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During a special budget meeting on June 24, the San Benito County Board of Supervisors voted 4-0 with Supervisor Ignacio Velazquez absent to continue consideration of adopting the proposed interim budget for the 2026-27 fiscal year until its June 30 meeting. They did not add any conditions other than to address issues, including bonuses, concerning the Sheriff’s Department.
Before the meeting began, the county’s Chief Executive Officer Esperanza Colio Warren told BenitoLink she would be delivering good news of a balanced interim budget.
But before delivering her report, she stepped away from the podium and asked Sheriff Eric Taylor to speak first concerning the plight of his department.
Without preamble, Taylor told the supervisors that he had just learned three more of his deputies were about to leave his department.
“That’s terrifying to me because we’re already at minimums,” he said. “It’s putting us in a position of not being able to police the community appropriately.”
Taylor outlined his proposal to keep funding his department, which he had already discussed with the CEO.
“I’m willing to freeze [vacant] positions in my office,” he began, “and I’m asking you to consider redirecting the funding for six positions, which will give me room in my budget to cover the medical costs of the people who work in my office. It would be a big difference for them to not have to pay that medical contribution.”
Taylor said in addition to recently reassigning a deputy away from San Juan Bautista to patrol duty, he also had to take deputies out of the investigations bureau to put them on patrol.
Taylor told BenitoLink that he was “a bit rattled” at the prospect that there will be only two or perhaps three deputies on patrol per shift, whereas before there were normally five per shift. He said they would patrol near Hollister, including Ridgemark and Tres Pinos, and that deputies will not normally patrol South County, San Juan Bautista, or Aromas, unless called. He did say, though, that the school resource officer at Spring Grove School would stay because the school funds the position.
Taylor described the situation as a “house of cards,” adding that deputies may soon only patrol at night, for which they will receive 5% night shift compensation. He told BenitoLink the compensation is becoming the norm in policing to encourage officers to sign up for night shifts.
He said he lost six deputies in the last year to other agencies or retirement, while there has been only one new hire. Two more deputies are on extended leave, waiting to be terminated.
He also said there are two people who want to go to the academy in order to be considered for a position.
“I’m very quickly going to be down 12 positions, which is dangerous,” he said, adding that this will leave 12 deputies and five sergeants. “Some are already on patrol. Others are being moved there, with one sergeant and two deputies per shift.”
Taylor told the supervisors he knew he wasn’t in a position to ask for more money, so he came up with his own solution to “stop the bleeding.” He acknowledged that hiring new deputies isn’t easy because nearby counties are also losing people, causing all counties to compete against one another for “the same small pool of candidates.”
Taylor said if the supervisors approved his plan—which they did—it would mean he would have about $900,000 to reallocate to a benefits package, to include medical contributions and longevity pay for years of service outside the county, which Supervisor Kollin Kosmicki had proposed earlier.
Supervisor Angela Curro and Kosmicki both described the sheriff’s staffing situation as a “crisis.” They echoed the latest critical Civil Grand Jury report, which notes the chronic nature of the department’s staffing issues.
“We’ve had some shortages in the past,” Kosmicki said, “We’ve had financial constraints that we’ve juggled, but we’re at a point where we absolutely have to make this our top priority in this budget.”
Later in the day, Colio Warren spoke with BenitoLink in an attempt, she said, to make sure the public understood the need to bring back the interim budget to the next supervisors meeting on June 30. She said that the county budget act requires the county to approve the budget as an interim or operational budget that will not be adopted until the new fiscal year because “the books close on June 30, and it takes about a month and a half to do the final closure.”
“Until then,” she said, “the county will not know whether we close in a deficit or a surplus. Budgets are based on projections.”
While waiting for the final numbers to come in from each department, she told the supervisors she had projected that the interim budget will be balanced. She said, however, that the accounting came down to the wire the day before the meeting, as she continued to talk to each department head. She said the $1.5 million shortfall had been reduced to $500,000 and told each department they had to make more sacrifices, which she said they did, and she was able to present the balanced interim budget to the supervisors.
BenitoLink reported on June 19 that the proposed interim budget included a $78.5 million general fund with about $71.4 million in revenue and about $5.65 million in fund balance or carryover funding from the current fiscal year, leaving a gap of about $1.6 million that would need to be addressed.
Other news
Earlier in the week, at the supervisors’ June 23 meeting, nearly 20 protesters showed up with signs and voiced their support of a joint lawsuit filed by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Santa Clara County Counsel Tony LoPresti to block “illegal development of an ICE facility near Gilroy.”
The group asked the supervisors to add an agenda item to the June 24 meeting, or at a subsequent meeting, requesting that San Benito County join other counties in demonstrating their support of the lawsuit. Only one woman supported the ICE facility, telling the group her daughter died from fentanyl given to her by an MS-13 gang member.
The joint lawsuit was announced in a June 10 press release from the attorney general’s office in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuit challenges the federal government’s plans to build the ICE facility on property leased by Elmwood Capital Group, a Beverly Hills-based firm that is also named in the lawsuit.
During its closed agenda session after the regular meeting, the board discussed the public comments, according to Supervisor Don Zanger. Through County Counsel Gregory Priamos, the supervisors announced their participation in Monterey County’s friend of the court brief in support of a joint lawsuit against the federal government regarding the construction of the ICE detention facility in Gilroy.
“This action is taken to demonstrate support for the agricultural industry in San Benito County,” Priamos stated in an email to BenitoLink. “Agriculture is an extremely important part of the county’s economy, and it must be preserved and protected.”
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