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Date Posted / Updated: Home Press Release Index
RIVERSIDE COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT
Sheriff Stanley Sniff
Sheriff's Administration
PRESS RELEASE
Date/Time Written: January 25, 2010 Type of Incident: Sheriff Projects Balanced Budget Date/Time of Incident: Location(s) of Incident: Reporting Officer: Sergeant Dennis Gutierrez – Public Information Officer Details:
The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department announced today that they expect to end their FY 09/10 budget in the black.
The Department started the 09/10 fiscal year with a $22.3 million dollar structural deficit. Sheriff Stan Sniff’s management team erased that deficit with cost saving measures throughout its many divisions, through a hiring freeze, early retirements, leaving a number of promotional vacancies unfilled, all without layoffs, and winning one of the largest COPS federal stimulus grants in California.
Sheriff Stan Sniff said, “The Department is pleased and very proud that we are able to erase that deficit. I told the Board at that time that I thought that it was ‘do-able’. I’d like to thank our command team from top to bottom for their efforts, ideas, initiative, and very strict management oversight as we brought our budget into balance. Every one of the county’s various departments have been challenged, but we are a massive part of the county budget. We certainly have critical uniformed first responder needs and a critical safety mission throughout all our communities in dealing with crime and any unexpected crisis, but we have also viewed ourselves as part of the larger ‘county family’. We have been mindful of our fiscal responsibility to be as conservative as we possibly could to avoid harm to other county operations, without jeopardizing our public safety commitment.”
By agreement with the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, county incorporated-area service levels were slightly reduced from 1.2/1000 to 1.1/1000 but these still remain at very safe levels. Actual service levels were much lower in October 2007 when Sheriff Stan Sniff took office and Sheriff’s patrol stations and jails were running huge amounts of overtime, due to staffing vacancies, forcing patrol stations across Riverside County to work mandatory 12-hour shifts.
Sheriff Stan Sniff made the filling of funded vacancies a priority early on in his tenure to get real service levels back up, and to reduce the use of overtime needed to compensate for those levels. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was therefore well-poised in staffing levels when the County’s hiring freeze was imposed for cost savings last year.
The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department is the second largest Sheriff’s Department in California, with 4,500 in full time staff and over 1,500 volunteers. It is central to the criminal justice system in serving patrol needs, operating the jail system, protecting the courts, and overseeing coroner-public administrator duties across 7,300 sq miles and serving a population of 2.1 million.
In a letter to the Board of Supervisors this week, Sheriff Stan Sniff outlined that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department had projected erasure of the $22.3 million structural deficit, but warned that a critical incident disaster or unexpected emergency could adversely impact the Sheriff’s budget. That original deficit amounted to roughly a 10% cut on discretionary budgetary spending this budget year; as many other parts of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department budget are contractual without cost to County taxpayers.
However, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department’s now-balanced budget does not include any of the 142 new positions required for the 600-bed, $80 million expansion of the Larry Smith Correctional Facility (LSCF) ready to open this March.
In addition, any loss of Prop 172 funding would create a new deficit to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department’s budget. Both the Larry Smith Correctional Facility staffing and Prop 172 funding are expected to be discussed at the Board of Supervisor’s meeting tomorrow, January 26th, as part of the mid-year budget report.
In November 2009, Sheriff Stan Sniff had reported to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors that the Sheriff’s Department had reduced the $22.3 million dollar deficit down to a projected $2.7 million deficit. That projected deficit is now erased.
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