Every county agency will tell you how much it spends. But almost no county tracks what its dollars actually do. In Contra Costa County, CA, in 2016, everybody knew where its AB 109 realignment funds were supposed to go, but nobody had ever tracked where they all went. So I built that accounting, re-keying the departmental spending I pulled from public meeting packets. What did I find? That $5.46 million of the $20.1 million approved wasn’t being put to its intended purpose. Most of it, $4.7 million, sat unspent; the rest was overspent or reallocated to cover costs no one had authorized.
Later, I opened a separate investigation, into money flowing the other way: what the County collected from the people in its justice system. When the Superior Court answered a public records request with 362 pages of scanned spreadsheets, I turned them into a month-by-month accounting of every criminal justice fee collected on the County’s behalf. It showed that the County had set and raised these fees, imposed millions of dollars of debt on low-income families, and never double-checked to make sure that this practice was legal. That analysis led the Board of Supervisors to suspend those fees and stop collecting the debt in September 2019, making Contra Costa the third county in the nation to do so. By 2022, the debt itself had been erased.
In another analysis, this time of the District Attorney’s civil asset forfeitures, I found that in 62.6% of forfeitures completed in 2018, police had seized people’s property, the seizing agencies and the District Attorney split most of the proceeds, and the people they took it from were never convicted of a crime. In December 2020, the District Attorney adopted a policy that, with narrow exceptions, allows forfeiture only when a criminal charge has been filed.
And after I investigated the policies and practices of a private “community court” — which was run with no contract by the man who held the hearings, set the penalties, and owned the collection company — the new District Attorney shut it down in 2019.
Following the money is one way to find out what a system is actually doing.