Ahead of next month’s scheduled budget workshop and public hearing, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors Tuesday received the results of the Community Budget Priority survey and a summary of comments from community meetings held across all five districts.
“This is the second year of our new effort to really try and capture the sentiment of the community on those issues that are priorities that our residents would like to see funded in the budget,” County Executive Officer Jeff Van Wagenen said at the May 12 meeting.
The county received nearly 27,000 responses to this year’s survey in which respondents were asked about which county services were most important to them, which they felt should receive more funding and how they would distribute the budget across the county’s service categories.
To analyze the responses, the county again partnered with Mark C. Long, dean and professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. The full report can be found here.
According to the data, survey respondents said public works and community services were the most important, followed by public safety, health and human services.
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“Last year, public safety was the top priority,” Long said. “So it’s shifted to public works, followed by health and human services.”
Respondents also said the county should put more money into road maintenance, social assistance programs, affordable housing and medical care and health services and less money into rehabilitation and probation support, financial budgeting and auditing, disease detection and vaccination and law enforcement officers.
However, when it came time for the respondents to divide the budget among the county’s six service areas, the average respondent gave both health and hospital services and public safety roughly 23%, both public works and community services and human services roughly 18%, finance and government services roughly 10% and internal services roughly 9%.
“These surveys are useful information, but I wouldn’t necessarily take them as purely, exactly, what you want to do as the five supervisors,” Long said. “I think it’s contextual information.”
In addition to the online survey, the county also held five community workshops in which 158 people attended and 56 comments were submitted. The biggest priority area across all districts, according to the summary, was affordable housing closely followed by social assistance programs.
At the District 4 workshop, more than two dozen residents spoke, with most identifying affordable housing as their primary concern or saying it would address the root causes of their primary concern, The Indio Post reported.
Rounding out the top five priority categories were medical care and health services, mental/behavioral health services and road maintenance. Out of the 14 categories, fire and emergency services came in sixth and law enforcement officers came in eighth.
The recommended budget is expected to be posted on the county’s budget website for public review this month with public hearings set for June 8 and, if necessary, June 9. Adoption of the budget is slated for June 23.
Earlier this year, Van Wagenen told supervisors the county’s financial outlook was stable, but tightening as economic uncertainties remained.
Following Tuesday’s meeting, Van Wagenen said the county is expected to present a deficit budget to the board for the second year in a row.
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