News
County finances opaque and lax oversight of bond measures and sales taxes
Photo credit: Courtesy of the Civil Grand Jurors’ Association of California.
There is no evidence of impropriety, waste or financial cheating.
But a report from the current Sonoma County Grand Jury concluded that oversight is lax and no authority guarantees that special funding is being spent correctly.
Instead, the report concluded that although officials comply with transparency laws, documents released to the public are opaque and largely indecipherable to ordinary people.
It all started with a letter about supervising a local school bond.
As Rob Hunter, president of the 2023-2024 Sonoma County Grand Jury, described it, the body fell down the rabbit hole.
“In getting that information and learning what that actually meant, we had to look at a number of other documents and that’s what led to the broader topic of ‘hey, how much are we paying in taxes, starting specifically with schools and then more broadly in In general, how much do we pay in taxes and where does this money really go?”
Hunter said that in the county’s $2.5 billion, 438-page budget, it is not possible to calculate how much local money goes to a specific purpose.
“It’s impossible,” Hunter said.
“There is absolutely no way to take that budget and translate it into what we are actually spending on specific types of services,” Hunter elaborated.
He said multiple county agencies can contribute to an effort, but the total is not tracked.
“One of the biggest topics that people are interested in and concerned about is what we are doing about homelessness in this county. Which should or does lead to the natural question: how much are we spending? And the answer is: we don’t know. How there are a dozen different agencies that have some component of homeless services, none of which track their spending in a functional way,” Hunter explained.
Hunter said the grand jury was unable to say whether the proceeds from voter-approved taxes and special bonds meant those programs were actually being used as intended. He said that while the money approved by voters was for parks, libraries, mental health services and the like, it is unclear whether or not the county’s general fund appropriations were cut by a similar amount.
They’re not supposed to replace Sonoma County’s overall parks budget, but since we didn’t in any way account for how much money was being spent, there’s really no way to know. If we don’t say, ‘this is what baseline spending is today,’ when we add $32 million a year to spending on mental health and substance use disorder treatment, if we don’t know what the baseline is, how is that we know we’re spending an additional $32 million,” Hunter asked.
That, Hunter said, is even more true with oversight of sales tax and school bond measures.
He said the fine print in each of the body’s bylaws severely restricts its power.
“Most oversight agencies basically look at a financial report once or twice a year. So in terms of actual oversight engagement, that’s pretty much non-existent,” Hunter added.
The report also raises questions about the feasibility of future local sales tax increases.
Mainly making up for property tax revenue lost in Proposition 13, sales taxes continued to rise.
The fact is that the state caps sales tax at 10 and a quarter percent, a level that several local municipalities will exceed next year due to Measure H.
Increasing sales taxes beyond this level requires permission from the state legislature.
“As taxes increase at the county level, it reduces the capacity of municipalities, which actually rely on sales taxes for a significant portion of their local budgets. Every time the county increases the sales tax, the maximum limit for municipalities decreases,” Caçador said.
The grand jury report on taxes and spending is scheduled to be published online on Tuesday. The county board of supervisors has 90 days to review and respond to the report and findings.