LA County Weighs $69.5M Care First Plan, Solis Fence Budget

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors took up two public-funding items at its 9:30 a.m. meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 27, pairing a large criminal-justice-diversion spending plan with a smaller capital fix at one of the county’s signature aquatic facilities. Both items appeared on the published agenda as actions for the Board to take, not as outcomes already recorded. The American Developer has not located a minute order or vote tally confirming final Board action on either item as of this writing.

Why it matters

Item 1 asked the Board to approve the Fiscal Year 2026-27 Care First and Community Investment Year Six Spending Plan, a $69,500,000 package covering Direct Community Investments and Alternatives to Incarceration programs, administered through the Chief Executive Office. The recommended action included transferring that full amount out of the CFCI Unspent, Uncommitted, Unencumbered budget unit and the CFCI To-Be-Allocated budget unit into various program-specific budget units. For builders and operators tracking where county dollars flow into community-facing programs and facilities, a six-figure diversion fund of this size signals continued county appetite for non-carceral investment over new jail capacity.

Item 4, brought by Supervisor Hilda L. Solis, is narrower but has a direct construction angle: a revised project budget for a new perimeter fence at the Hilda L. Solis Aquatic Center, Capital Project No. 69909. The item asked the Board to find the fence work within the scope of the facility’s previously adopted Mitigated Negative Declaration under the California Environmental Quality Act, meaning no new environmental review, and to authorize a contract amendment with Balfour Beatty Construction, LLC.

The numbers

The Care First item sought approval of the full $69.5 million FY2026-27 allocation, split between Direct Community Investments and Alternatives to Incarceration. The aquatic center item sought a revised project budget of $36,560,000, an increase of $600,000 over the previously Board-approved $35,960,000, funded from the Climate Equity Action Fund. The fence contract amendment with Balfour Beatty Construction was capped at not-to-exceed $400,000. Because the fence item requires approval under Public Contract Code section 20137, it needed a four-fifths vote of the five-member Board, a higher bar than a simple majority item.

What’s next

Neither item’s agenda listing constitutes a recorded Board decision. The American Developer checked the Board’s public site and its linked Statement of Proceedings and meeting-media pages for an Oct. 27 minute order or vote result and did not find one posted. Readers tracking either item should look for the county’s official Statement of Proceedings for the Oct. 27 meeting, which the Executive Office publishes after each session, for confirmation of whether the Care First spending plan and the Solis center fence budget actually passed. This agenda sits alongside other Southern California public-investment activity this desk is tracking, including affordable housing financing such as Sankofa Place in Inglewood. More from Los Angeles.