Along with Cupertino and Saratoga, Los Altos Hills uses the Santa Clara County Sheriff for public safety and law enforcement. Historically, that has been a way to obtain police services at reasonable cost.

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In past years, the increase in the contract cost has been manageable, typically around 5%.

This year, the increase ia very significant. The initial sheriff's contract proposal came in at over $3.5M.

That has since been revised downward slightly.

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2025-2026 Budget:

    LAH General Fund Revenues: $14.5M

    Sheriff's Contract: $2.75M

    Private Security: $0.5M

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2026-2027 Budget:

    LAH General Fund Revenues: $14.5M

    Sheriff's Contract: $3.38M (+22% over previous year)

    Private Security (est.): $0.5M

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How much​ coverage do we get for this level of service?

This includes 5,421 hours of Patrol coverage by 1 deputy. That is 62% of the 8,760 hours in a year.

It also includes 1,860 hours of traffic enforcement. The town is considering exchanging a portion of the traffic officer hours for additional patrol offier hours.

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Below is the breakdown for all three cities:

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​Note that the actual cost of the deputy hours for Los Altos Hills is $1.5M.

The rest is support services, overhead and (modest) equipment costs: $1.88M

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The current draft county budget (which currently eliminates the Sheriff's contract for the three cities) shows cost reductions in the amount of $28M if the contracts for the three cities are cancelled. This contrasts with the three city total cost of $38M in the table below.

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Under California Government Code Sec § 51350 , all costs incurred with the county providing a contracted service to a city must be charged to the city. Reflexively, a county cannot charge a city for those portion of the costs which are made available to all portions of the county, or which are general overhead costs of operation of the county government.

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This is the key point in the negotiation: which costs are overhead costs that are attributable to overall count operations and which costs are incurred pursuant to providing the service to the city. We need to close on this soon. Additionally, the draft contract proposed by the county has a number of open-ended cost factors that are undefined at this time.

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Long term, it is clear that the town would benefit from increased patrol coverage at more efficient cost with our own police department. While that would be beneficial from an ROI perspective, it would also result in an increased total budget for police services.

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