![Is California considering cutting homelessness funding to address budget deficit? Is California considering cutting homelessness funding to address budget deficit?](https://i0.wp.com/calmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/02182023_HOUSINGINEQUALITY_PU_CM_16.jpg?fit=2000%2C1325&ssl=1)
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It’s the billion dollar question. That’s the amount cities and other local governments have been receiving from the state each year to address California’s growing homeless population.
But after five years, will Sacramento’s aid continue as Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders try to close a massive state budget deficit?
Newsom has been critical of local homeless efforts, and his newly revised 2024-25 budget not only takes away an additional $260 million that local officials had counted on receiving this year, based on meeting specific goals. The proposal does not include anything for another year.
“I know it may not sit well with some,” Newsom said in releasing the review last month, “but we are struggling to see the performance I want to see on the streets.”
Last week, legislative leaders released their own version of the budget. Specifically, it includes $1 billion to continue grants to local agencies for a sixth year.
Local officials, particularly those in major cities where homelessness is most evident, are doing everything they can to include the $1 billion in the final budget that Newsom and legislative leaders must approve next week.
“We cannot abandon this progress now,” said San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, president of the California Big Cities Mayors coalition, as he and other mayors made a public appeal. Without it, Gloria said, “the progress we were making will fade away,” citing the consequences of closing shelters and other programs funded by the grant program.
“In short, it will be a disaster.”
While Gloria cites “the progress we are making,” Newsom has repeatedly rebuked local officials for not making more progress. Since he became governor in 2019, California’s official homeless count has risen from 151,000 to 181,000 despite state spending of at least $25 billion, including local grants.
But who is really responsible for spending so much money for so little progress?
In April, state Auditor Grant Parks issued a report highly critical of the California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH), made up of appointees of the Newsom administration, for failing to track how billions of dollars have been spent. Dollars.
Noting that his office had warned of a “lack of coordination among state homeless programs” three years earlier, the April report said the agency had tracked spending for two years but “has not continued to track or report about this information since then. .”
Additionally, Parks said, “it has not aligned its action plan to address homelessness with its legal objectives nor ensured that it collected accurate, complete and comparable financial and outcomes information from homeless programs. Until Cal ICH takes these critical steps, the state will lack up-to-date information it can use to make data-driven policy decisions about how to effectively reduce homelessness.”
While running for governor in 2018, as the homeless crisis became apparent, Newsom promised to appoint a “homeless czar” who would shake up bureaucracy and focus on reducing the number of homeless Californians.
Two years later, during a press conference, reporters pressed him on his campaign promise. Visibly irritated, Newsom hit the podium and snapped: “You want to know who the homeless czar is? “I’m the homeless czar in the state of California.”
Given the state’s obvious failure to significantly reduce the numbers despite spending many billions of dollars, it would seem that Newsom, the self-proclaimed czar, wants to shift the blame.
As things stand, if he were to step down as governor in two years while homelessness continues to rise, it would likely dampen any next political venture he envisions.
“I am a sustaining member of CalMatters because I want unbiased journalism that allows me to make my own decisions.”
Susana, Palos Verdes.
CalMatters Featured Member
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