Budget Ad Hoc Molehill Gives Birth To Dead Mouse

There’s an old parable about a mountain being in labor “uttering immense groans and on earth there was very great expectation. But it gave birth to a mouse. This has been written for you who, though you threaten great things, accomplish nothing.”

We were reminded of that parable during the last Supervisors board meeting when, during “supervisors reports,” Board Chair John Haschak asked his colleague Supervisor Ted Williams about the status of the budget ad hoc committee on which Williams sits with fellow Supervisor Madeline Cline. In early 2025 the Williams/Cline budget ad hoc committee was formed for the “ad hoc” purpose of “working on the budget challenges and solutions with Public Safety and Strategic Hiring Process improvements for the most efficient outcomes.”

After giggling about the invocation of the phrase “most efficient outcomes” uttered by some of the least efficent government officials we know, we looked back to the Board’s September meeting when, in response to a routine question from Board Chair John Haschak about the status of the budget ad hoc committee, Williams replied, “We haven’t got anywhere. We will have to make massive cuts and nobody will like them. We are like a deer in the headlights.”

Undaunted, Haschak then asked Williams and Cline to “bring back a proposal,” but, as usual, with no due date.

At their November 4 meeting, months after accepting the budget ad hoc assignment and two months after agreeing to “bring back a proposal,” Williams had a new excuse, explaining that there simply wasn’t enough information for his committee to make any recommendations.

Ms. Cline added that their ad hoc committee has been “working with the CEO budget team,” which has so far made no specific budget balancing recommendations either, public safety or otherwise.

Haschak then speculated that maybe they don’t need a budget ad hoc.

Ms. Cline mentioned the Board’s 6% across the board budget reductions imposed on all general fund departments and their random “attrition” policy (aka the “strategic hiring process”) that is supposed to limit rehires for general fund positions that randomly become vacant — a policy that at last count was running at less than 50% of the hoped for $6 million savings for this fiscal year.

But that hardly amounts to any kind of specific budget balancing recommendations or proposals from the ad hoc committee or the “budget team.”

Although the original intent of the ad hoc was to look at “public safety” which makes up the large majority of the general fund, Williams has never mentioned even meeting with any of the County’s public safety officials and managers to explore proposals or budget balancing ideas.

Williams added, “We are always waiting. We have no financial information to work with, nothing we can believe. We don’t know what’s going on so it’s hard to project. We still don’t get good reports. … We need new software.” This last was an apparent reference to the County’s costly yet unieldly “MUNIS” government financial software program that has never provided meaningful, up-to-date budget status reports, despite having been in place for at least ten years.

In addition, as noted by County Auditor-Controller/Treasurer Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison, the County’s understaffed general fund departments are having trouble feeding timely, accurate expense information into MUNIS, even though most of the budget “expenses” are salaries which should be straightforward and current — and therefore providing no excuse for not exploring budget cutting proposals.

Supervisor Bernie Norvell thought the Board should keep the useless ad hoc committee even if all it was doing was “working with the CEO’s office.”