Funding Found for County Probation Camps

It was, as the saying goes, deja vu at the county Hall of Administration Thursday as the Board of Supervisors was given dire financial forecasts for the upcoming year, and then promptly dodged a more immediate problem by dipping into one-time revenues rather than cut services and employees.

The five-member board voted unanimously to use reserves and one-time revenue sources to patch a $49-million hole in this year’s budget, which arose when federal funding for juvenile probation camps fell through.

That money will keep the county’s vaunted program for thousands of juvenile offenders running through the fiscal year, which ends June 30.

But even as they voted to approve that stopgap measure, the supervisors were given a detailed report on exactly how bad next year’s financial problems will be. And immediately the the squabbling began about whether county officials are putting off serious fiscal problems until they become crises.

Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen told the supervisors that they face a projected $356.7-million deficit for the next fiscal year, but that such a budget gap could be offset by using one-time sources of revenue.

In the past, the supervisors have pledged not to use such sources because they are too shaky to rely on.

Board Chairman Zev Yaroslavsky warned that the county is again risking fiscal disaster by not moving immediately to cut that deficit.

“If we don’t do anything but pay lip service to the structural problems, then we are setting ourselves up for the kind of crisis we had in the summer of 1995,” said Yaroslavsky, a frequent critic of using one-time solutions to solve ongoing problems.

Because of that crisis, the supervisors resolved to begin their budget deliberations earlier, which means they have several months before they have to make tough decisions for next year.

Janssen acknowledged the reliance on potentially shaky revenue sources in the budget, which was drafted by his predecessor, Sally Reed, before she left to head the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

“We should . . . note that the county continues its significant reliance on essentially one-time funding sources for ongoing operations,” Janssen wrote in a Jan. 22 report. “The degree to which we are yet unable to support all ongoing operational costs with stable ongoing revenues underscores a significant continuing structural deficit in the county budget.”

In another development, Mark Finucane, the county’s director of health services, told the Board of Supervisors that the planned privatization of High Desert Hospital in Lancaster is on schedule.

Los Angeles County is negotiating with private companies to take over the 36-year-old facility as part of the Health Department’s effort to switch from primarily inpatient hospital care to less expensive outpatient care.

But because High Desert is situated in a relatively isolated portion of the county--and its patients are largely poor or uninsured--the county has had a tough time attracting private health-care providers to take over the hospital.

Jerry Harris, the hospital’s associate administrator, said Thursday that the hospital plans to report to the Department of Health Services by mid-April with a recommendation on whether to privatize the hospital or pursue other options.

“I’m pretty confident that we’ll be able to work out something one way or another to maintain services up here,” said Harris.

The Board of Supervisors plans to end the county’s $8.3-million annual funding to the hospital by June 30, the end of the current fiscal year.

Last year, the county invited 79 private companies to submit bids on the hospital and its operations but received only three bids.

Only one of those, a joint bid by the health care and consulting firm Altila (cq) and the RSP Corp., both of Las Vegas, met the Health Department’s standards, officials said.

Last year, Altila was chosen to run the hospital’s rehabilitation unit.

Harris said if negotiations with Altila fail, the hospital’s second option would be to enlist the aid of several private health providers to jointly operate with the county’s vital programs at the hospital.