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As Santa Clara County leaders ask their top prosecutor to make cuts during a crushing budget deficit, District Attorney Jeff Rosen is instead questioning county spending he considers nonessential — such as summer leadership camps for county executives.
Rosen and a coalition of local law enforcement union leaders on Monday called on the county to review several contracts and redirect any savings toward mental health court workers, attorneys and a non-police mental health crisis response team. This comes as the Board of Supervisors begins publicly hashing out budget recommendations from County Executive James Williams, who has suggested eliminating criminal investigators and prosecutors from Rosen’s office while allocating new tax dollars toward public hospitals. The county anticipates annual losses of $1 billion due to federal spending cuts.
Rosen and law enforcement leaders cited several agreements as well-intentioned but wasteful in a fiscal squeeze, including a county agreement to fund a summer leadership training program for county executives at Stanford. County documents valued the total cost of the agreement at $4.4 million over five years, from July 2025 through June 2030.
Another contract pays a consulting firm $1.4 million over six years to find tree stewards for maintenance after planting. A separate county webpage describes these tree stewards as unpaid volunteers.
“I think a lot of these contracts are nice-to-haves — good things — but are they must-haves?” Rosen said at the Monday news conference. “This group has found places where the county can trim or cut nonessential programs and spending and redirect that to critical public safety services, including mental health professionals like the TRUST (Trusted Response Urgent Support Team) program and prosecutors that work in drug treatment and mental health courtrooms.”
County Executive James Williams called the remarks a “gross misrepresentation” of certain contracts, such as mentoring and car wash services for county vehicles.
“Are they seriously suggesting we stop deep cleaning police cars when people vomit in them? That we abandon mentorship services that help kids escape gang violence?” Williams told San José Spotlight. “Instead of putting forward misinformation about the work of other county departments, we encourage the DA and his allies to focus on the actual budget challenges at hand, which require difficult cuts across the county organization to close a $787 million budget deficit.”
Williams has previously emphasized that his budget memo proposes a net increase in DA spending — and that public safety remains the county’s single largest area of discretionary spending in the county budget.
“I and my staff have been going over all 672 pages of the budget since it was released on May 1. We are about to hold three hearings on all the proposals in this document, and we will revisit discussion in June,” District 5 Supervisor Margaret Abe-Koga told San José Spotlight. “I think it is important to have those frank discussions with my colleagues and the public, thoughtfully and deliberately at that time. This way, everyone will know when to tune in and weigh in — and be afforded the same opportunities to be heard in a public forum.”
Max Zarzana, a county prosecutor and president of the union representing attorneys at the DA and Public Defender’s offices, said their public questioning isn’t meant as a political attack. At the same time, the law enforcement unions have created a website calling out these contracts.
Zarzana said he’s worked in the county’s mental health drug treatment court for the last six years with judges, social workers and treatment providers to get people out of jail and into treatment.
“If forced to cut a prosecutor’s position, what do we think is going to be the first code on the chopping block?” Zarzana said. “It’s not going to be a homicide prosecutor. It’s going to be people like myself who work in mental health drug treatment court. What are the priorities of the county? That? Or a contract worth $1.4 million to locate volunteer tree stewards?”
It’s the latest in a long-brewing political battle between law enforcement leaders and county administrators over which services get priority. Rosen previously criticized Williams’ budget recommendations as being made without his input. This is after Rosen already criticized Williams’ full allocation of a sales tax increase approved by voters last year — known as Measure A — toward county hospitals when Rosen said he gained assurances that law enforcement would see some of the revenue.
Mary Sunzeri, president of the San Jose Police Dispatchers Association, said her department has tried to implement systemic shifts diverting police from mental health calls. County reports consistently show more mental health emergency calls going to the non-police TRUST team than all other crisis support programs that involve police. Yet San Jose faces mounting legal pressure over its lagging progress on rerouting calls to the team, which city officials blame on a lack of capacity at the county.
“We have tried to implement change in bringing TRUST out and sending calls out after we triage them … but if there are no resources for them to respond, I do have to send a police officer,” Sunzeri said at the news conference. “It does create a bit of frustration and stress on us out there … when you have a family member who’s called back three or four times because they need someone to help out.”
This story was written by Brandon Pho for San José Spotlight. The original version of this article can be viewed here.
Contact Brandon Pho at brandon@sanjosespotlight.com or @brandonphooo on X.
