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After months of reviewing the numbers, San Benito County staff unveiled their recommended budget for the 2025–26 fiscal year. Presented to the Board of Supervisors at a special meeting on May 29, the plan included salary and benefit cuts across nearly every department. But the supervisors indicated they couldn’t discuss it due to a “math problem,” as board chairman Kollin Kosmicki put it.
The proposed budget for the upcoming year is $339 million, an $8 million increase from last year. Yet despite widespread cuts to salaries, benefits, and vacant positions, the proposed general fund—the county’s main account for day-to-day operations—would have a $20 million increase over what the county spent in 2024-25, rising to $107 million.
“There are inconsistencies in the numbers,” said Kosmicki, who sits on the board’s budget committee. “We’re freezing positions, we’re eliminating positions, we’re reducing other areas of the budget across the board. Still, the general fund is showing a 23% spike in the recommended draft budget as compared with the 2024-25 actuals. There’s no logical explanation for this.”
Kosmicki said the problem lay in the baseline staff used to build the new budget. Instead of using actual spending from 2024–25, they relied on the adopted budget—the $117 million the county had planned to spend, not the $87 million it actually spent. That mismatch distorted the picture and forced the board to delay its more detailed review.
Supervisor Angela Curro said that she hadn’t seen the actual figures. County Budget Officer Dulce Alonso confirmed that those numbers were not yet available to the public, including most of the supervisors.
“We have a problem and we do not have control of the numbers,” Curro said. “If we can’t get it, and I have a ton of notes and questions on every single one of these slides, I don’t think it’s worth going into that.”
Supervisor Mindy Sotelo had similar concerns. “I have a ton of questions, but I just don’t know how appropriate it is for me to ask them when some of this may be hypothetical at this point.”
The practice of using the approved budget rather than the actual spending as a baseline, Kosmicki said, is not new. For years, he noted, the county has budgeted based on what it had planned to spend the previous year, not on what it actually spent. He blamed part of the discrepancy on “vacancy budgeting,” in which departments project salaries for positions that often remain unfilled.
“We’ve had these overinflated adopted budgets in the range of $30 million, $40 million,” he said. “With this budget, we actually used an adopted budget as the baseline going forward and went to department heads and asked them to reduce a relatively small amount. The year-end actuals should be the baseline going forward as opposed to the adopted budget.”
Drafting this year’s budget has been particularly challenging. The county is experiencing a $1.5 million shortfall that it has been trying to close for a month. One of the core challenges, Alonso said, is that revenue hasn’t kept pace with spending or inflation over the past few years.
“The cost of providing services is increasing while programs continue to expand to meet community needs,” she said. “At the same time, state and federal funding has not kept up with increased and rising costs.”
The budget has also been affected by a transition in the county. The county has been without a permanent administrative officer since Ray Espinosa stepped down in May 2024. Since then, Henie Ring has served as interim CAO, and on May 29 the board appointed Elizabeth Colio Warren as the new CAO. Alonso stepped into the budget officer role about a month ago when her predecessor, Ramon Aban, took another position in the county.
The county has also hired consultants Baker-Tilly to help with the budget.
Kosmicki asked all departments to review their recommended budgets using last year’s actuals and prepare revised proposals for a June 9 public hearing. The board must approve a budget before the end of June in order for it to be formally adopted in September.
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