{"id":310854,"date":"2026-05-11T21:12:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T21:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/310854\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T21:12:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T21:12:07","slug":"da-public-safety-unions-decry-reputed-waste-in-latest-salvo-of-santa-clara-county-spending-fight-the-mercury-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/310854\/","title":{"rendered":"DA, public safety unions decry reputed waste in latest salvo of Santa Clara County spending fight \u2013 The Mercury News"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN JOSE \u2014 A coalition of South Bay public safety unions, banding together with Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen, is calling out what they describe as wasteful spending in the latest salvo to preserve law enforcement funding<\/a> while the county grapples with a nearly $800 million budget deficit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rosen and union leaders for the county\u2019s courtroom attorneys, DA investigators, San Jose police and police dispatchers sought to ramp up the public pressure Monday with the launch of a website<\/a> they say calls out millions of dollars in superfluous spending on items like headhunting for tree-maintenance volunteers that the coalition believes flies in the face of the county\u2019s austerity posture as it works through the 2026-2027 budget.<\/p>\n

Max Zarzana, a prosecutor in mental health and drug court who heads the Government Attorneys Association \u2014 the union for the county\u2019s line-level prosecutors and public defenders \u2014 led a news conference Monday that zeroed in on expenses including executive retreats at Stanford University, and virtual coffee meetings, which are funded by contracts amounting to $4.66 million and $3.2 million respectively.<\/p>\n

He said his group only learned about the scope of the under-the-radar contracts as a result of state law requiring wide public disclosure starting this year, and they moved to publish them after getting an unprecedented detailed view.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis website is intended to provide \u2026 credible options that they can choose instead of the deep and debilitating cuts that are being proposed right now,\u201d Zarzana said.<\/p>\n

He also questioned the sensibility of paying millions to hold coffee meetings \u2014 as a peer and caregiver support resource \u2014 that are held exclusively online.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t even suggest that we go from a large down to a small because they\u2019re not even serving real coffee,\u201d Zarzana said.<\/p>\n

Rosen emphasized that the expenses the coalition was outlining have merit in times of budget abundance, but in a financial crunch need to make way for law enforcement staffing that keeps crime at bay.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think a lot of the things in these contracts are certainly \u2018nice to haves,\u2019 are good things, but are they \u2018must haves\u2019 like we must have prosecutors, we must have DA detectives, we must have mental health clinicians?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The county administration was expected to provide a response to the claims Monday afternoon.<\/p>\n

The coalition\u2019s actions Monday continue to inflame tensions between county law enforcement and County Executive James Williams\u2019 administration over Measure A, a tax initiative voters passed last year<\/a> to buoy the county\u2019s finances in anticipation of $1 billion in cuts to federal Medicaid dollars<\/a> that subsidize a quarter of the county\u2019s healthcare system.<\/p>\n

Rosen and other public-safety figures supported the tax measure under the impression that at minimum, its passage would stave off downstream cuts to their agencies, they said. But after being presented with notable cut proposals even after accounting for the $337 million expected to enter county coffers in a full year, they soured on county leaders, and Rosen vocally complained \u00a0he was deceived<\/a>. He would later forewarn public-safety peril<\/a> as a result of the cuts, which in his office amount to the prospective loss of about 40 positions.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Sean Pritchard, former head of the San Jose Police Officers\u2019 Association and now head of the DA Investigators Association, warned of how cuts to his agency would hamper human trafficking enforcement and gun-violence prevention work done in the county.<\/p>\n

The county healthcare system \u2014 now the state\u2019s second-largest after several hospital acquisitions in the past years \u2014 was already in a deficit prior to the federal cuts<\/a> and has absorbed significant job losses, including a round of cuts this past February. Overall, the current proposed budget entails a loss of 464 county jobs, many of them vacant. Behavioral health services in the county are slated to suffer significantly as well with the proposed cut of 110 positions.<\/p>\n

On the latter proposal, Mary Sunzeri, president of the San Jose Police Dispatchers Association, said there is already a resource bottleneck when they want to send a behavioral health specialist or the county-run civilian TRUST team to respond to a mental-health crisis. The city is under pressure from civil rights groups<\/a> \u2014 including the local ACLU chapter and Silicon Valley De-Bug \u2014 to boost the civilian response capacity for these scenarios.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe person in crisis does not need a sheriff deputy or police officer to come out,\u201d Sunzeri said. \u201cWhat they need is a clinician.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zarzana added that jobs like his are most vulnerable when Rosen\u2019s office has to trim his budget \u2014 cuts that Zarzana maintains will like hit staff dedicated to finding non-jail and rehabilitative outcomes for defendants suffering from mental illness and drug addiction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do we think is going to be the first (job) code on the chopping block? It\u2019s not going to be a homicide prosecutor. It\u2019s going to be people like myself who work in mental health drug treatment court,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat are the priorities of the county?\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a developing story. Check back later for updates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN JOSE \u2014 A coalition of South Bay public safety unions, banding together with Santa Clara County District…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[2672,2076,7359,7028,4110,14229,6647,236,1492,88,90,89,198,1747,1519,2328],"class_list":["post-310854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-administration","tag-budget","tag-district-attorney","tag-federal","tag-funding","tag-jeff-rosen","tag-measure-a","tag-police","tag-public-safety","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-santa-clara-county","tag-tax","tag-trump","tag-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}