Transparency and Accountability in the County Budget
Sacramento County Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan

The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors makes choices about its priorities and how it funds discretionary programs. This is the Board’s job, and one that I take seriously. However, it is necessary for the budget document to clearly show what spending is mandatory, and what spending is not. I have been fighting this battle for years now.

Thanks to the hard work of a citizen’s committee I established in April, we are finally moving in a direction that will bring greater transparency to the County’s spending choices. The Sacramento County general fund exceeds $2 Billion – the public deserves to know how that money is spent on meeting mandates and funding local discretionary priorities.

Every program Sacramento County provides is disclosed in the budget, and fits into one of the following categories: Mandate, Discretionary Law Enforcement, Safety Net, Quality of Life, General Government, and Prevention/Intervention programs.

I have a lot of questions about the spending that occurs in “mandated” programs. What is the mandate? What law makes the expenditure a mandate? Is there a level of service mandated? Do our expenditures exceed the minimum mandated amount? Unfortunately, most of this information is not readily available in the budget.

The lack of transparency was put into clear focus when I discovered that Sacramento County was providing non-emergency health care to people illegally residing in Sacramento County. This expenditure was completely discretionary, but it was not disclosed in the budget.

This means that, for years, the County was providing discretionary services to citizens of other countries at the expense of services to legal residents, but was not disclosing that fact to the Board of Supervisors or the public. I successfully fought to eliminate this expenditure.

With Sacramento County facing an unprecedented fiscal crisis, I formed a citizen’s ad hoc budget committee with representatives from chambers of commerce, law enforcement, city councils, and taxpayer groups. This committee rolled up their sleeves and went to work, immediately recognizing the need for additional transparency in the County budget.

After reviewing a significant amount of information, the committee devised a matrix that very clearly analyzes each program for mandatory and discretionary spending. This decision-making tool, when completed by County staff, will be a significant step towards breaking through this barrier to transparency.

This is not just about dealing with this year’s budget crisis. It is about providing future Board members with clear information about discretionary expenditures approved in the past. Discretionary programs should be evaluated every year, and the Board needs to consider whether these discretionary expenditures meet the needs of the citizens from one year to the next.

I appreciate the hard work of the budget committee. The all-volunteer group spent many hours on behalf of the citizens of Sacramento County to help me evaluate our present budget situation, come up with possible short-term solutions, and start the thought process for how to best govern the County going forward in a way that is transparent and provides for much greater accountability than has existed at the County level in decades.