Dear Supervisors,
We have sat through two days of your rushed deliberations this week in a tightly packed but poorly organized or communicated schedule as you attempt to very quickly create an annual budget to run services on behalf of Sonoma County tax payers and residents.
The long hours you have spent talking are visible for viewing via Zoom but there has been little opportunity for citizen interaction, except for ninety second sound bites which don’t appear to be taken very seriously, with no follow up or answers to speaker questions.
During Thursday you are presumably meeting off the record before reconvening on Friday to celebrate closing the books on a budget the supervisors think will work for the county and its employees, partners and contractors.
There is virtually no time to react to your conversations and small group consensus agreements, but here are some thoughts on the ‘ending homelessness’ budget expansions and utopian plans you agreed on Wednesday September 9, parts of which are embedded here.
The first law of holes
As noted elsewhere on this site there has been zero success in ‘ending homelessness’ in Sonoma County over the last few years. 3,000 people are homeless and it is clear there is no coherent plan in place, although the increased funds you are helping yourselves to by slashing budgets elsewhere will partially be used to try and figure out what you are doing for the future.
The first law of holes, or the law of holes, is an adage which states: “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”. Digging a hole makes it deeper and therefore harder to get out of, which is used as a metaphor that when in an untenable position, it is best to stop carrying on and exacerbating the situation.
It’s not possible to have a ‘no confidence’ vote as you are making bureaucratic decisions as a clique with no oversight or community discussion. This has been going on for years, and now that we are in the jaws of a major economic depression sadly both the homeless situation is getting more serious and so is the lack of any sort of coherent planning or consideration of other approaches .
The planned lavish spending on these vague plans fly in the face of logical ways to actually address the three main causes of homelessness: economic hardship, mental illness and substance abuse.
The idea of grabbing grants to warehouse people in hotel rooms is extremely naive and will have serious long term tax base and community ramifications in both Santa Rosa and Sebastopol, while homeless industry ‘providers’ will welcome more homeless with open arms …because that is their reason for existing.
Build it and they will come
It is well known that services provided for substance abuse itinerants act like a magnet, with the ‘RV armadas’ Supervisor Rabbit mentioned heading to Sonoma County from all over. Chico is now heading in the right direction as a community having realized this harsh reality. Supervisor Zane appears to be particularly naive on this topic despite having lived near homeless issues in Sonoma County for some time, and having presumably noticed the increase in needles, human excrement, drug dealing and criminal damage on city streets as she passes through.
The police are overwhelmed and have mostly given up on everything but serious crimes by these substance abuse altered people, who have little empathy or community spirit.
There are solutions being successfully rolled out in other states, with Houston and Austin in Texas notable examples discussed on this site.
We urge you to make public the materials requested by the chair (at 3:20 in this video) from Barbie Robinson, which will presumably form the basis for the backbone of your latest short and medium terms plans, paid for out of contingency funds, and any other plans for public discussion and comment.
Sonoma County residents deserve to be consulted on your proposed plans. Even Sebastopol City Council has no say in your acquisition of city properties with state grant money to repurpose them into homeless room houses. Even local homeless people have predicted this warehousing approach will result in the conversion of a hotel in to a ‘tweaker den’ backing on to the Joe Rodota Trail within six months
We urge you to have some humility and consider the entire community in your planning, and to study what actually works in ‘ending homelessness’, because what you have been executing so far has had little success.
Please feel free to respond in the comments section and we look forward to future dialog as a community.
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