CA: Prisons budget called a fiction

Sac Bee ^ | 3/19/04 | Clea Benson

[NormsRevenge]

No one is held accountable for budget overruns at the state Department of Corrections, which has already overspent its nearly $6 billion budget by more than $500 million this year, Department of Finance officials said Thursday.

The troubled department, which has blown its budget every year since 1998, has been allocated far less than it needs to cover pay raises for correctional officers and mandatory policy changes that require more staff, said James Tilton, the Finance Department official in charge of the corrections budget.

[NormsRevenge]

It bears repeating.

Some of the responsibility, Tilton said, lies with administrators who went ahead and spent money without authorization. But some responsibility, he said, lies with policy-makers who drew up years of budgets that did not take into account raises negotiated in employee contracts and other mandatory spending.

"There's lots of blame to go around," he said.

[tubebender]

It looks like the wrong people are in jail. On top of this $500,000,000 shortfall the state must come of with $500,000,000 to settle the court case with Yuba County over failed flood control. I guess that is just "pocket change" to the trolls in Sacramento...