County's $9.16 Billion Budget Targets Food Deserts, Elevates Mental Health
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The San Diego County Board of Supervisors adopted a $9.16 billion budget on June 25th — a 6.1 percent increase over the prior year representing $522 million in additional spending — and two programs embedded in that adoption signal deliberate choices about which residents the county is prioritizing as federal support contracts. The budget takes effect Tuesday, July 1st.
The first program, the Safety Net Bridge Program championed by Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe, sets aside one million dollars to fund approximately 96 food distribution events throughout the fiscal year in partnership with Feeding San Diego and the San Diego Food Bank. The events are targeted at communities the county identifies as most exposed to federal H.R. 1 legislation's CalFresh cuts: El Cajon, Chula Vista, Oceanside, Kearny Mesa, and two Spring Valley locations. Distribution events must launch within 60 days of the budget's June 25th approval, meaning that clock is already running.
The scale of federal retrenchment driving that program is substantial. The county's own analysis estimated roughly 93,500 San Diego residents are at risk of losing or seeing reductions in CalFresh benefits. H.R. 1 also shifts 25 percent of CalFresh administrative costs to local governments beginning October 1st — an additional $15.8 million burden for the county — with the broader H.R. 1 impact on the county's first-year budget totaling $68.4 million.
The second major structural move in the budget is the elevation of Behavioral Health Services to its own standalone county department, separated from its previous home inside Health and Human Services. The new department carries a 12.4 percent funding increase to $1.4 billion — the largest single departmental funding increase in the entire budget — along with 31 new positions. Making behavioral health a standalone department creates its own director, its own reporting chain, and its own budget line subject to direct Board scrutiny year over year, a shift advocates have sought for years in California counties where mental health services have historically been administratively buried.