CAO Message: A Budget That's Building Our Future and Building Up Our Workforce

Message from Chief Administrative Officer Helen Robbins-Meyer

Nothing tells the story of our priorities more clearly than our budget. We’ve just released our proposed plan for the fiscal year starting July 1. Under last year’s Framework for the Future, we began a fundamental reshaping of our direction as a County. We now advance that through our new budget – Building the Future – which lays out major investments we’re making in addressing mental health and substance use, homelessness, sustainability, justice transformation and more.

For the first time, we’ve created our plan using a budget equity assessment tool. That requires each department to consider how its spending affects communities struggling with inequalities and to make sure it’s reducing disparities.

The budget’s total, $7.15 billion, is slightly under last year’s. But don’t let that dip mislead you. It’s in large part because we no longer have many of the costs related to COVID-19. We are actually significantly increasing our resources across many key initiatives. 

Notable for you as employees is that as we expand our services, we’re expanding our workforce. This budget adds about 1,000 staff positions. Some of the areas seeing the biggest changes: 115 positions in behavioral health and 71 in public health; about 100 positions in eligibility; another 100 in Child Welfare Services; 90 with Public Defender; 18 for the District Attorney focused on crime victims. Staff will be added to heightened focus areas of sustainability, community engagement, economic development, transparency, and performance measurement. And that comes after 1,000 positions we added since last year’s budget, meaning a big boost to our ranks over two years.

The budget is now out for everyone to see. You can get a good, quick overview in our County News Center story or in the Executive Summary we created. I invite you to take a look at one of those. They’ll give a good feel for where we’re going over the next year. 

We’ll walk our Board of Supervisors through the budget at public meetings on May 19 and 20. Much of that will be presentations by a number of individual departments. We’re still working out the schedule for which department goes when, but we’ll share that when it’s ready.

Putting the budget together is a huge undertaking, and I offer my thanks to everyone who pitched in. It sets the foundation for the even bigger job ahead – turning all those plans into action. It will take every one of us, and I look forward to working with you as we build our future.