Riverside County this week released its recommended budget ahead of Monday’s scheduled public hearing.
At that hearing, supervisors will hear from about a dozen county departments about their funding requests beyond the county’s recommendations for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts July 1 and runs through June 30, 2027.
The board will also hear from the public and potentially from different community groups also seeking financial support from the supervisors’ nearly $1.4 billion in discretionary funding.
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This year’s proposed budget, which can be found here on the county’s website, is a little more than $10.3 billion, a 3.4% increase from last year’s adopted budget. For the second year in a row, the county is proposing a deficit budget, meaning the county is expecting to spend more than what it brings in.
“The recommended budget includes an acceptable structural imbalance supported by reserves while simultaneously implementing operational controls intended to gradually reduce expenditures and align staffing levels with ongoing revenue over time,” County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen wrote in his annual budget letter. “These measures include a hard hiring freeze for general fund-supported departments, limited hiring controls for mission-critical employee classifications, and stricter scrutiny of ongoing spending commitments.”
In an interview with The Riverside Record, Van Wagenen said the county this year was operating with a soft hiring freeze, which provided additional flexibility to fill positions. However, next year’s proposed hiring freeze would be more restrictive.
“The idea this year is to take a more focused look at certain job classes in certain departments and set maximum fill rates there to try and minimize the impact on services,” he said. “The reality is any department that receives general fund support for staffing is something that we’re going to have to be taking a look at.”
Of that $10.3 billion, roughly $3.1 billion is slated to go to Riverside University Health System (RUHS) Health and Hospital Services, an increase of 12% from last year; $2.4 billion is slated to go toward Public Safety, an increase of 1.5% from last year; about $2 billion is set to go to Human Services, a decrease of about 0.8% from last year; $1.1 billion is set to go to Public Works and Community Services, a decrease of 5.6% from last year; about $953 million is slated to go to Internal Services, an increase of 9%; and about $744 million is set to go to Finance and Government Services, a 3.4% decrease from last year.
Prior to the release of the recommended budget, the supervisors received the results of the county’s community budget outreach, which included a budget survey and five in-person community workshops. The surveys found that public works and affordable housing were among county residents’ top concerns.
According to the budget document, the main goal of the survey and the workshops was to ensure that the recommended budget reflected the needs, priorities and values of the community.
“Budgets are expressions of priorities, responsibility and confidence in the future,” Van Wagenen wrote in his letter. “They reveal not only what an organization values, but whether it possesses the discipline to preserve those values during difficult times.”
Monday’s budget hearing is set to begin at 9:30 a.m. Following the public hearing, the county will make written revisions to the budget and the supervisors will approve the recommended budget as revised. This will either happen Monday at the end of the public hearing or on Tuesday following the regularly scheduled Riverside County Board of Supervisors meeting.
The supervisors are expected to adopt the budget at the regularly scheduled June 23 meeting.
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