(soft music) - As the number of homeless continues to rise and state and local government pour record dollars into trying to find solutions, State Senator Angelique Ashby has introduced SB 802.

It would streamline city and county run programs into a single regional joint powers authority.

Senator Ashby, Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty, and County Supervisor Pat Hume, join us to discuss whether it's the right solution to the problem.

Senator Ashby, homelessness is one of the most intractable and some would say thankless issues to take on for any elected official, particularly in this region.

What possessed you to introduce a bill mid-session that essentially was the equivalent of rolling a grenade into the status quo and making like, or proposing significant change?

- Well, I wouldn't disagree with your comment that it is a tough issue and that it is also the number one issue that we hear about out in the community.

I think my colleagues and friends here would agree with that statement.

And it is certainly something that I am asked about everywhere that I go.

So something needs to be done.

Enough time has gone by.

I spent 12 years on the Sacramento City Council and I've been at the Senate now in my third year, and there's no time like the present to aspire to achieve what the public is asking us to do, which is collaborate, work together, and make real progress on the toughest and most persistent issue we face.

- Well, what is it about this bill that made it so controversial the minute that it was revealed to the public?

- Well, part of it may be how well I know the system.

- And we should name it, SB 802.

- It is SB 802.

- All right.

- Part of probably why it hits so many notes is because I come from the local office where I know what's happening and what's not happening between the city and the county and the smaller cities in the region.

It's not an unfamiliar dialogue for me.

Mayor McCarty ran a similar but much more dialed back bill the year before.

We both heard a lot of criticism about his bill.

So in taking that steps farther and trying to figure out what would really have an impact here.

And so I reviewed all the grand jury reports, all of the failed efforts over the last 20 years, some of them I lived through, between the city of Sacramento and the county of Sacramento.

And tried very hard to just slice through the middle of all of the rhetoric and put something on the table that would in fact make a real difference.

It's not performative, it's not small, it's big.

It's a big swing at a big problem.

- So Mayor McCarty, you've been to this show before, okay.

Because you had a bill in a previous session before you became the mayor of Sacramento, that its contours are very similar to Senator Ashby's bill, but there were some significant differences with it.

Can can you talk a little bit about that?

- Yeah, I guess the big picture is that I, like Senator Ashby and Supervisor Hume, think we need to work on these issues together.

You know, he's currently on local governments.

I serve with Angelique on boards.

We serve on 15 or so local boards on wastewater, the library, you know, regional transit, but not the number one issue we focused on.

So the lack of coordination I thought was glaring.

And I did read this grand jury report and thought, "Yeah, you know, the public wants us to work on this issue together."

We are all in this together.

The city of Sacramento can't solve it.

We need the county working with us.

We need resources from the state and federal government, which provide most of the money that we do for these programs.

And so, you know, we introduced a bill a couple years ago, about a third of which is in the senator's bill, which brings these entities together, the cities.

Cities of Elk Grove, Rancho, Citrus Heights, City of Sacramento, and the County of Sacramento to work on these things together so we can pool resources.

Because let's face it, homelessness doesn't know the boundary.

They can cross lines.

- Sure.

- So, you know, strength in numbers like, you know, the mantra of sports team.

So how do we work together and solve this issue?

And that was a notion of the bill I still stand by today.

- But yours was different in a couple of critical ways.

- It was, it was, we had a lot of pushback from the county and the cities.

And one of things that we proposed, it would be a JPA, we wouldn't take the money from the cities.

The cities would, - Joint powers authority.

- Joint powers authority.

The cities would voluntarily opt in like they do most JPAs in Sacramento, wouldn't have land use authority.

So collaboration is hard when you force people to do it.

I kind of realized that.

And so if you want people to join in partnership, they have to agree to that union.

And so that's why we had it as an optional opt-in method.

- Well see, and and that goes to a quote supervisor Hume 'cause I wanna get you in here.

- Okay.

- Because the county, you know, encompasses all of the cities and you called Senator Ashby's bill, "An arrow through the heart of local control," I think was the quote.

- Okay, I'll trust you on that.

- Okay.

And there's this really hard sort of tension between local control and pushing decisions, funding and where that funding goes down to, you know, as close to the street as possible.

And I think everybody gets that.

On the other hand, because of the fractionalization of Sacramento, it's like there's like a million different entities and the grand jury reports focus on this, but there's very little accountability 'cause everybody gets to do like this.

- Sure, sure.

- Right.

- Your view sitting from the county perspective is what, in terms of how do we thread the needle between, you know, collegiality and frankly getting some stuff done?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'll, I'll first pick up on something that the mayor just said relative to unions.

And if you think about this, obviously, it's a much better feeling to enter in a marriage because you found your one true love than to be in an arranged marriage, right?

And so I think that might be what the senator's bill really struck people.

- You know, there's a debate going on in this country though is whether or not parents should pick out their, nevermind.

We'll talk about that.

- I don't want to get into the topic of a parenting 'cause that might even be a bigger issue than homelessness.

But I think that the bottom line is this, is that people don't care how government works, only that it works.

And when you have an issue that is an intractable and as transient as this issue, it doesn't matter whether the differences are from functionality or from jurisdiction.

And that was the piece of the senator's bill that really spoke to me.

And that I think people that it resonates is we have to break down these silos somehow.

We have to get on the same page and be rowing in the same direction or else we're never gonna make progress.

And so I think my objection was the top down approach rather than an organic bottom up approach.

And that's what I said to her when she called for the press conference.

That's what I called for in our own press conference.

And when I met in her office that I said the same thing.

Give us time to come up with a more, - Tell us more about that.

You guys met in the office and kind of talked it through and all that.

What did you guys discover about your respective positions that kind of like created at least some common ground at this point?

- Well, I met with both of them in my office at different times and several other folks too from all the other cities and counties and regions and Sacramento Steps Forward and all of those folks that, a couple things I would say.

First of all, on the marriage theme and whether or not a forced marriage or a chosen marriage is best?

As the only woman at this table, I will tell you this, if you leave me waiting for 20 years, I'm laying an ultimatum on the table and you can walk away if you want to.

But there's only so long that I think the citizens of Sacramento should have to wait for this happy union to take place.

And four grand jury reports have called for a JPA, multiple failed attempts dating back more than 20 years.

So I know you like me and you wanna take me out on a date, but I wanna know if this is permanent or not.

- Well, well, - And the people of Sacramento deserve that level of accountability.

- Let me just respond.

- To your question though, that's the thing we agree upon.

- [Scott] Okay.

- And I believe the mayor does too.

We all agree that there needs to be more collaboration and there needs to be more accountability.

And that if we're going to make progress on the topic, we have to do it together.

- Okay, let me just give you all, three, a perspective.

So our current president, Donald Trump, has upset a lot of people in Europe, in Western Europe, in the NATO alliance because he has threatened to pull out, he has threatened all sorts of things because of the fact that, historically, they never paid their fair share of their defense costs.

Now there's been objections and gnashing of teeth and wailing and tears and everything else because of his actions.

And whether you like him or agree with him or support him or whatever, irrelevant in this case.

But today, NATO countries are starting to step up in terms of increasing their defense budgets.

They're taking responsibilities rather than laying it all off on the United States.

And you, Senator Ashby made a comment, and I don't know whether it's in press conference or to a reporter, that nothing sharpens the mind like a deadline.

There is a kumbaya moment or suspicion that a lot of residents in Sacramento have.

And I'm going tell you a quick story and get you to react to it.

Sanjay Varshney, former Dean of the School of Business at Sac State, a renowned economist within this region, we're lucky to have him.

- Yep.

- A few weeks after coming to Sacramento, he and I got together for lunch and met for the first time.

And we were talking about economic development, which is my favorite subject.

And I said, well, "What do you think?"

And he basically told me that economic development in Sacramento was bull shit.

And I'm gonna use that word because it was like he was slapping me across the face with a dead fish.

And he said that because he said, "In Sacramento, there is this culture where it is that one hand washes the other and covers each other's back.

And you got a lot of nonprofits and governments where it is that everybody's trying to get to the end of their time so they can collect their pension or get their final contract and nothing ever happens."

And so he said that he considered most of the economic development organizations in the region irrelevant.

And a couple of them have died because of that, I would say, in the past couple years.

The question is, is that when I look at the whole issue of opt-in and willingness to participate, I have to be honest with you, there is a time, the thesis that Senator Ashby offers does at some point make sense where there's gotta be a 'times up' moment.

And I understand the need for local control, but the grand jury report basically says, "Too many board committees and subcommittees creating waste and redundancy, no comprehensive strategic plan and minimal coordination."

And this has gone on for a long time.

Is there a point at which either of you would support a trigger where it is that if the municipalities altogether can't come up with a true integrated JPA approach that it is mandatory in order, almost like a base closing commission style because we as the public, we are kind of fed up.

- Rightfully so.

- Yeah, let me tackle that a little bit.

Well, I support this effort of a joint powers authority of us working together as the senator said.

- It's in your bill.

- It was in my bill and we support this and we're doing that.

The good news is Senator Ashby's bill brought even more attention to this.

So in the last few months, I brought back the city and county having these check-ins to talk about homelessness, mental health, public safety on a regular basis.

In October, we've been planning for a few months now, a big hearing with all of us, the county board of supervisors, the entire city council, every mayor from the city to talk about what is the state of homelessness, what are we doing, what can we do better?

So these things are happening.

This, as you said earlier, this grenade or whatever you wanna call it, this is politics.

People drop big ideas and this draws more attention.

I'm all for that.

The thing that we really need to do is how do we be more effective?

As Pat said, people don't understand what government, this and that.

They still call me congress member or assembly member.

They know I'm the guy, they checked my name to help solve problems.

- Right.

- That's what we need to do is work together and find better solutions.

That's one thing that we're really doing is, we haven't talked about this yet, but some of the solutions and the money we spend is outrageous.

It's like the military industrial complex, all these nonprofits, permanent supportive housing, that's like a million dollars a door for a homeless person.

That's insane.

- That is crazy.

- That's insane.

So what we're doing in the city and the county's doing is like, how can we do these for 150 to 200,000?

Tiny homes, we're delivering a hundred today, the day we tape, over on Roseville Road, a partnership with the city and the county.

And we're looking at these models that aren't SHRA rated, which spend a fraction of the cost to serve more people.

Because nothing wrong with SHRA, it's a nice plan, but it only helps one in 10 people who need help.

I think it's a failure.

When you say, oh, I helped one in 10 of the people here that's homeless at the park.

My constituents be like, "You fail.

What about the nine in 10 who get nothing?"

So we need to think differently.

Think about how ways we can spend our money more effectively.

And that's what I learned running for mayor.

I've learned my first seven months as mayor is we're changing the equation, doing things differently so we can serve more people today.

- But is there a point at which if you guys, can you all give yourselves a deadline, and at a point at which where if you guys haven't gotten your act together, whatever that act is, whatever commitments you all are willing to make, that you move to not an opt-in model, but a forced regionalization model.

Is there any circumstance under which that any of you would ever support that?

- I don't know that that's gonna be necessary.

I think that's the agreement we came to is like we're gonna take this seriously and we're gonna start marching down that road.

And as you know, organizationally, the phrase, "Because that's the way we've always done it," is absolutely the opposite of continuous improvement.

But to the mayor's point, I think there are some things that have been put in motion.

We will be, at our next county board of supervisors meeting on the 19th of this month, we will be having a decision point of a new regionally coordinated model that establishes a board that assumes some of the continuum of care functions with elected member oversight that brings together SSF, SHRA and all of the staff within the different homeless departments of all the agencies for a more coordinated approach of how do we get everybody working on this together?

Because the problem is, is if we just squeeze the balloon, it blows out somewhere else.

And now you have unintended consequences.

You have this fractional situation that kind of what we're dealing with today.

So I don't know that a JPA necessarily and particularly a forced JPA, because now if you have people coming to the table, you know, that haven't hit rock bottom, so to speak, and they're not wanting to make that change, are you gonna be as effective as you would be?

But we have to find some sort of governance model with teeth that says, "Look, we're all in this together and it's in all of our benefit to make sure that we approach this in a reasonable and deliberate way."

- How do you react to that Senator Ashby?

- Great, great.

The only concern I have is that I've heard this before, and so has Sacramento on repeat over and over.

In 2010, they took a vote to establish a continuum of care that was supposed to be followed by a vote in 2011 for a JPA, didn't happen.

Grand jury report after grand jury report, a ballot measure, oh, supposed to create an agreement between the city county, which does exist, but has no enforcement mechanism.

The district attorney sued the city, still in litigation.

There are dozens and dozens of examples of we're working on that right now, for the last 20 years.

That being said, the supervisor and I and another supervisor did agree to really five terms in principle, that if those are resolved, that is the bill.

- What, what five are those?

- So they go like this and you tell me if I get any of them wrong.

- Okay.

- The first is, it has to be an official government organization.

So it doesn't have to be a JPA if they can come up with something that has the same level of accountability and oversight as a JPA.

- But we have RT and we have, - Yep, I agree.

- They work.

It's a working model.

- Correct.

I agree.

- Is there a problem with that model?

- No, no, it's absolutely, - I'm sorry to interrupt.

- No.

- No.

- I've tried it.

- Okay.

- Yep.

I think that's a good one.

I'm sure the mayor would agree on that, that's partially his bill.

Second is, it has to be resourced.

There have to be some resources.

Now, one thing I think was a relief to the supervisor was in my bill, it takes all the resources, but that doesn't have to be the case as the mayor can tell you.

In legislation, we can pull that back.

They could each decide to keep a portion of the money in house, in the city or in the county to do what they wanna do and decide they're gonna put a portion of it forward to work with as a group.

But it has to be resourced because otherwise you're just talking about nothing.

- No money, no mission.

- Well that's what's gonna happen in October.

There's no funding on the table.

So they're just getting together to talk about a way to move forward, but they're not talking about real dollars.

And the state in part, myself, in part, former assembly member McCarty, in part former Senator Pan and Senator Steinberg, delivered over $400 million to this community in the last four and a half years for this topic for which there is very little to show.

So item number two has to be resources.

Item number three is it has to deal with SHRA and Sacramento Steps Forward.

Because you can't have a conversation around housing and homelessness without talking about our voucher program, without talking about public housing, without talking about coordinated entry, so that has to be a component of this.

It doesn't need to be prescriptive.

They can decide what that's going to look like, but it has to be included.

It has to include housing and homelessness.

It has to, because the two are intrinsically connected.

And if you deal with one without the other, you just have an empty chair at all times in the dialogue.

And lastly, the fifth item was it has to include the small cities.

- So two reactions to that.

One is, is that, and I've shared this with some of you before, the practitioners, the providers, a lot of them say that this housing at all costs issue, they're afraid to say it in front of you all, but what they will say on the side is it has completely distorted the ability to actually give people what they need, where they need it.

- Yeah, let me address that, because the bill is actually silent as to how they use the dollars other than for housing.

Now me, former Council Member Ashby and now Senator Ashby, have strong opinions and some of the things that they wanna do, I don't agree with.

I don't like tiny homes, for example.

I understand why SHRA spends more dollars per door, it's because the longevity of those facilities has to be a hundred years.

Look at CV Circle, look at these entities.

There's no money that's gonna come back to renovate these facilities.

So I understand that.

I maybe don't agree with them, but it doesn't matter because my opinion is not infused into the bill.

They can do whatever form of housing they want to do.

That will be up to them.

If they wanna do tiny homes, they can do tiny homes.

They wanna do a parking lot, they can do a parking lot, if they wanna do hotel conversions, they can do that.

The idea is just that they need to be working together on what those resources and priorities are across the entire region and it must be a coordinated effort.

Because the other thing that Grand jury report says, amongst the things that you said, is that Sacramento is in a loop of failure.

- Well, actually, interesting on that, Supervisor, no offense.

I've always wondered, Mayor, when Thien Ho, our district attorney, sued the city of Sacramento a couple years ago, there were a couple of people who came up to me and said, "You know what, it's funny that he's suing the city because we think he should be suing the county."

The city has the problem, but the county has the responsibility.

And I'm gonna give you a chance to get in here.

- I would very much appreciate that.

(laughing) - But I do wanna ask you whether or not, you know, the City of Sacramento ends up being ground zero for everything, okay?

What are the tools that you need from both of the institutions that your colleagues here represent that would be most helpful to you at this moment?

- Yeah, this is interesting because I was in the legislature.

I saw us giving money to cities.

I wasn't satisfied by the response my kids walking home from school around encampments.

So I decided, you know what I'm gonna do?

Run for mayor.

So now I'm here and I've seen it for eight months and I see that we need more resources.

It's kind of sad that the City of Sacramento did a good job.

We've reduced our homelessness by 30% and we lost about 50% of our money.

Granted, the budget cut as well this year.

So we're gonna be struggling.

We're gonna have to dip in a bit to our general fund to keep that going.

So we need to work on these things together.

The county does have 10 times more resources than the city.

When Angelique and I were on the city council, we spent $0 on homelessness.

Now we spent about 50 million a year and help about 2000 people a year.

So we are in the right direction, but it's not nearly enough.

There's way too many people sleeping in parks and in the river.

- Right, but what do you want 'cause I gotta give him the last word.

- Yeah, we want to work together and we're doing that.

It's something that I campaigned on.

We've launching it.

I think Angelique, just like Thien Ho's lawsuit, what did it bring?

Attention and focus.

So this is bringing a spotlight.

- Should he have sued the county on your behalf?

- I don't know about that, but the fact that he was talking about it, it brought the city to act and we've seen a better improvement with the lawsuit, with the Supreme Court decision that says we can enforce encampments.

- All right, Supervisor, you get the last word.

- Great.

I'll take it.

Here's the thing, I'll stipulate to those five points.

And I appreciate this conversation because it does put a finer point on things.

I think what the DA's lawsuit was was relative to enforcement.

That there was a situation where the sidewalks, the parks, everything was being overrun, and people who did nothing wrong other than get up in the morning to go to work, were having their lives impacted.

That's a failure of society.

But I would disagree slightly with what the senator said in that I do think the City/County partnership has born results.

We've stood up about 1400 shelter beds between the two agencies.

We have 11 core sites that are spread around through the community that are drop in places to access homeless services.

The county spends tens of millions of dollars every year in the provision of those services.

But here's the thing and why I think I agree that when we are spending so much per door, and I understand that buying down the longevity of that door is part of the expense of it, but when you take that same million dollars per door and invest that in five mental health counselors, are you having more of an impact for the immediate term issue?

And so what happens in my mind is when you have mental health issues and addiction issues that are comorbidity, you lose the causation correlation line where you can say, "You're in a chicken and egg conundrum."

And so for me, I think if we aren't addressing what's going on up here that has brought somebody to think that this is their best life, which we all agreed is absolutely not, and that there's a more fulfilling life out there for them.

But we have to figure out how to instill in them joy, hope, optimism, the the will to want to have something better.

And so I think that the housing first model results oftentimes in housing only.

And that does not help address the underlying issues that people are facing.

- All right, so TBD, I want to ask for a commitment.

Since we're on the cusp of, you know, the end of this year's legislative session here.

This bill is parked for a year.

You all have a meeting coming up in September or October, which is gonna get everybody together.

I'd ask you all to come back one year from now and let's have another conversation.

Let's see how you all do.

- Let's do it.

- Yeah.

- You down?

- Great.

- Sure, but the bill will be well in play or not by then.

- It won't have to be.

- All right, and let's see if we can do something before another 417 million is spent.

All right, thank you all very much.

Good luck and thank you for your time.

- Thank you.

- Thanks for having us.

- All right, and that's our show.

Thanks to our guests and thanks to you for watching Studio Sacramento.

I'm Scott Syphax, see you next time, right here on KVIE.

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