This week the Riverside County Board of Supervisors approved the budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year, which begins on July 1.

Staring at a significant budget deficit, the board had to tap the county’s reserves and implement a hiring freeze to make the nearly $10 billion budget plan pencil out.

“We face immediate and formidable challenges,” the county executive office explained in the budget plan. “Inflationary pressures, growing labor costs, unpredictable state and federal funding and necessary investments in aging infrastructure strain our financial capacity.”

The usual, in other words.

The labor costs, of course, are entirely a self-inflicted harm as the board routinely bends to the demands of the county’s unions. They ask for more, much more, and they receive. This is how it mostly was when the nonpartisan board was majority-Republican and it’s how it is now that it is majority Democrat.

City News Service reported a familiar scene from the county’s budget hearings earlier this month.

“Sheriff Chad Bianco complained during the June 9 hearing the appropriation for sheriff’s operations ‘falls woefully short’ of what would be needed. The sheriff’s department ended the current fiscal year $10 million in the red, and the ‘flatline’ spending plan for 2025-26 would put the agency $76 million in the hole, he said,” according to City News Service.

With this big of a hole, neither the board nor Sheriff Bianco have figured out how to come up with the money to fully open the Benoit Detention Center.

Wonder why? Well, as City News Service also pointed out, the sheriff’s department continues to struggle with “ballooning labor and pension expenses stemming from the county’s agreement with the Riverside Sheriffs’ Association, the collective bargaining unit representing deputies, as well as court security, the anticipated agreement with the Law Enforcement Management Unit...”

Bianco knows better of course than to point out that bloated union contracts are crowding out resources to keep Riverside County residents safe. It was the unions, after all, who put him into office in the first place.

It’s the same old story and every taxpayer in Riverside County is paying for it.