Grand Jury: County finances opaque, lax oversight of bond measures, sales tax

A Civil Grand Jury report found spending poorly tracked, with few safeguards against potential misuse.

photo credit: courtesy Civil Grand Jurors’ Association of California.

There's no evidence of impropriety, waste or financial skullduggery.

But a report from the current Sonoma County Grand Jury found lax oversight, and no authority assuring special funding is being spent correctly.

The report instead found that while officials comply with transparency laws, documents released to the public are opaque and are largely indecipherable to ordinary people.

It started with a letter about oversight of a local school bond.

As Rob Hunter, the foreperson of the 2023-2024 Sonoma County Grand Jury, described it, the body went down a rabbit hole.

"In the course of getting that information, and learning what that really meant, we had to look at a bunch of other documents and that's what led to the broader topic of 'hey, how much are we paying in taxes, specifically starting with schools, and then more broadly in general, how much do we pay in taxes and where does that money actually go?"

Hunter said in the county's $2.5 billion, 438-page budget, one can not figure out how much local money is going to a specific purpose.

"It is impossible," Hunter said.

"There's absolutely no way to take that budget and translate it into what are we actually spending on specific types of services," Hunter elaborated.

He said a number of county agencies may contribute toward an effort, but the total isn't tracked.

"One of the biggest topics people are interested in and concerned about is what are we doing about homelessness in this county. Which should lead or does lead to the natural question how much are we spending? And the answer is, we don't know. Because there are a dozen different agencies that have some component of homelessness services, none of them track their expenditures on a functional basis," Hunter explained.

Hunter said the grand jury was unable to tell if the proceeds of voter approved special taxes and bonds meant those programs were really being used as intended. He said while voter-approved money was going to parks, libraries, mental health services and the like, it is not clear whether or not appropriations from the County general fund had been cut by a similar amount.

They are not supposed to be a replacement for Sonoma County's general fund parks budget, but since we don't account in any way for how much money was being spent, there's really no way to know. If you don't say, 'this is what the baseline expenditure is today,' when we add $32 million dollars a year to spending on mental health and substance use disorder treatment, if we don't know what the baseline is, how do we know that we are spending an additional $32 million," Hunter asked.

That, Hunter said, is even more the case with oversight over sales tax and school bond measures.

He said fine print in each of the body's bylaws tightly constrain their power.

"Most of the oversight agencies basically look at a financial report once or twice a year. So, in terms of actual involvement in the oversight, that's pretty much non-existent," Hunter added.

The report also raises questions about the viability of future local sales tax increases.

Primarily offsetting property tax revenue lost to proposition 13, sales taxes have continued creeping up.

Thing is, the state caps sales tax at 10 and a quarter percent, a level several local municipalities will cross next year due to measure H.

Lifting sales taxes beyond that level requires permission from the state legislature.

"As taxes go up at the county level it squeezes the ability of the municipalities, which actually do depend on sales taxes for a significant part of their local budgets. Every time the county raises the sales tax, the ceiling for the municipalities, shrinks," Hunter said.

The grand jury's report on taxes and spending is scheduled to be published online Tuesday. The county board of supervisors has 90 days to review and respond to the report and findings.