When Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced his endorsement of Measure A just weeks before Election Day, he said he did so with the understanding that while the money raised through the sales tax increase wouldn’t necessarily fund public safety, it would stave off further cuts.
Now, he appears to be walking back those comments as he chastises county officials for a proposal to spend all of the revenues on health care services.
In early August, when the Board of Supervisors held a special meeting to place Measure A on the November ballot, County Executive James Williams emphasized the devastation that President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill, signed one month prior on July 4, would have on the county’s health care system.
Medicaid reimbursements serve as the single largest revenue source for Santa Clara Valley Healthcare, and Trump’s legislation slashes the federally funded health insurance program over the next decade, leaving the county with a roughly $1 billion funding gap.
At the meeting, Williams called the cuts “unprecedented” and said they posed an “acute threat” to the county. Measure A, a five-eighths-of-a-cent sales tax increase, would help preserve access to health care services that one in four county residents rely on, he argued.
Rosen this week blamed a change in the ballot measure language as the reason he believed public safety would be getting some of the funds. A lawsuit from a group of Libertarians back in August prompted county officials to edit the text — including the addition of public safety among the “critical local services” that revenues from the sales tax increase would support.
But in Sept. 30 interview with this news organization, he acknowledged that his support wasn’t due to any commitment from county officials to allocate funds to public safety, but rather the impact that trickle-down cuts would have on these services if Measure A failed.
“If the sales tax measure doesn’t pass, then it’s clear to me that there’s going to be cuts to law enforcement in the county, cuts to the DA’s office and cuts to the Sheriff’s office,” Rosen said in September.
When asked this week about his reversal on Measure A, the county’s top law enforcement official signaled potential budget woes in his office.
“I don’t think one can say that this sales tax measure is promoting public safety when county administrators are proposing a budget that guts public safety,” Rosen said.
Williams called Rosen’s words “frivolous.” At press conferences, public meetings and in interviews with the media over the last several months, the county executive has advocated for the sales tax measure as a way to preserve services at the county’s four public hospitals and 15 clinics.
“We’ve been unequivocal from day one that Measure A was placed on the ballot to deal with the unprecedented nearly $1 trillion in federal cuts to Medicaid,” Williams said. “What that means for our county organization is over a billion dollars a year in lost revenue for health care services.”
But several weeks after Election Day, when 57% of voters approved the ballot initiative, Rosen isn’t the only one saying they’re surprised that all of the money is going to health care.
Marcus Barbour, the president of the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, also pointed to the ballot language.
Barbour, who has worked in law enforcement for the last 13 years, said that while the coalition supports health care services in the county, the ballot measure text itself led them to believe they would get a piece of the fiscal pie, as well.
“I think a lot of the voters took that as a concerning measure to have public safety included in this that it would protect public safety in the county,” Barbour said.
County officials have yet to release any budget proposals for next fiscal year, though they’re expected to make some mid-year adjustments to the current budget in February that could include $200 million in cuts to the health care systems. But Rosen said that department heads have seen early proposals that make cuts to public safety, which he called “draconian and dangerous.” The DA in the past has gone head-to-head with county leaders over his office’s budget.
Rosen said that while he’s not conducting an investigation into the sales tax measure — he told this news organization that what the “county is doing here may not be illegal, but it is destructive and wrong” — he’s been looking into the different ways the funds could be used.
“I want to make sure that the will of the voters is respected,” he said.
As for the budget, Williams said that his “focus is on mitigating cuts to any part of our county organization to the greatest extent possible.”
“That’s where my energy is focused, that’s where everyone’s energy should be focused,” he added. “We were facing a general fund deficit even before the federal cuts and that does mean that there are impacts across the county organization.”