Santa Barbara County, California

Overview

Santa Barbara County’s FY 2025-26 adopted operating budget totals $1.69 billion in expenditures against $1.64 billion in operating revenues, with non-operating revenues of $0.05 billion. Staffing is 4,738.5 full-time equivalents, down 6.5 from the recommended budget. The adopted budget addresses the Board’s focus areas of a safe and just community, a thriving and sustainable environment, a healthy and equitable community, and continued financial stability — funding mandated and essential services, debt service obligations, deferred maintenance and infrastructure needs, and Board priorities under the Board’s financial management policies.

Source: County of Santa Barbara, Summary of Significant Changes, FY 2025-26 Recommended to Adopted Budget.

At a glance — FY 2025-26 adopted

Source: County of Santa Barbara, Summary of Significant Changes, FY 2025-26.

Adopted budget, FY 2025-26

Recommended-to-adopted changes are exact in the summary; adopted totals are stated rounded to $0.01 billion. Adopted operating revenues of $1.64 billion are $1,968,900 (0.12%) below the recommended budget, predominantly from adjustments in state and federal revenue. Adopted operating expenditures of $1.69 billion are $609,900 (0.04%) below recommended, driven by a $2.1 million decrease in salaries and benefits, partly offset by a $1.4 million increase in services and supplies and other charges.

Source: County of Santa Barbara, Summary of Significant Changes, FY 2025-26.

Changes by fund, recommended to adopted

Operating expenditure changes by fund (excluding operating transfers). The salary-and-benefits changes sum to −$2,031,100 and the services-and-supplies/other-charges changes sum to +$1,421,200, giving the total change of −$609,900 — exact. The fund rows also sum exactly to −$609,900. The salary decrease is driven by a $621,100 reduction of County Health extra-help positions after the federal government rescinded Epidemiology Laboratory Capacity and COVID-19 immunization grant funding, plus 6.5 un-funded FTEs (3 in Planning and Development on fee-study delays; 3.5 in the Sheriff’s Office on cannabis-enforcement reallocation and dispatch reorganization). Services-and-supplies increases were driven by Public Works projects and legal services ($1.2 million) and $925,600 to replace the Sheriff’s in-car video system, partly offset by a $710,400 County Health reduction on the rescinded grants.

Source: County of Santa Barbara, Summary of Significant Changes, FY 2025-26.

Elected officials

No elected officials are named in the cited summary, so none are listed here rather than supplied from another source.

Source: County of Santa Barbara, Summary of Significant Changes, FY 2025-26.

Board meetings

The Board of Supervisors meets on Tuesdays at 9:00 a.m., alternating between the Board Hearing Room in Santa Barbara (County Administration Building, Fourth Floor, 105 East Anapamu Street) and the Board Hearing Room in Santa Maria (Joseph Centeno Betteravia Government Administration Building, 511 East Lakeside Parkway), on dates set by the Board’s calendar — not every Tuesday.

Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors meeting calendar (Legistar)

No next meeting date is asserted here — see the official calendar for the next scheduled date and which hearing room it uses.

Livability — Santa Barbara County

Santa Barbara County scores 55.6 on the Hometown Numbers Livability Index, ranked #16 of 58 ranked California counties. Violent crime: 432.6 reported violent crimes per 100,000 residents in 2024 (FBI Crime Data Explorer; score 57.0, where a higher score means a lower rate). Full rankings: California livability rankings.

Method: percentile rank (count below + 0.5 × count equal) ÷ N × 100, lower-better measures inverted; composite is the mean of available component scores, rounded to 1 decimal; a county needs at least 5 of 7 components or it is unranked, never estimated. Vintages: ACS 2024 5-year (2020–2024) for housing affordability, income, and commute; FBI Crime Data Explorer 2024 for violent crime; County Health Rankings 2025 release for graduation and uninsured. Unemployment (BLS LAUS 2024) is missing for every California county because the BLS public API was unreachable (HTTP 503) on 2026-10-25; composites rest on the other components and will be recomputed if BLS data becomes available.

Housing prices — Santa Barbara County

County-level figures for Santa Barbara County.

Source: American Community Survey 2024 5-year estimates (2020–2024), tables B25077 (median home value) and B25064 (median gross rent).

Public schools — Santa Barbara County

Schools physically located in Santa Barbara County.

126 public schools in 34 school districts, from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES EDGE Public School Locations, 2024–25 school year).

2 schools in the NCES 2024–25 locations list for this county are not shown because they are not currently open: Cuyama Valley Junior High (status 7), Guadalupe Junior High (status 7) — temporarily closed (status 6) or scheduled to open within 2 years (status 7) under NCES CCD operational status codes.

School performance (proficiency): district-level proficiency values are published in the federal Ed Data Express tool and are retrievable by CSV export, but they have not yet been added to this page — the export requires a live-browser download (direct requests to the tool are blocked), so no proficiency figures are shown rather than substituted ones. Source for the list: NCES EDGE Public School Locations — Current, 2024–25.

Neighbor comparison

How Santa Barbara County’s General Fund spending per resident and fund-balance share compare with adjacent counties, computed from each dashboard’s own published figures.

GF total dashed: no GF total shown from the adopted-budget summary (per page disclosure)

Fund-balance % dashed: no GF ending balance published

Kern County: GF total dashed: no GF total published (page reports County Funds group $4,358,790,731 and All Funds only)

Kern County: Fund-balance % dashed: no GF ending balance published

Ventura County: Fund-balance % dashed: fund balance available $111,431,474 is beginning, not ending

San Luis Obispo County: No San Luis Obispo County dashboard in this dataset (no county GF figure exists here); a city dashboard in the county, if any, does not supply a county figure.

Per-capita GF spending = the dashboard’s published General Fund total ÷ county population (ACS 2024 5-year, table B01003). Fund balance % = published GF ending balance ÷ GF total for the same fiscal year unless noted.

— in the fund-balance column means no GF ending balance is published on that dashboard (adopted budgets typically state only a January 1 balance).

Neighbor rows are county figures for the counties adjacent to the home county (U.S. Census Bureau County Adjacency File, 2024; out-of-state neighbors excluded).

Sources & notes

• Only source used: County of Santa Barbara, Summary of Significant Changes, FY 2025-26 Recommended to Adopted Budget (CivicPlus-hosted county document). Summary of significant changes.
• Sum checks: salary changes (−$2,031,100) plus services-and-supplies changes (+$1,421,200) equal the total expenditure change (−$609,900); fund-row changes sum exactly to −$609,900; staffing change exact (4,745.0 − 6.5 = 4,738.5).
• What is not claimed: exact adopted operating revenue and expenditure dollars are not stated in the summary (only $0.01-billion-rounded totals) and are not invented; no General Fund total, function breakdown, or outstanding-debt total is shown from this summary; the county Budget Documents page row for 2025-2026 yielded no text and is not cited for figures.
• Page accent: #3C5887, the County of Santa Barbara’s official site theme color (countyofsb.org); the dark-theme accent (#95ABD0) is a lightened tint of the same color for contrast on the dark background.

← Back to California