The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday took a significant step toward ensuring consistent protection for San Bernardino County’s many unincorporated communities.
Supervisors voted unanimously to place the San Bernardino County Law Enforcement Staffing and Community Protection Act of 2024 on the Nov. 5 General Election ballot. If approved by a majority of voters, the act will establish a funding formula for law enforcement resources in unincorporated communities and make it difficult for future boards to reduce law enforcement funding.
“We went through an era, that actually still to some degree exists, of ‘defund the police.’ This is an opportunity for us to communicate to our residents that we see, hear and understand that they would like to have minimum levels of staffing to ensure that we do have community protections,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman and Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe.
The act would require the board to allocate a minimum amountof funding in its annual budget to fund patrol personnel’s direct salary and benefit costs for operations in the unincorporated areas of the county. The minimum amount would be the average of actual patrol personnel salary and benefit costs in the unincorporated area of the county in the three preceding fiscal years.
The board could suspend the requirement for no more than 12 months only if it declares a fiscal emergency by at least a four-fifths vote. Funding during a fiscal emergency would not be factored into future three-year averages unless authorized by a five-fifths vote of the board. The act would also ensure competitive compensation for the Sheriff and District Attorney by modernizing the formula used to set their base salaries. The existing formula is based on the salaries paid in Kern, Riverside, Orange, San Diego and Ventura counties. The act would delete Kern County and add Los Angeles County to the formula. The change would also apply to San Bernardino County’s Assessor-Recorder-County Clerk and Auditor-Controller/Treasurer/Tax Collector.