
0101 Regular Salaries
0102 Extra Help
0103 Overtime
1900 Professional and Specialized Services
2700 Transportation and Travel — Meetings/Conferences
6410 Animal Licenses
7450 Humane Services
7530 Adoption Fees
The distinctions a citizen would want are defined in the budget book. But the budget itself ignores these categories.
OC Animal Care’s budget page makes a promise: “Detailed budget by expense category and by activity is presented for agency OC Animal Care in the Appendix on page A35.” But page A35 contains no activity at all.
That same sentence, with names swapped, appears more than a hundred times in the budget and that promise is usually left hanging.
Across all of OC Community Resources — $900 million — the budget publishes sixty-five expense lines, an average of $13.8 million behind each number. The Orange County Housing Authority’s $352 million has just five. Its Services and Supplies line was budgeted at $23.5 million last year and spent $6.7 million (page A165); this year it is budgeted at $21.3 million again. The budget prints these figures with no explanation. OC residents are left in the dark.
Countywide, $10.6 billion is published across 583 expense lines. That is $18.1 million behind the average number.
Other counties do better. Take animal shelters: Sacramento County’s Animal Care Services is smaller than ours — about $22.5 million against our $31.4 million. Look at pages F6-F17 of its budget, split into four programs. Administration, Community Outreach, Dispatch and Field Services, and Shelter Services are each with its own appropriations, revenue, net cost, and staffing. A Sacramento resident can compare the cost of the shelter facility to field services. An OC resident cannot.
Tuolumne County, population 55,000, publishes every department at the individual account level — salaries, overtime, office expense, professional services, utilities. A county of 55,000 residents itemizes its animal shelter; a county of 3.1 million does not.
These counties operate under the same California County Budget Act and the same State Controller accounting manual as OC.
What about non-profit organizations? They must file a Form 990 — a fixed federal schedule of 24 expense lines. The form for Pasadena Humane, a local non-profit animal shelter smaller than OC Animal Care, breaks down revenue from the wellness clinic, license sales, adoption fees, and humane education. Their expenses give separate numbers for facility and equipment, veterinary and health, supplies, advertising and promotion, and insurance.
Orange County’s $31.4 million animal shelter doesn’t give us these details.
The county sets the bar low for itself. The County’s favorite answer is that it publishes what the law requires. That is true. But the law expressly permits a county to “add to the information required, or display it in more detail.” The law sets a floor. Sacramento, Tuolumne, and many other counties choose to inform their citizens. OC chooses not to. The law is the bare minimum, not an alibi.
I give the OC budget a C-minus; not as bad as an F but needs work. A lot of work.
If the legal minimum is going to be the County’s standard of service, residents are entitled to ask whether it should also be the County’s standard of compensation. The law requires that public employees be paid the minimum wage. It requires nothing beyond that. Orange County pays its budget managers a great deal more. They should not answer requests for information by pointing at the legal minimum.
Meaningful participation requires three changes:
- Publish each department’s budget against the object codes the County has already defined: regular salaries, overtime, extra help, professional services, travel, utilities, supplies.
- Extend the activity-level tables the budget now produces to all departments and make the cross-reference at the foot of each department page true.
- Publish a vendor payment file (payee, amount, department, purpose) as many cities and states already do and tie it to the budget line it draws on.
Until then, the Strategic Financial Plan comment period is an invitation to opine on a spending plan without being told what this year’s spending buys.
Citizens may wonder if the County is concealing a scandal in its budget pages. What we can say is that the county is not disclosing enough for anyone outside the building to know whether there is a scandal.
I am ready to talk budget. The budget isn’t.
Michael Mavrovouniotis retired from a research career in finance and academia.
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