A MASSIVE STRUCTURAL BUDGET DEFICIT is forcing Santa Clara County leaders to get creative in finding ways to avoid hits to critical social safety net services.
A San José Spotlight review of County Executive James Williams’ budget recommendations for fiscal year 2025-26 shows four main takeaways about what services could be eliminated, reduced, saved and added — and what it all means for residents in light of a $70 million federal funding loss.
Cuts equal layoffs?
The most striking portion of Williams’ May budget proposal plans for eliminating 279 full-time positions across several county agencies. But that doesn’t equate to 279 layoffs.
About 80 of those positions are filled — with the majority left vacant despite having money set aside to fund them. Williams previously said he expects the number of layoffs to decrease by July 1 due to hiring freezes and the natural cycle of retirements and separations. The county has options for employees filling certain positions on the chopping block, namely through interagency job transfers.
District 4 Supervisor Susan Ellenberg said the numbers could have been worse.
“Very few filled positions have been cut,” Ellenberg told San José Spotlight. “I’m not particularly nervous about immediate impacts — again because of the way the proposal was so precisely crafted. However, it does mean that as our work grows, those positions would have to be recreated, and funding reattached to them, to unfreeze the hiring freezes in place now.”
Health system impacts
The majority of the cut positions — 119 — are in the county’s health and hospital system, which takes up roughly 30% of the proposed $13 billion spending budget.
The budget proposal shows cuts could affect patient care resulting from reduced capacity. Meanwhile, the elimination of one psychiatrist position in Custody Health Services could hamstring the county’s efforts to better serve and house people reentering society upon release from jail. The jail system reached a 20-year high of in-custody deaths last year.
At the same time, the county is bringing on 31 new custody health jobs to expand nighttime mental health and pharmacy services in the jails, namely between 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.
PERT eliminated
The Santa Clara County Behavioral Health Department is set to see roughly 50 positions eliminated. But the most notable cut has the support of mental health reform advocates.
Williams’ proposal recommends eliminating the county’s Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (PERT), which pairs a licensed mental health clinician with a law enforcement officer to respond to people experiencing mental health crises. The team is dispatched through 911 phone calls.
Advocates see the program as a superficial approach — arguing cops shouldn’t be involved in these calls at all due to the risk of handcuffing, agitating or using violence on someone who needs help.
County officials say cutting PERT will allow them to expand and prioritize another program they adopted which advocates prefer — a non-police response known as the Trusted Response Urgent Support Team (TRUST).
Community activists who architected TRUST have sent letters of written support for PERT’s elimination in recent months.
Laurie Valdez is one activist who pushed for the program’s creation, after her partner Antonio Guzman-Lopez was killed by San Jose State University police. Valdez lauded the plan to end PERT and hopes the county can rectify what she described as a lackluster approach to publicizing TRUST.
“I rarely see any of the TRUST vans. I don’t know where the hell they go,” she told San José Spotlight. “It’s not visible out there enough, especially with what (San Jose Mayor) Matt Mahan’s doing — hiring a whole new police force to go after the homeless. This isn’t a good direction and I hope the county is steadfast and knows that when we created TRUST it was for the purpose of community safety — to ensure people are met with care and concern, not guns and violence.”
Funding cuts and housing
California is expected to slash Santa Clara County’s welfare grant funding, which helps homeless or at-risk families and disabled people find new housing through CalWORKS. The county has about 110 families enrolled in the program as of May.
But the county will have to absorb that reduction — about $4.7 million — by turning away new enrollments.
The cuts are a compounding wound to the $70 million in anticipated lost federal funding the county will have to backfill with general fund dollars, the discretionary spending of taxpayer revenue. The Office of Supportive Housing — set to see the largest federal funding losses of $29 million — will see the most help from the general fund, backfilling the losses entirely.
“We are living in extraordinary times with a federal government slashing funds and acting not as a partner, but as an adversary,” District 5 Supervisor Margaret Abe-Koga told San José Spotlight. “Every action is in essence a demand that we heel to the White House’s priorities without regard to our residents’ welfare, whether it is health care, public safety or education. We will nonetheless be in the position of making the hard decisions needed to create reserves for that core in the future. And we contemplate having to change the way we deliver our services in the future.”
Ellenberg said the budget’s recommended cost cutting and saving measures are too delicately balanced to substantially change on final adoption.
“Where there are cuts I am concerned about, I am still a little hesitant to push back on because I’m cognizant of how deep our challenges are. I’m worried about where the money will come from and whether I will get what I want,” Ellenberg said.
It remains to be seen whether the county’s projection of $70 million in federal funding cuts will pan out worse or better than expected. For that reason, Ellenberg said the county is fast-tracking its mid-year budget review earlier than expected, in the fall of this year.
“If some of the conservative predictions that have been made don’t come to fruition, there’s a big list of (parked) items that need to be prioritized in the fall,” Ellenberg said.
Contact Brandon Pho at brandon@sanjosespotlight.com or @brandonphooo on X.
This story originally appeared in San Jose Spotlight.