Six months ago, a split San Diego County Board of Supervisors loosened rules governing how the county calculates how much it keeps in reserves — a move intended to free up hundreds of millions of dollars after years of conservative spending by a once GOP-dominated government. Unionized county empl oyees were the first to benefit, scoring contractually-guaranteed bonuses that tapped $14 million from the newly unlocked funds. Now, six months later, county contractors are the next in line. Democratic supervisors signed off Tuesday on distributing an additional $56 million in money previously kept in unassigned county reserves, using a procedural approach that let them approve the spending with just three votes instead of the usual four. Of that money, $24 million will go to existing county housing and social services programs. Another $8.8 million will fund a trio of projects to study and mitigate the effects of the Tijuana River Valley sewage crisis, a top priority of Supervisor Paloma Aguirre. And another $23 million will fund a county conservation program, infrastructure projects and one-time costs related to an overhaul of the county’s software for tracking property taxes. Most of the latest tranche of reserves spending came at the behest of a subcommittee controlled by Democratic Supervisors Terra Lawson-Remer and Monica Montgomery Steppe, according to county documents. The subcommittee has been meeting out of view of the public, without a publicly posted agenda or meeting minutes, to steer the county’s fiscal policies. Lawson-Remer characterized the new spending as funding programs and “critical investments” that help residents. “I think it targets the right kind of core issues, where I really see people in our community hurting, where we really need to be making investments,” Lawson-Remer said at the Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday. The county’s two Republican supervisors, Joel Anderson and Jim Desmond, voted against the majority of the new reserves funding. The Republicans did vote to spend reserves on the Tijuana River Valley projects, which was voted on separately. The county’s new reserves policy, adopted last August, overhauls how the county calculates how much money it must keep in unassigned reserves — meaning money that isn’t already pledged to other services and programs. Previously, that figure included both operating expenses and capital expenses. Now, the county must keep in reserve two months of operating expenses only. Under the new policy, the county can spend up to 25% of its newly freed up reserves each fiscal year. This year, it had $381.6 million in available unassigned reserves, of which $95.4 million could be spent. Between the latest spending and the bonuses, the county will have spent $70.4 million of that, leaving about $25 million. With a new fiscal year beginning in July, supervisors still have a few months to decide whether and how to spend the rest. Last year, Democrats sold changing the rules about their reserves as a way to offset federal and state cuts to county programs. At the time, Congress had just passed legislation, H.R. 1, containing new requirements and cost-sharing for Medicaid and food stamps that county staff said would saddle them with hundreds of millions of dollars each year in new expenses. Another possible use for the freed-up reserves, Democrats said at the time, would included easing the impact of economic downturns on county revenue sources like sales taxes. Any reserve spending needed four votes to pass — meaning that with the current partisan split of supervisors, one Republican would have to support it. But the spending measure supervisors approved on Tuesday circumvented that vote threshold. That’s because the county has been using reserves to backfill unused budget capacity in different county departments — an accounting move that only requires a simple majority of three votes to pass. That drew the ire of one Republican supervisor Tuesday. Anderson seized on how the approach to reserves has changed, saying the reserves were being used as a “slush fund” controlled by a select group of supervisors. “This is not organic,” Anderson said. “This is cooking the process.” He pointed to a host of programs set to benefit from new funding from county reserves that have not been impacted by federal cuts — including $5 million for an affordable housing development and $3 million for tenant legal services. “I thought the purpose of this exercise was … to look at H.R. 1 cuts that are impacting us and backfilling those cuts,” Anderson said. “This is far exceeding any cuts.” Amy Thompson, the county’s deputy chief financial officer, said that programs getting money from freed-up reserves “are envisioned to help the same population” that would be impacted by new federal cuts and rules. Lawson-Remer agreed. “We reformed our reserve policy so that when volatility hits, San Diego families aren’t left without food, housing or emergency response,” Lawson-Remer said. “Today’s vote puts that framework into action.” Beyond social services spending, the reserves spending advances three key county initiatives for the South Bay’s sewage crisis. Included in the package is $2.5 million for a construction project currently being planned to mitigate a notorious “hot spot” site on Saturn Boulevard, where sewage cascading from the Tijuana River exacerbates the release of toxic gas into the air. Another $4 million will go toward a program that distributes air purifiers capable of filtering hydrogen sulfide and other pollutants from the toxic cross-border flows. An additional $2.3 million will be spent on studying the public health impacts of the sewage crisis. ...read more read less