Crime & Safety

County Budget Cuts Could Force Juvenile Hall Releases

Sacramento County Juvenile Hall could release as many as 60 residents.

Sacramento County budget cuts could soon lead to an early release for some residents in .

The county, facing a $69.4 million budget shortfall, is proposing an $8 million cut to the Sacramento County Probation Department, which operates the juvenile hall on Kiefer Boulevard in Rosemont and has a total budget of nearly $110 million.

If these cuts are enacted, juvenile hall will lose more than 60 positions, and will be forced to release as many as 60 residents, according to a county budget estimate released earlier this month.

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Chief Probation Officer Don Meyer said the department would have to ask the judges who sentenced the residents to authorize their release.

He said the proposed layoffs would put the maximum occupancy of juvenile hall at 140 residents–.

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“We’ve laid off so many people … 370 in a little over two years,” he said in an interview earlier this month. “There’s no other criminal justice agency that’s done that in Sacramento County.”

And the department faces an additional threat—an increase to California's vehicle license fee, which provides hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to law enforcement agencies around the state, is set to expire on June 30.

"If that doesn’t get extended, that’s another $5 million we don’t have—another 50 people out the door," Meyer said.

Meyer said one possible savior for the department could be , which could provide additional money for counties willing to house their own serious offenders instead of sending them to state facilities.

“That could allow us to actually reopen one of our closed institutions, but we’d have to do a number of building modifications,” he said.

On Friday, the county will release a complete recommended budget, including proposals for the sheriff’s department, district attorney and public defender, which so far have not been made public. The budget will be finalized during Sacramento County Board of Supervisors hearings starting June 6.

Click here to visit Sacramento County's budget website.

Proposed probation department layoffs:

Title Number of full-time equivalent (FTE) positions recommended for elimination Administrative Service Officer II 1 California Meth Enforcement Team Senior Deputy Probation Officer 1 Senior IT Analyst
(reallocated to IT Analyst) Assistant Division Chief 1 Supervising Probation Officer 3 Deputy Probation Officer 6.4 Probation Assistant 50 Juvenile hall laundry worker 1 Juvenile Hall Food Service Manager 1


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