ACT’s Homelessness & Housing Local Organizing Committee (LOC) Letter to the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors Regarding the FY 2020-2021 Budget:
September 2, 2020
Supervisor Phil Serna, Chair, and Members
Sacramento County Board of Supervisors
700 H Street, Suite 2450
Sacramento, CA 95814
Dear Chair Serna and Members of the Board of Supervisors:
Sacramento Area Congregations Together (SacACT) provides these comments on the FY 2020/21 budget that was released on August 28, 2020.
We appreciate the brief opportunity we had to discuss the general direction of the budget with staff, and we reiterate our concern that the budget MUST address public health and homelessness in a robust way. We understand the county struggles with loss of revenue and increased costs due to the pandemic, but it is essential that decisions about whether to augment or cut programs depart from the “status quo” orientation we see in the proposed budget. Click here to read the full letter.
Recent actions by the board that essentially delegated the CARES decisions to the County Executive officer make it clear that law enforcement still has a stranglehold on the budget. Our perception of your recent decisions, while perhaps intended to minimize negative impacts on the FY2020-2021 budget, is that they hold the Sheriff’s Office essentially “harmless” while other county human and health services are considered less worthy of being held harmless or even augmented. Especially we ask that you not delegate any major decisions to the County Executive without clear direction by the Board.
SacACT respectfully urges you to take seriously the notion that budgets are moral documents that reflect our values and raise the value of human needs for health, income support, rent relief, and other urgent services as high as possible in the budget you are about to adopt.
Beyond that, we urge you to start a process for the FY 2021/22 budget that will closely look at all the ways the county spends money with an eye to rethinking the balance of human services that prevent crime and reduce policing needs versus direct law enforcement activities. The safety of county residents is certainly an important part of your overall job—but there are many ways to make this a safer county, and they don’t require that law enforcement get the lion’s share of general funds available.
Increased Funding for Homeless Services
For many years, SacACT has urged key elected officials in our community to sponsor the development of a comprehensive, collaborative plan to end homelessness. Given the huge number of homeless people on the streets, and others cycling in and out of emergency shelters, it is clear that we have a long way to go to solve this acute problem. As a result of this enormous unmet need, SacACT has supported incremental increases in County funding for homeless programs in recent years without challenging the design of various programs because almost anything has been a positive step toward improving our community’s support for homeless people.
Top management of the County’s executive team assure us that the County has preserved funding in the proposed FY 2020/21 budget for all of the programs funded in the FY 2019/20 budget unless it is clear that service needs have declined. Detailed information about program funding levels and sources received 9/1/2020 confirm that this is the case. The Board has already approved, on a provisional basis, at least 11 contracts over the period from June 16 to July 23 with entities that provide housing and services that implement various County homeless programs. These contracts amount to $8.9 million dollars of the $24.3 million the County budgeted from all sources in FY 2019/20. Approval is still needed for the majority of the funding for the program and service operators that will be funded out of the final FY 2020/21 budget. We appreciate the Board’s actions to date, and the recommendations of the Executive Officer that nearly all programs will continue to be funded at the level approved in FY 2019/20 and higher in some cases.
We are disappointed that the pandemic and its economic repercussions, even with extensive financial support from state and federal governments, did not motivate the County Executive to expand the scope of existing programs or lead to new programs. We have three specific recommendations for new and continuing programs:
a. Homeless Encampment Outreach and Support
The original Covid-19 Homelessness Response Plan included $1.25 million to support outreach to homeless encampments throughout the County and the City of Sacramento. This effort was funded by $0.25 million from County DHS to fund placement and upkeep of sanitation stations. $1.0 million from the Sacramento CoC funded outreach services, water deliveries, food distribution, and protective gear in order reduce the spread of the virus. Medical review and assessment was provided through UC Davis medical students and other trained volunteers. Although not directly mentioned in the Board letter for Agenda Item #9 3 of the July 14 Board meeting, the $2.15 million approved did include funds to continue encampment outreach through September 30. SacACT recommends that the County fund an encampment outreach program through the balance of FY 20/21 as follows:
i) Augment its DHA homelessness programs to extend this encampment outreach effort through the end of FY2020/21. This would cost about $0.75 million.
ii) Because DHS intends to fund the sanitation stations (porta potties and wash stations) only until the end of the year; therefore the DHS, Public Health Division budget should be increased to fund sanitation services by $0.5 million
iii) Since it is critical that trash services be added to what has already been provided to encampments from April through July to these encampments, the budget of the Waste Management Department should be increased to support placement of waste containers and frequent waste pickup, and
iv) Park Rangers and Sheriff Deputies should be directed to not harass the encampments that have been de facto sanctioned by virtue of the extensive support they have received since April of this year.
b. Permanent Supportive Housing
On August 11, County staff put forward a proposed application for the State’s Homekey Program that is generally understood to fund acquisition, rehabilitation, and operation of motels as permanent supportive housing. The Board rejected this proposal on the grounds that the specific motel proposed was too important to the continuing development of McClellan Business Park. Although this means Sacramento County lost the opportunity to apply in the first round of applications, it is possible that funding may be available later this year.
The County should develop a proposal that is scalable using new manufactured housing as the basis for one or more “tiny home” villages. A 20-unit manufactured housing village with associated common use structures comparable to the St. John’s project funded by the City would cost about $4.5 million, but would re quire only about $1.0 million from the County with the balance from State Homekey funds. There is ample evidence that more housing is needed to serve unsheltered homeless people, and this is the fastest and cheapest way to provide this housing. SacACT recommends setting aside $1.0 million of funding not tied to the CARES expenditure deadline, so that if Homekey Program funding is not available, this “setaside” can be redirected to other purposes during the year.
c. 2021 Point-in-Time Count
In FY2016/17 and FY 2018/19, the County provided $50,000 to the CoC/SSF to assist with the biennial Point-in-Time Count. This is a primary data collection effort that helps to characterize the size and nature of the unsheltered homeless population in our community. The County is a direct beneficiary of the data collected for use in designing the nature and scale of County programs. No evidence of such funding exists in the detailed budget materials provided by DHA to SacACT. This effort must not be compromised by funding shortfalls. SacACT recommends that the County find $0.05 million from some other homeless program with a flexible funding source and allocate it to the CoC/SSF for the 2021 Point-in-Time Count.
Homelessness Prevention: Immediate Rent Relief
We call for the Board to authorize $5 million for a renter relief program, to be administered by SHRA in parallel with the similar program authorized and under development for the City of Sacramento. Although the legislature has passed, and the governor has signed, AB3088, this legislation does not relieve tenants from repaying the debt they owe landlords. In fact, it requires partial payments of monthly rents beginning September 1 despite reductions in unemployment benefits to laid-off workers. The need for renter relief still exists, starting immediately. Given the scope of the current economic crisis, our unemployment levels, and the devastating social (and real budgetary) costs of increased homelessness, it is not too much to ask that a mere 1 percent of the County’s general fund be used to prevent at least 1,000 families from becoming homeless in the next three months. How inequitable it would be if the City of Sacramento uses relief funds to take responsibility for some struggling renters, and the County fails to do so!
In April and May, SacACT conducted a listening campaign with over 100 area residents most severely impacted by COVID-19. They told us that they were barely hanging on before this crisis. They told us their minimum wage jobs hadn’t allowed them to save for this “rainy day” and they didn’t have family able to assist them. For most of them, their service industry jobs have NOT come back.
Today, eviction is looming over their heads. What will they do? Where will they go? They are understandably terrified. Assisting as many of these families as we can is a perfectly appropriate use of federal and state funds. We need to remember that it will benefit us all by boosting our economy and preventing costly downstream problems. 5
Since the likely source of funding for a short term program is HUD ESG-CV2 funds, SacACT believes that the Board of Supervisors should approve funding for a renter relief program as an amendment to the current year’s Housing Authority of the County of Sacramento Annual Action Plan. SHRA is hard at work designing the City’s program as this is being written. This program will have as its overarching priority the prevention of eviction for our most vulnerable neighbors. With the work being done by SHRA, there is no need for the County to “reinvent the wheel”, but simply to augment the pool of funds to be administered by SHRA, reserved, of course, for assistance to County residents.
We Need to Reimagine the Budgeting Process
There is an urgent need for the county to expand the transparency and public involvement in the budget process. The Board’s recent action to delegate to the County Executive officer the allotment of CARES Act funding, whatever its motivation, appeared to be a flat-out giveaway to the Sheriff’s Office at the expense of critical public health and social services for which Congress intended the funding. Notwith-standing that the motives may have been good, this approach to major funding decisions should NOT be repeated.
We suggest that not only should the board consider specific spending proposals from ourselves and other human services advocates in this budget; you should also commit to an ongoing and transparent process to look at long-term budget issues. You should establish a citizens’ task force and schedule periodic open public workshops over the coming months so that potential restructuring of the budget can be explored before the 2021-2022 budget starts to take shape. You should give people an opportunity to learn more about your constraints, to review current spending and projected future needs, and to offer recommendations to reduce the reflexive need to protect the Sheriff’s Office in spite of the potential cost to other vital services.
A Comprehensive, Regional Plan to End Homelessness
For years, Sacramento ACT has implored elected officials in our community to come together to develop a comprehensive plan to end homelessness. Ending homelessness – making homelessness brief, rare, and one time – is not only possible, but will lead to a vast array of human, social, and even financial benefits. The human and social costs of ‘managing’ homelessness in our current manner are huge in terms of wasted human potential, pain, suffering, and loss of dignity. The financial costs are also huge in terms of hospital visits, law enforcement, trash pickup, lost business revenues, and much, much more.
The County simply has to fundamentally rethink the nature of the revenues it receives and the expenditures it undertakes in order to increase the priority of homelessness relief and prevention efforts. Business as usual is insufficient in these unusual times. The lives of thousands of existing homeless people and the possibility of thousands more becoming homeless are too important to the future of our community. The critical first step to long-term solutions is a real plan with goals, measures of progress, and the ability to promote genuine collaboration among all the stakeholders, and the county should immediately begin a joint process with other agencies to, at long last, prepare this plan.
Summary
In summary, we urge you to make three changes to the staff’s budget proposal and the associated program activities it funds:
1. Increase $1.8 million in funding to add/restore three homeless programs operated by DHA with support from other departments.
2. Direct staff and encourage the Sheriff to adopt new practices that avoid “sweeping” homeless encampments sanctioned through the Homelessness Response Plan activities.
3. Allocate $5M, or 1% of the general fund, to a rent relief program to be administered by SHRA.
In addition, we urge you to commit yourselves to two critical efforts in this fiscal year:
1. Create a new, transparent, values-based and community-based budgeting process for the 2021-2022 fiscal year to begin with public outreach and workshops early next year.
2. Working with your colleagues throughout the community, begin the work to develop a regional comprehensive plan for ending homelessness.
Thank you for your consideration of the needs of the many homeless and low-income citizens of our County who need your support.
Gabby Trejo, Executive Director
SacACT
CC: County Executive Officer Nav Gill
Deputy County Executive Officer Bruce Wagstaff
Clerk of the Board