By TED WINTERER
I have a confession to make: I watch City Council meetings on CityTV. You might think this means I need to get a life. You might be right. But at times the meetings are compelling drama, with antagonists on the dais and a chorus of public input embellishing the theatrics.
At other times they’re quite tedious, which is when I usually surf over to TV Land to catch a rerun of “Leave It to Beaver,” checking back on the City Council every so often to see if any fireworks are about to be launched.
So two weeks ago I was prone on the couch eyeballing the latest episode of “Desperate Councilpersons.” I glanced at my watch — getting near bedtime — and thought about crawling under the covers to read a few pages of “French Women Don’t Get Fat” before snoozing. Just then Councilman Bobby Shriver introduced an intriguing motion: That the city should hire a homeless czar, an upper-echelon staff person reporting directly to the city manager whose sole job would be to seek innovative and effective ways to reduce homelessness.
The notion was provocative enough that I sat up and decided to forego an hour of sleep to see how it would play out. Why is it that homelessness, the No. 1 resident priority year in and year out, always seems to get buried at the end of the council agenda? After all, here was a bold new idea and I was curious to see how the City Council would vote — while our elected leaders are all progressive individuals, they are often collectively timid about novel approaches to our problems.
Clearly the strategies pursued by City Hall since the 1991 report of the Task Force on Homelessness have had mixed results. City staff have done a good job of monitoring the use of public funds by the local homeless services network, which has directed many individuals off the streets to self-sufficiency. And they’ve recently had success with a pilot program to assist the most service-resistant chronically homeless.
But the fact is City Hall has only one employee working full-time on homelessness. By all accounts she does a great job, but one person can only do so much. So Shriver’s concept made a lot of sense: Hire for one year on a trial basis a politically-connected, charismatic person to advance new solutions such as a sobering center and a homeless court, and to schmooze and cajole the leaders of the 88 cities involved in the “Bring Home LA” coalition into regional answers to homelessness.
My cynicism was unwarranted, as the City Council voted to approve Shriver’s motion by a 4-2 margin. And I say “Huzzah!” Kudos to the City Council for giving homelessness the attention it deserves. And if our new homeless liaison succeeds in just one effort, such as procuring housing at the VA site, the money will have been well spent.
But there’s more still to be done. There was much debate about whether or not hiring a homeless bigwig would count against the city’s cap on spending for this issue. It turns out that, in reaction to the prospects of an ill-conceived voter initiative to cap annual spending on the homeless, the City Council in 1994 passed an ordinance to “(p)revent an increase and, whenever feasible, reduce overall city expenditures relating to homeless services.”
Now I’ve suggested before that the growth of City Hall’s expenditures is unsustainable — I guess that makes me a municipal budget hawk. But in this case I think such fiscal restraint is penny wise and pound foolish. Wouldn’t spending that reduced our street population generate enormous direct savings to the city’s coffers through reduced costs for emergency services, correctional facilities and park upkeep? And wouldn’t residents benefit from not having to indirectly subsidize the costs born by local health care facilities to treat the homeless?
The city’s 2005 review of homeless services notes that “city general fund support for operating costs related to the continuum of care (for homelessness) has not increased substantially over the past decade.” Yet since fiscal year 1996-97, City Hall’s expenditures from the general fund have increased 45 percent. Consequently, our government now spends a smaller proportion of its annual outlays on homelessness than it did eight years ago. Does it make sense to anyone that we spend less each year on our citizens’ primary concern?
I say it’s time to get rid of the cap on homeless spending and allocate whatever funds are necessary to improve the quality of life in our town for both the housed and the homeless. (Ted Winterer is a writer who lives in Ocean Park. He can be reached at our-townsmdp@aol.com.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 13, 2005. Read the original PDF.