Bracing for federal cuts, Sonoma County adopts $2.9 billion budget
What it means for West County
The Sebastopol Times is busy working on an article on the budget passed by the city of Sebastopol this week. In the meantime, here’s a quick look at the recently passed Sonoma County budget by reporter Roger Coryell.
On June 12, Sonoma County supervisors adopted a $2.9 billion budget built around a single bet: that Washington is about to push the cost of the safety net onto the county and that the county had better get in front of it.
The spending plan for the fiscal year that starts July 1 runs 4.3% above this year’s. It trims the county workforce by the equivalent of 42 full-time jobs, to 4,457 — most of them time-limited positions allowed to expire rather than layoffs. And it pours more than $70 million over three years into bracing for the fallout from HR 1, the federal law rewriting who qualifies for Medi-Cal and CalFresh and shifting the administrative bill onto counties.
For readers in West County, the abstractions have addresses. The clinics that treat uninsured patients, the food-aid case workers, the youth crisis counselors in the high schools, the senior counseling programs run out of Guerneville — those are the line items, and residents of West County lean on most of them harder than the county at large.
The federal squeeze
Most of the budget’s defensive crouch traces to one law. HR 1 — the federal reconciliation package — is moving Medicaid and food-aid costs onto states and counties and adding work requirements that residents have to document or lose coverage.
The county’s answer is staffing. Of the $70 million-plus set aside, $33 million goes to hire additional eligibility workers, expand the employment and training services that help people meet the new federal work rules, and absorb the administrative costs the law dumps on the county. The logic, county officials have argued through the budget hearings, is that keeping someone enrolled in Medi-Cal is far cheaper than treating them later as an uninsured patient.
The other $38 million is parked in reserve — money the board is holding against future food insecurity and the cost of caring for residents who lose health coverage, to be spent once the state budget and the final shape of H.R. 1 come into focus. The state spending plan still isn’t finished, and rather than build around dollars Sacramento hasn’t approved, supervisors deferred some staffing and funding calls until later this year.
“This budget reflects our commitment to protecting essential services while preparing for significant financial challenges beyond our control,” said Supervisor Rebecca Hermosillo, the board chair. The county worked, she said, “to prioritize essential services, health care, food assistance, public safety, and infrastructure while being responsible with taxpayer dollars.”
The youth crisis teams come back
The clearest reversal in the adopted budget reaches into West County’s schools. The board restored two Crisis Assessment, Prevention and Education teams — CAPE — bringing the program back to a full complement of five, and paid for the rescue with Measure O, the county’s voter-approved mental-health sales tax. The teams provide behavioral health support to students on campus, and the recommended budget had proposed cutting them.
At the June 9 hearing, clinicians, parents and union members packed the chamber to argue against the cut. A West County father, Mark Lovato, told supervisors his son was 14 when he began to struggle, in years before CAPE existed, and went instead through the Sheriff’s Office and juvenile detention. “I lost my son to this terrible disease,” he said. The county’s health director, Nolan Sullivan, told the board flatly that “any reduction to CAPE most likely will correlate with an increase in… suicides,” in a county where the suicide rate — 14.3 per 100,000, by the county’s own count — already runs well above the statewide rate of 10.5 per 100,000,
All five CAPE teams survived to adoption — but on borrowed time. Measure O “is a short-term tax measure that’s going to expire in less than four years,” Vice-Chair Chris Coursey reminded the room as the board signed off. “We need to renew that.”
West County Community Services: a program cut, then spared
(Disclosure: The author is a former volunteer at West County Community Services homeless shelter.)
What the budget did to one Guerneville nonprofit shows how close to the line these programs run. West County Community Services has run the safety net west of Santa Rosa since 1978 — the Russian River Senior Center, the Guerneville homeless shelter, supportive housing at Mill Street and Fife Creek, and senior counseling that reaches Sebastopol residents in their homes. Its senior peer counseling program — volunteer seniors trained to counsel other isolated seniors — fell out of the recommended budget and was set to lapse June 30. Supervisors directed staff at the June 9 hearing to restore it, and the budget they adopted Friday made good on that promise, approving one-time funding for the senior peer counseling contracts. It is a one-year reprieve, not a permanent line: staff told the board they would “work with health in future years to look at how those are handled within the budget.”
“You cannot spend less and get as much as you get out of that program for the support of the community,” said Christy Davila, a licensed marriage and family therapist and WCCS’s executive director. The program, she said, hadn’t been targeted so much as overlooked — left off the list when the county rebid its behavioral health contracts under Proposition 1, the 2024 measure that replaced the Mental Health Services Act with the Behavioral Health Services Act and forced counties to put the money back out to bid.
That rebid is its own unresolved story: WCCS lost a separate behavioral health peer-training contract — recommended in May for a San Francisco-based nonprofit, the Felton Institute — and has contested how the “local preference” scoring was applied. Those contracts still require a separate board vote and aren’t part of the budget the supervisors adopted Friday.
For now, the senior counseling program runs on. “I love everybody that works with us and the services that we’re able to give to the community,” Davila said, “that wouldn’t be there if we weren’t here.”
Roads, reserves, and what’s deferred
Beyond the safety net, the budget puts $27 million into road repairs and pavement preservation — work the county is fronting while it waits on more than $30 million in federal and state disaster-recovery reimbursements that still haven’t arrived.
The deferrals are the tell. By holding $38 million in reserve and putting off staffing decisions until the state budget lands, supervisors built a plan designed to flex as the year’s bad news arrives in installments — which is how it has tended to come. Sullivan described a local nonprofit sector where outfits are “three months from making payroll.” “The wheels,” he told the board, “are coming off.”
For West County, the budget bought one more year. The senior counselors keep their money on one-time funding. The crisis teams keep all five, paid out of Measure O — the sales tax that runs out in under four years. What gets cut when those run dry is the budget supervisors haven’t written yet.
Budget reports and the full operating budget are at sonomacounty.gov; detailed line items at sonomacounty.budget.socrata.com.
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Good article. Thx