Shasta’s Health and Human Services Agency will consider monthly staff furlough to address ongoing budget crisis
HHSA Director Christy Coleman will present Tuesday about ongoing budget concerns that have left the county’s largest agency more than $4 million in the red. Potential cost-saving measures include a monthly mandatory furlough for all HHSA staff members. The measure would amount to a 5% pay cut for about half the county’s employees.
Cost-cutting measures at Shasta County’s Health and Human Services Agency, which manages about half of the county’s $600 million annual budget, haven’t been sufficient to address ongoing budget instability, according to a presentation that will be shared by Director Christy Coleman on Tuesday.
HHSA has faced significant financial challenges for several years. In October, the board tasked Coleman to reduce expenditures in the social services fund budget by $1 million a month. She’s done that, Coleman’s presentation indicates, but it hasn’t been enough. A staff report shared with the board doesn’t provide a clear explanation for why the fund is continuing to run short of cash.
Coleman will ask the board to approve temporarily drawing on $10 million from the county’s general fund to augment HHSA’s shortfall. She’s also suggesting a severe cost-saving measure moving forward: a mandatory furlough of all HHSA staff members for one day a month. If approved, the action would amount to a 5% salary reduction for close to half of the county’s staff.
A furlough is just one of several options being considered by Coleman to address a current budget shortfall that was more than $4 million as of early May. HHSA’s social services fund is anticipated to remain in a negative cash flow into 2027, the staff report says.
Successful cost-saving measures that have been taken to address shortfalls so far include a reduction in travel and office supply expenses, HHSA’s presentation indicates, as well as an agency-wide soft hiring freeze. The agency has also reduced costs by closing multiple service locations and may also close the California Street office.
Supervisors first approved temporarily using general funds to support HHSA’s social services fund in March 2025, according to a timeline shared by Coleman for Tuesday’s meeting. The amount requested by the agency was originally up to $10.5 million. In June, Coleman came back, asking for a loan of half of that amount, or $5 million, to be extended through October. In September she asked for an increase up to $7 million along with another extension. General fund support for that amount has been extended twice more since then, through June 30.
Over recent weeks, Coleman has reached out to HHSA staff by email, sharing the news of continuing financial issues at HHSA and explaining the options she’s considering to address it, including the possibility of the mandatory staff furlough. Her emails, shared with Shasta Scout by several agency employees, are vague on what led to the problem.
“Having more expenditures than revenue for a continued amount of time strains cash flow,” Coleman wrote to staff on May 6. “There isn’t one thing that caused this, it’s really a combination of things that happened.”
Coleman was appointed as HHSA’s director by supervisors last year without an open recruitment process and against the wishes of mid-level managers at the agency, who issued a vote of no-confidence in her leadership shortly before the board approved Coleman as director.
Teamsters Local 137 business manager Heather McFall alleged at the time that Coleman and former HHSA Director Laura Burch had put high-level staffers into positions at HHSA that they were not qualified to hold. As a result, she said, mid-level managers were left to fill gaps in institutional knowledge and expertise as best they could while facing pushback from those placed in authority over them. Coleman responded to the vote of no confidence at the time by saying she believes in an open-door policy and will continue to foster open communication with HHSA employees. She reiterated those sentiments this week.
“Transparency with our HHSA staff is important to me,” Coleman wrote to Shasta Scout, saying that’s why she’s been communicating about potential budget cut approaches with staff by email in the lead-up to Tuesday’s meeting.
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This falls squarely on Crye and Kelstrom… and to Corkey too for not educating the rest of us.. Long and Plummer have been screaming about it. Crye has emphatically said in his campaign commercials he balanced the County’s budget…obviously this was a falsehood
Vote the bums out
We are scheduled to lose 2 million dollars at the food bank next month.. we will have to do more with less.. which really means depending more upon the generosity of the corporate food donations made by our community
For those of you with TDS and rant every time you make a post you only diminish the crux of your post.
The biggest problem is the lack of experienced employees. They ran off most of the people who actually know how to run HHSA and won’t listen to those who have remained. From what I’m seeing, the biggest issue is their lack of knowledge of how the funding streams work. They don’t fill positions that receive the state and federal funding, but keep the positions that are paid by the county, or only collect admin fees if the open positions were filled. HHSA Administration has Managers with 6-15 employees under them, while other branches Managers are responsible for 50-60 employees. They could save money by removing 1-2 unnecessary Manager positions in Administration (which aren’t funded by state and federal in income). But those are the positions filled by their friends.
In my graduate program, I was fortunate to have Dennis McFall, a longtime Director of the Shasta County Department of Social Services, as a mentor and educator. After Dennis retired from the county, he helped develop the MSW program at Chico State. I’m also fortunate to be a lifelong friend of Cathern Camp, who, after retiring as executive director of the California Mental Health Directors Association, helped set up Shasta County’s Mental Health Services Act (MHSA), now called the California Behavioral Health Services Act (BHSA). I fully understand that social service program development and administration require a very special skill set. There are many moving parts at the local, state, and national levels that you must understand and keep up with, often involving a very large share of a county’s budget. Sadly, we won’t have much of the skill set here in Shasta County. Here’s why.
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This county has been under a well-funded, coordinated MAGA attack for years. We have always been a conservative county, but right after President Obama took office, MAGA kicked in hard, and even harder after Biden won. The result? Secession, election lies and conspiracies, anti-immigrant sentiment, pro-gun positions, and a new mantra, as Crye says often, “Social Services should be run by the church (of Trump), not local government!” Both Kelstorm and his good buddy P. Jones (still running Shasta Co. MAGA from behind the lines at the ROV office) agrees with Crye, and if it ain’t CRYING WOLF, Corky doesn’t know what we’re talking about.
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Leaders with a legacy, such as Dr. Karen Ramstrom, Shasta County Health Officer, were fired by MAGA CRYERS “without cause” for following the LAW (kinda like Sheriff Magrini). MAGA supervisors replaced Shasta County Health and Human Services Agency (HHSA) Director Donnell Ewert with people like Jon Knight, Crye’s buddy, a militia conspiracy theorist and founder of the Red White Blueprint, known for Jewish mosquitos’ delivery COVID vaccine fame. Many middle-level staff across all sectors of Shasta County government were cried out by MAGA, including our ROV, for not towing the tRumpian CRYE-LINE; the same with people on community service boards that won’t tow Crye’s line. And understandably, most of Shasta County is just struggling to pay the bills, which are increasing exponentially daily under Trump 2.0, so the public does see the Titanic going down under Crye’s foolish, vindictive, ignorant, and incompetent leadership, until it’s too late.
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There’s only one way out of the Crye-Jones-Kelstorm- Curtis MAGA chokehold that sinking Shasta County. Vote them out!
Seems I was right, an uptick in homeless and welfare services caused the need for HHS to borrow from the general fund.
We are in an economic crisis; HHSA is just the tip of the iceberg. Crye and Kelstrom know it! I would mention Corky, but why bother? Crye and Kelstrom have been rearranging the deck chairs and even sent an SOS to Gavin Newsom on April 7, but they sent it to the wrong guy.
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Crye and Kelstorm, both Trumpian arms of the Shasta Co. Republican Central Committee, have been doing their best to Trumpify Shasta County into a very distorted MAGA-City on a Hill. They all voted for the Court-Adjudicated Rapist – Convicted 34 Court Felon, and now we are reaping what they have sown. HR 1, their Big Ugly Bill (BUB)!
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A 2026 regional healthcare report found that about one-third of residents in the Shasta/Lassen region rely on Medi-Cal, while Medicare enrollment is significantly above the state average. The BUB will cause severe losses in healthcare coverage in Shasta County and could trigger catastrophic ripple effects, risking the economic viability of Shasta Regional Medical Center, Mercy Medical Center Redding, Shasta Community Health Center, Mayers Memorial, and small clinics like Hill County Medical and Fall River Health Center.
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A Shasta County economic snapshot estimated that Trump’s BUB alone could cost the county more than 1,100 healthcare-related jobs. Remember, every healthcare job supports roughly 1.5 additional non-healthcare jobs. The multiplier effect will hit Shasta County’s restaurants, retail stores, real estate, construction, and transportation sectors hard, and Home Health Care clients, like grandma, could be pushed out onto the street. And just recently, the Adjudicated Rapist just cut another 1.3 billion in federal Medicaid (Medi-Cal) payments to California!
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This is why we need a major change in national and local governance. Crye, Kelstorm, and their avatar, Trump, are deliberately hurting Shasta County so the rich can get richer and the rest of us poorer. But as inflation, gas, food, and housing prices are rising quickly, the Adjudicated Rapist’s polling numbers are rapidly sinking, with only 35% of Americans approving his presidency (Pew Research Center – Reuters/Ipsos Poll). Hopefully, the same is true for Crye and Kelstorm! VOTE FOR SAFE AND SANE RECOVERY. Vote Chaos Cray-Cray Crye, Curtis, Hobbs, and Jones out!
I’m sorry Christian but, you continually go over the same statements. Many now just pass over your comments. The problem with the county is NOW, not in the future when other programs take effect.
Carol, sorry, but I read every correct word Mr. Gardinier printed and what does it matter if the problem is now vs the future, the future IS tomorrow, jobs lost are jobs lost, services lost are hurtful to Shasta County’s less fortunate, what are you doing to make the day better for street folks and their pets ?
“put high-level staffers into positions at HHSA that they were not qualified to hold. As a result, she said, mid-level managers were left to fill gaps in institutional knowledge and expertise as best they could while facing pushback from those placed in authority over them. ” This statement seems to be a New reality with many recent appointments across many County agencies – ROV comes to mind too…. The problem is from the top – Board of Directors – and won’t change until we change the board members with our coming vote.
Furloughs can’t even be considered as an option until the union votes to approve it, and that will never happen.
Something tells me that if it comes to a choice between furloughs and layoffs, the unions will vote for it. Shame that it came to this, the leadership of HHSA was fantastic until 2022, then quickly went off the rails.
What I wonder is how much money HHSA is leaving on the table by not filling grant-funded positions, and whether that would have made a difference here.
Not to mention the agency would need a huge amount of employees to agree to taking off once a month without pay, making an economic dent in the employees income, and thus the local economy…messy times, vote your conscious, which means vote them out and get fresh minds.
Staff has been warning and whistleblowing for years about the incompetence and mismanagement in HHSA and the mess that has been festering all this time.
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Christy and Erinn will not be able to explain to the Board why the Agency is underwater. They don’t know.
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And they are in charge. Which is why the employees will end up suffering even though they tried to sound the alarm so many times. There will be more furloughs and/or layoffs as long as Christy and Erinn remain in charge.
HHSA is running a deficit but the the other county departments aren’t and are making up the difference. We should probably cut back on homeless programs to cut the deficit.
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
The only reason county remains financially solvent is because there are hundreds of unfilled job vacancies. If the county was fully staffed in all county departments, it would quickly go bankrupt. Crye and Kelstrom have been consistently gaslighting constituents claiming county budget is on solid footing. Once Trump’s BBB cuts take effect, the county will either need to make drastic cuts or borrow money. Wake up and smell the coffee Nickie.
Kevin Crye claims that he is the cause for balanced budget…
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Yet the county department that HE meddled in more than any other department is significantly in the red.
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Not to mention that we are still wasting taxpayer money on stupid unfounded, election denialism. Are also a ton of lawsuits that are happening they’re going to cost the county a ton more of the tax payers money.
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Yup, Crye sure is a shining example of a fiscal conservative.
/s
It’s interesting that HHSA administration leadership prior to Laura Burch, and now Christy Coleman, were able to consistantly and effectively manage all of the various funding streams for the many programs for which it is responsible. It’s also interesting there is no detailed explanation of why there was a need for what has added up to $22.5 million being taken from the county general fund and now another $4 million shortfall.
I guess that’s what happens when you have an HHSA administration and county BOS that do not value the historical knowledge, skills, and abilities of those who do know what and how things have to be done.
Is there a shared mindset among some appointed and elected leaders of trained monkeys being able to do the job just as well?
Didn’t I just see a certain board member running for reelection state that the counties budget is in the black unlike the City of Redding? Sounds to me like there is more going on with the counties budget than current BOS want to publicly admit. And this he claims to be proud of? Wow that’s pretty low expectations of oneself in my opinion.