Friday, Mar. 20, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 18A

http://www.sacbee.com/editorials/story/1714595.html

Last fall, as the nation tumbled into recession and the state veered toward bankruptcy, Sacramento County's department heads gathered for an off-site retreat at the Winchester Country Club, a golf resort in Placer County, to talk about global warming.

It was late October, and county government was spiraling downward to today's projected deficit of $168 million. The same week that the county's appointed department heads met – elected department heads, the sheriff, the district attorney and the assessor declined their Winchester invitations – Sacramento city officials sent out a notice informing all non-union employees that they would be required to take an unpaid day off each month, starting in January. Most of their departments already had been ordered to cut spending 20 percent. The Police Department had to cut 8 percent, the Fire Department 4 percent.

Across the region, cities and counties instituted hiring freezes, laid off workers and forced employees to take furloughs. A number of jurisdictions moved to reopen negotiations with their labor unions, seeking to delay pay raises approved in better times.

As the economic crisis mounted, Sacramento County remained curiously passive. Businesses closed; the stock market took a nose dive, but county budget officials clung stubbornly to the fiction that sales tax revenues would grow 2 percent. As late as December, even as state tax officials were reporting a 1.5 percent decline in Sacramento tax revenues, the county refused to "speculate" about what its sales tax receipts would be.

Some spending adjustments did occur. In late November the county froze purchases of new computers and office furniture. It ordered all printing to be double-sided and blocked construction starts for new facilities. But the county ordered no hiring freezes, no layoffs, no furloughs.

Not until it had emptied out its reserves, the money set aside for economic uncertainty, did the county bother to address the costly scandals over employees' take-home cars and vacation payouts – too little, too late.

Union officials complain that the county has been too slow to react to the recession's severity, and they're right. Even today, Sacramento supervisors express "surprise" at the magnitude of the downturn: "I … don't think anyone thought things would deteriorate as rapidly as they have," Supervisor Roger Dickinson lamented last week.

"The staff was not comfortable that they had good numbers," Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan said, offering scant solace for the inaction. "Terry Schutten doesn't manage the national economy or the state economy," board President Susan Peters said in defense of the beleaguered county executive.

Because it continued to spend at an unsustainable rate even as the scale of the county's budget problems mounted, Sacramento will have to make more painful cuts than it otherwise would have. County workers blame Schutten. But that lets his five elected bosses off the hook: Supervisors Dickinson, MacGlashan, Peters, Don Nottoli and Jimmy Yee.

As the crisis deepened, they dithered. As the county's deficit exploded, department heads met at a golf resort to talk about global warming – no doubt a worthy topic. But the focus – then and now – should have been on the county's crumbling finances. Sacramento's slow response to an obvious crisis borders on recklessness.