The Orange County Sheriffs’ Department overran their budget by $77 million in the last three years combined – including a nearly $30 million overrun this past fiscal year.
Those cost overruns are the highest of any department in the county according to year-end budget reports, which show that the $17 million overage reported from the Social Services Agency in that same time frame came in second place for the last fiscal year.
But the sheriff’s department insists those aren’t overruns: their budget is built underfunded so officials have to request more money from the supervisors in an effort to keep costs down.
“To start the year the CEO’s office underfunds our budget,” said Brian Wayt, executive director of the sheriff’s administrative services command. “This is a strategy they use to kind of keep pressure on certain departments to do what they can to keep costs in check.”
But when asked what other departments face that pressure point, Wayt said he was only aware of the sheriff’s department facing that requirement, noting they’d always expected to run over their budget last year by $30 million and they had less overruns than anticipated.
“We didn’t overrun, we actually underran by a couple million but on paper it looks like we overran,” Wayt said. “It’s a strategy the CEO’s office has decided to take and the sheriff and I have worked pretty closely with Michelle and Frank in the past to go along with it.”
It’s a similar argument to what sheriff officials claimed last year when they overran their budget, which Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento highlighted at the time, saying the sheriffs didn’t do enough to inform supervisors about the overruns, a statement the sheriffs disputed at the time.
This year, Sarmiento also questioned the overruns from the sheriff’s department in a brief statement on Monday.
“Given the economic realities we are facing as a County, it is critical that all departments, including the Sheriff, function within their budgets,” Sarmiento wrote.
Supervisor Janet Nguyen declined to comment, and none of the other county supervisors replied to requests for comment.
County spokesperson Molly Nichelson said the shift is done because so much of the sheriff’s department funding comes from sales tax, meaning the CEO’s office has to monitor the budget throughout the year and supplement if the taxes fall short.
“Given the County’s budget has limited General Purpose Revenue to allocate for all County departments, CEO Budget’s strategy is to provide the amount of General Purpose Revenue needed either within the budget or when closing the fiscal year books,” Nichelson wrote.
OC Supervisors are slated to discuss a budget report detailing spending from the last fiscal year, which includes cost overruns, at their 9:30 a.m. meeting next Tuesday.
Over the past two years, county supervisors haven’t talked much about the sheriff’s overspending when their staff notified them about it, approving both year-end budget reports without any public discussion.
Wayt said the county does everything they can to make the budget transparent, but it’s difficult with how complex the over $10 billion county bureaucracy is.
“The reality is that even the documents they provide to the public are hundreds of pages and that is only a high level pass,” Wayt said. “If they printed up the entire detail of the budget it’d be tens of thousands of pages, it’s a difficult thing to understand.”
The OC Sheriff is one of the most expensive departments in the county to begin with, taking up over 20% of the county’s general fund with an over $1 billion annual budget to cover an elected sheriff and his over 3,900 other staff, including deputies and support personnel.
There have also been different reasons each year for why the department overshot the budget, according to county reports.
In the 2023-24 budget, the sheriff’s department noted they missed their budget targets by nearly $11 million because less money rolled in than expected from Prop 172, a statewide sales tax increase from the 90s that goes to support public safety.
The next year when they overshot their budget by over $37 million, officials again pinned the issue on lower tax revenue and “higher than budgeted overtime expenditures.”
This last year, the department overspent by nearly $29 million according to the finance department’s report, which noted the causes included “revenue shortfall due to lower than budgeted Realignment revenue and higher than budgeted expenditures for IT services, daily meals for inmate population, and uniforms and safety clothing for sworn personnel.”
Those overages come out of the county’s general fund to offset the spending, a fund that county staff have warned is growing increasingly structurally imbalanced.
Noah Biesiada is a Voice of OC reporter. Contact him at nbiesiada@voiceofoc.org.
