Anonymous
Source: Santa Barbara County Grand Jury
The 2019-20 Santa Barbara County Grand Jury inspected the facility and operation of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff-Coroner’s Bureau. The Jury noted that most of the failures demonstrated lack of compliance with new standards. The facility was built with County inmate labor in 1987 and has been in continuous operation since 1988. While the building may have been adequate thirty years ago, it does not meet national standards in 2020.
This Jury researched the reports of earlier Santa Barbara County Grand Juries and saw that many of their recommendations have not been implemented. As a result, the Bureau and its facility remain outdated. The current Jury found there is still an urgent need for a new facility that meets the industry standards of the 21st Century.
The Jury recommends that the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors separate the Santa Barbara County Coroner position and make it independent from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff when the current Sheriff-Coroner’s term expires.
Read the full report below.
The recommendation to separate the Coroner from the Sheriff is great. Anything that diminishes that empire is a step forward. The Sheriff should also return the Marshall’s function to the court. And Corrections Officers should probably be under the supervision of Probation.
While the Facility may have been found inadequate, I’ll bet that the pay, benefits and pensions were found to be more than adequate. These days our budgets go more for public employee compensation than for facilities and services.
7:42 a.m. I would bet that even more money goes to compensation and pensions in private industry than goes to capital improvement. So what?
Well, the “so what” is that the pay and benefits in the public sector have gotten to be much better than in the private sector and we, taxpayers, are paying for public services but are getting instead, a highly compensated bureaucracy.
The decline in the pay of the “private sector” is due to the corporate and hedge fund push to disable workers in their efforts to fight for equity in that world. “In the 1950s, a typical CEO made 20 times the salary of his or her average worker. Last year, CEO pay at an S&P 500 Index firm soared to an average of 361 times more than the average rank-and-file worker, or pay of $13,940,000 a year,…” The inability of workers to get fair pay is also accentuated by the importation of cheap labor and the removal of plants to places that are even worse to employees than the US. The pay of government employees has not gone up like the pay of CEO’s and such types. The pay of non government employees has, as noted, declined. That is not the model we should follow.