About 70 county jobs will be affected after the Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to approve the $1.95 billion budget for 2027 – which includes a near $18 million deficit in the Community Services Agency.

District 5 Supervisor Channce Condit opposed the spending plan, which must be sent to the state controller’s office by Oct. 2.

“I think best way to prevent service reduction is to build a strong foundation, and how you build a strong foundation is by prioritizing our frontline employees,” said Condit. “This may be a balanced budget, but I’m not convinced it is an efficient budget. Our frontline employees are being asked to do more with less, and I think some of the cuts tonight are going to be evidence of that. I’m going to oppose the budget … based on concerns I have regarding staffing ratios. I am of the belief that our county government is far too top heavy. Our staffing ratio needs a realignment.”

CSA, which has 958 employees and a budget of $187 million, manages such programs as Child Welfare Services, Adult Protective Services, CalFresh, CalWORKS, Medi-Cal, and in-home supportive services.

County officials blamed the shortfall on job turnover and a loss of institutional knowledge within the department – a notion that didn’t sit well with the public as speaker after speaker strode to the podium during the public-comment portion of the meeting.

• “The budget before the board tonight includes a plan to eliminate 67 employees, including 39 social workers,” said Harlen Diven, a board member at HAVEN (Healthy Alternatives to Violent Environments), pointing out that number represents about a quarter of frontline staff for child protective services. “These cuts will foreseeably result in deeper inequities within our system. The problem cannot be overstated with a quarter of the county’s child-facing social workers are about to be cut or demoted.”
• “I have worked in settings that have allowed me to see again and again the impact of failing to protect our children and not providing them with the resources they need,” said Lyn Raible, MD with VP of the board at HAVEN. “What happens? Some of them die. Those who don’t die, because of abuse and stress in their environments, have permanent and difficult changes to the brain that forever impact their lives. They are predisposed to mental health problems, including addition, and other disturbing patterns that are not their fault. They are the result of brain rewiring during childhood in a system that didn’t protect them.”
• “As an accountant, I know that it takes a lot of work to create budgets; it takes a lot of negotiating; it takes one heck of a lot of time to create those nifty Power Point slides with all the numbers on them,” said Steven Filling, Ph.D., a professor of accounting and ethics at Stanislaus State. “But I’m also aware that sometimes things get created without attention to the core values of the organization. I think the core values of Stanislaus County are, indeed, providing service to people, and that’s needs to be the No. 1 thing. Yes, we need to balance the budget, but I’m moderately certain you can instruct these very talented and intelligent folks to go back to their work desks and come up with a solution that doesn’t involve marginalizing all those people.”
• “It seems like you’re targeting this one department,” said Turlock resident Milt Trieweiler. “It’s not their issue; it’s your issue.”

District 3 Supervisor Terry Withrow said he understood the city’s concerns.

“I got on the board just after the Great Recession, and at that point we had to reduce 25 percent of our workforce; it was over 1,000 people we had to reduce and take their jobs for them,” said Withrow. “But we had no choice. We can’t let the entire organization go down in those situations. … We’re not the federal government. We can’t run deficits, and we can’t print money. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to right the ship.”

District 2 Supervisor Vito Chiesa, who represents Turlock, attended the meeting remotely from Washington, D.C. He holds out hope that the situation will improve and wants CSA staff to return in 90 days with an update before the cuts go into effect in March 2027.

“There’s a chance that things get better and there’s a chance that things get worse,” said Chiesa. “But I’m of the belief that things will get better and that the reductions in force won’t have to go so deep.”

“I think it’s very important for everyone in the public to know that every single one of our department heads tried to do their very best to maximize the resources and the service levels within our community,” said county CEO Jody Hayes.

“And with that said, every one of them would like more resources to provide to our community.”