Riverside County D.A.’s Office Suffers $5.9 Million Deficit
Riverside County District Attorney Paul Zellerbach addressed the county’s Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday morning, admitting he had a long way to go in bridging a huge budget gap in his office.
He told the panel that despite slashing nearly $1.8 million from his budget, the D.A.’s office will still end the year $5.9 million in the red, requiring him to seek other ways to save money, including job cuts.
In the Feb. 1 mid-year 2010-11 county budget report, Zellerbach stated that he was “working on a comprehensive budget plan that will maintain operational effectiveness while attempting to reduce this deficit.”
Zellerbach told City News Service just prior to taking office in early January that he feared his predecessor’s spending habits would make balancing the D.A.’s budget virtually impossible in the current fiscal year.
The former Superior Court judge defeated incumbent Rod Pacheco in the June election. Zellerbach said Pacheco’s post-loss decision to promote 70 deputy district attorneys, hire eight new ones and sign off on a $900,000 vacation buyback program for staffers placed greater burdens on the budget.
The Executive Office had initially estimated a $9 million deficit in the D.A.’s accounts — a figure that Pacheco consistently argued was overblown. The $6.3 million figure was arrived at within weeks of Zellerbach taking office.
The county’s new top prosecutor eliminated nearly a dozen executive level positions. He said two ways he will save his office and the county in general money is by filing fewer death penalty cases and giving prosecutors more latitude to settle cases before trial.
