Petaluma homeless services at risk
Petaluma’s Committee on the Shelterless is considering the possibility of future service cuts or even the chance of closure for its celebrated homeless shelter program after losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funding.
A change to the way that money is distributed across California has amounted to a $260,672 reduction in annual funding for the nonprofit’s Mary Isaak Center. The federal funds, which are declining by 72 percent year-over-year for a disbursement that occurs each October, typically make up around half of the budget for the emergency shelter program, said CEO Mike Johnson.
While a significant one-time contribution from the county will bridge the gap in the fiscal year that starts on July 1, Johnson said his organization, commonly known by the acronym COTS, could still face a major ongoing challenge to maintain services in the long term.
“What it did was basically force us to beg our Board of Supervisors to make the difference up. It looks like they will do that for at least one year, but after that, we don’t have a solution, unless we can find a different strategy at the state level,” he said.
The loss of funding comes as California shifts away from a purely competitive model for distributing a special pot of federal money to emergency shelters and toward an approach that spreads that support more evenly across the state. High-performing homeless service organizations in Sonoma County have traditionally drawn an outsize per-capita share of those funds, amounting to $1.2 million last year for COTS, Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Santa Rosa and Interfaith Shelter Network, Johnson said.
Dwindling funds
Sonoma County-based organizations drew around 10 percent of the statewide program’s funds available for emergency shelters as a whole last year, he said. Yet the area will now be the biggest loser in California on a percentage basis, with the state allocation to Sonoma County from the federal Emergency Solutions Grant program plunging by 80 percent, to $239,000, Johnson said.
COTS alone received close to that entire amount from the program – $200,000 – last year, along with $119,392 from a county-based program that receives and distributes a share of the federal funds. Both are on the decline, he said, the latest blow in a recession-induced downswing that has prompted the organization to shrink its staff and operating costs in recent years.
Around 55 percent of the funding for COTS as a whole is from private contributions, with the remaining from government sources, Johnson said.
The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors proposed earlier this month to budget $800,000 in one-time general fund dollars to help COTS and other organizations to bridge the gap, while the Petaluma City Council took a first vote on a budget that increases the city’s annual funding for COTS by 50 percent, to $150,000.
Supervisor David Rabbitt, whose district encompasses Petaluma, said he pitched the county contribution along with Supervisor Shirlee Zane in recognition of the role those organizations have played in addressing homelessness in the region. The homeless population across the county decreased by 27.4 percent between 2013 and 2015, and by 60 percent in Petaluma, according to the most recent Sonoma County Homeless Census.
Still, he acknowledged that the future of funding at that level was uncertain.
“We can get them another year, but in the year thereafter, there’s no money, unless we can look at another pot, or under another rock,” he said. “COTS is a beloved institution, but I also think it provides a very important role. If we didn’t have it, we’d have a lot more people on the street.”
While organizations like COTS have obtained more money under the old formula, many other shelter programs have been less successful in obtaining those federal funds over the years. That’s despite the fact that homelessness in California remains an issue across county lines, said State Senator Mike McGuire, a former Sonoma County supervisor whose North Coast district includes parts of the Petaluma area.
“Sonoma County and Marin County have always done an amazing job in that competitive process,” McGuire said. “The problem with the ESG grant is, not one dime was ever invested north of Sonoma County.”
Push for state funding
McGuire said that he was pushing for a hybrid approach that would allocate state money toward restoring or even growing the amount of funding available on a competitive basis, which would still maintain the across-the-board distribution that goes into effect this year. He is also advocating for a $2 billion bond to fund the “No Place Like Home” program, which he described as a bipartisan proposal that would be used to build 14,000 units of permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: