The impact of the $400 million shortfall in the Board of Supervisors’ recommended budget compared to the $3.9 billion budget submitted by the Sheriff’s Department was outlined by Sheriff Alex Villanueva during his COVID-19 status update on Monday.

“We’re doing our best, we don’t really have any fat to trim, so what we’re doing is shifting around things that are things that the board wants, the community wants, the department wants because they’re productive,  good things, good use of our resources, however the board no longer wants to fund them,” said Villanueva. “So based on the Board’s actions, this is what we’re forced to do, is to withdraw them.”

Of the 191 currently unfunded Sheriff’s Department positions in patrol, 137 are being eliminated and reintegrated into patrol positions to create $22.8 million in savings, according to Villanueva.

Some of the programs among the cuts include the Youth Activities League, School Resource Deputies, the Vital Intervention & Directional Alternatives (VIDA) program, nuisance abatement, the Community Relations Team and Search and Rescue Coordinator, among others, according to Villanueva.

Villanueva also announced that the number of academy classes would shrink from 12 to eight to create an additional $21.9 million in savings.

The decrease is less significant than the Board of Supervisors’ request to reduce to four classes.

At present, the Sheriff’s Department has 712 vacancies at sworn rank of deputy, sergeant lieutenant. Reducing the number of academy classes to four would have meant shrinking the number of sworn personnel by an average 160 deputies per year, according to Villanueva.

“These are not negotiable positions, these are the line jobs in the department, these are the deputies working patrol, the deputies working in custody, the detectives out there in the field doing investigations,” Villanueva said. “These are not positions we can just wish away because they are inconvenient, we have to staff them, these have a direct impact on public safety.”

Further savings were created through the closure of the Altadena and Marina del Rey Patrol Stations as well as the elimination of the Parks Bureau and the Community Partnership Bureau (COPS), which provided service specifically to unincorporated county areas.

Now these county parks and unincorporated areas fall under the protection of the nearest Sheriff’s station, according to Villanueva.

These cuts cumulatively saved approximately $74.6 million in the department’s budget.

Finally, other departments have taken financial cuts but do not face outright elimination, these include the Special Victims Bureau ($23.5M), OSS (Gang Investigation Bureau) ($38.8M), Fraud & Cyber Bureau ($13.4M) and Major Crimes ($22.1M).

“In previous administrations when there was a deficit of any kind, the service and supply funds, the extra money that’s allotted to do all those things that’s not paying salary, was used to cover that deficit,” Villanueva said. “For the first time in the history of the county government, the board of supervisors decided not to allow me to be able to use that to cover the deficit.”

The Board of Supervisors previously froze $143 million in service and supply funds, as Villanueva referenced, and has since released $83 million of the funds to the department.

While Villanueva acknowledged that budget estimates across the county will change because of lack of revenue from sources such as sales tax, he has called for more financial transparency across the county’s various departments with the public.

“The public needs to be able to see every single county department, what they’re proposing, what the budget will fund in each department, so they make a decision for themselves about what the priorities of the county are, and more specifically, how the board of supervisors is representing their priorities when it comes to public safety,” he said.

Los Angeles County officials previously released an estimate that the coronavirus pandemic would create a $2 billion loss in tax revenue, $1 billion by the end of the fiscal year in June and another $1 billion in 2020-2021.

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