Sacramento’s city budget is filled with fiction and phony job vacancies | Opinion
In the city of Sacramento, a police officer position has remained vacant for 2.8 years. A job as an investigator for the city attorney has gone unfilled for 3.1 years. A position as a parking enforcer has been available for 5.7 years. And for the City Council, an executive assistant slot has remained open for 8.1 years.
It turns out that these long-term vacancies, creating savings that can be spent, are not an accident.
They are part of a pattern of deception within Sacramento City Hall, where the official budget on big-ticket items like police overtime is complete fiction and intentionally low-balled. The real overtime budget depends on “savings” from vacant positions. So what can appear to be a vacant police position, money just sitting there, is actually money being earmarked off the books for overtime or some other purpose.
Now that Sacramento is in the throes of a tough budget year, City Councilmember Roger Dickinson has decided to take a rare, “deeper dive” into the vacancies. At his request, the city has produced a list of every one of them (look at Item 3 in Supplement Budget Information) including an assistant camp chef job that has gone unfilled for nine years.
As Dickinson has been asking why Sacramento can’t get rid of city positions that have gone unfilled for years, the staff is pushing back. Dickinson is simply digging too deep, they basically say. Eliminating vacancies in the Police Department is described by Chief Katherine Lester as “catastrophic.”
This budget seems intentionally designed so that council members like Dickinson will struggle to find savings that the staff hasn’t already proposed. He and other council members are running out of time to do so as a key meeting approaches Tuesday. But at least in this budget season, thanks to Dickinson, the council has the choice of going along with this horribly non-transparent way of budgeting or to begin to make some changes.
A “deeper dive”
“Some of these positions have been vacant for 1,000 or 2,000 days,” Dickinson said at last Tuesday night’s council meeting. “I think there are a number of positions…we could look at…I would suggest that we take a deeper dive into the vacant positions.”
Just because a city position is vacant doesn’t mean that the city isn’t spending that money.
“Automatically eliminating all positions that have been vacant for more than a year could lead to unintended consequences, including reduced service levels, increased strain on remaining staff, and the loss of critical functions that may still be necessary in the near future,” said city spokesperson Jennifer Singer. “Every vacancy has context, and each one is reviewed through the lens of current and future operational needs.”
Frankly, the greatest abuser of phantom budgeting with this money involving vacancies is the City Council itself. It technically has 13 vacancies, but the money has been used to fund 18.55 positions officially categorized as “non-budgeted.”
City-wide, the city says there are 203.3 “non-budgeted positions” that can “temporarily take the place of a vacant budgeted position.” Temporarily, for actually years. These hires apparently can happen when the applicants don’t match the qualifications of the official position.
How vacancies pay for police overtime
Meanwhile, the Police Department has nearly 18% of its 1092.5 positions standing vacant. Mayor McCarty asked Chief Lester last Tuesday what would happen if that money was taken away.
“Catastrophic,” Lester told the council. “We’ve got 218 people deployed in patrol,” she said, which is nearly on par with the number of vacant positions. Those officers on patrol work overtime. “When you look at our overtime usage….that’s really what we use, those vacancy savings.”
The City Council could insist on a far more accurate budget for police overtime in the official budget and delete some of the vacancies. But that’s not how Sacramento normally handles spending decisions.
Credit McCarty for naming Dickinson his chair of the council’s Budget and Audit committee. The mayor could have picked just about any other council member who has no track record of asking sensitive money questions of staff. But Dickinson is a veteran of ugly budget cycles, particularly years ago when on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, when he said he did a similar exploration of county vacancies.
“There are really opportunities to save money by cutting long-time vacant positions,” he said.
Breaking a bad budget tradition
This budget year is no exception to a long and troublesome pattern in Sacramento. Under the eight-year reign of former City Manager Howard Chan, the real political power became consolidated in his position and not that of the mayor. And it was Chan’s control of the budget and of staff that kept the City Council in check.
The interim city manager, Leyne Milstein, is a long-time city staffer and a Chan protege.. She could have used this budget to blow up the boxes and shift monies from vacancies into the actual budget so that her council could have more power to make real decisions. But she did not.
It’s ludicrous for staff to continue defending that 90% of vacancies are untouchable, as the council on Tuesday is expected to suggest some final touches on the proposed budget to prepare the final document for approval next month.
Fellow council members need to follow Dickinson’s and begin to ask tougher questions. This is not how a sophisticated organization does budgeting and strategic spending. Sacramento needs to get smarter than this.
This story was originally published May 19, 2025 at 5:00 AM.