Santa Barbara Sheriff overtime will nearly double its $10M budget

Santa Barbara County's 2025-2026 Civil Grand Jury⧉ -- a citizen panel empaneled annually under California law to investigate local government operations, with a statutory right under Penal Code Sec. 933 to a formal agency response -- found the Sheriff's Office is on track to nearly double its $10 million overtime budget for fiscal year 2025-26, landing at a projected $19 million.▸ Deputies had already burned through 99% of the full-year budget by December 31, 2025, six months in. The mechanism the grand jury blames most: a labor-contract provision that lets deputies count accrued leave as "time worked," letting them draw overtime pay for hours they never worked while simultaneously banking more leave than they used -- a loophole the county's own Auditor-Controller found on 35.7% of the timecards it examined.

The grand jury's report⧉ tracked overtime hours coded across the Sheriff's Office back to fiscal year 2019: 180,487 hours that year, climbing to 298,740 in FY25 -- a 66% increase.▸ The number of employees logging any overtime grew more slowly, from 609 to 667, meaning the load concentrated: average overtime per employee who claimed it rose from 296 hours a year to 448.

Fifty-five deputies each logged more than 1,000 overtime hours in FY25 -- roughly an extra 20 hours on top of every 40-hour week, for the full year -- up from just 14 deputies in FY19.▸ The report is explicit about what didn't grow to match: patrol miles, arrests, and the jail population all stayed flat or fell over the same period.

The mechanism, as the grand jury lays it out: the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) -- the labor contract negotiated every three years between the county and the Deputy Sheriffs' Association, which expires in late June 2026⧉ -- lets deputies substitute banked leave for shifts they don't work, then count those "paid" days toward the 80-hour, two-week threshold that triggers time-and-a-half.▸ A deputy who uses leave for Monday and Tuesday, works Wednesday through Friday at regular pay, then works Saturday and Sunday, gets paid for eight days -- five regular, two overtime -- off five days of actual work. Worse, the extra pay also accrues more leave, which can be banked and spent the same way again: the practice the report calls "pyramiding."

One Custody Deputy took the mechanism to its extreme in 2024-25, earning $287,000 in total pay on a roughly $130,000 base salary by working 2,298 overtime hours -- an average 84-hour work week for the year.▸ The report cites fatigue research warning that "long shifts and extensive overtime can quickly degrade an officer's alertness and decision-making ability⧉; overworked officers face serious impairment often equivalent to alcohol intoxication" -- the loophole isn't just a budget problem, it's a stated public-safety one.

Santa Barbara County now operates two jail facilities with a combined rated capacity of 819 beds against an average daily population of 745 -- even though the countywide jail population fell from 1,010 in January 2013 to 750 by November 2024, a 26% decline.▸ Running two administratively separate jails, rather than one, duplicates command staff, sergeants, and support positions -- 148 sworn custody positions at the South County Main Jail versus 133 at the Northern Branch Jail, which opened in 2022 and, the report notes, is the year overtime hours jumped sharply. Some of that duplication isn't discretionary: a 2021 federal settlement⧉ in Murray v. County of Santa Barbara, over jail overcrowding and conditions for inmates with disabilities, locked in minimum custody staffing levels the county can't simply cut.

The Sheriff's Office now draws 33% of the county's discretionary General Fund -- the largest share of any department, up from 25% last year and 24% the year before -- while the county overall works through a projected $66 million shortfall over the next five years.▸ As the grand jury put it plainly: "at a time when all other Departments are required to reduce their staff and expenditures, that extra $9 million will have to be found in still further cuts in other Departments." That single-year, single-department overage alone is equivalent to about 14% of the county's entire five-year, all-department deficit projection.

Under Penal Code Sec. 933.05, Sheriff Bill Brown⧉, in office since 2007, has 60 days from the report's June 4, 2026 issuance -- until roughly early August -- to formally respond to all four findings and six recommendations; the Board of Supervisors has 90 days, into early September, to respond to three of the findings and three of the recommendations.▸ The recommendations themselves carry their own deadlines: a cap on overtime hours per pay period and a stricter timecard-approval process by October 31, 2026; acceleration of a new Workday payroll and HR system -- not otherwise scheduled to reach the Sheriff's Office until 2028 -- by January 1, 2027; and a plan to decommission the South County Main Jail entirely by December 31, 2026.

None of that requires the county to wait: the MOU's late-June-2026 expiration date, per the report, had already arrived by publication -- unless the county and the union renewed or extended it -- giving the Board of Supervisors and the deputies' union a contractual opening to renegotiate the leave-as-hours-worked provision directly, which the grand jury recommends as its first and most direct fix.▸ A "disagree" or "will not implement" response to any recommendation is a permitted outcome under the statute -- the report obligates an answer, not a fix.