Could new accountability plan help SLO County fight homelessness? Here’s how it works
San Luis Obispo County is among the entities calling on Gov. Gavin Newsom to support a statewide plan to hold local governments accountable for their efforts to prevent homelessness.
On Monday, San Luis Obispo County Homeless Services Oversight Council chair Susan Funk and four other speakers representing the California State Association of Counties called on Newsom and the California State Legislature to adopt proposed trailer bill language for the accountability plan in the 2023-2024 state budget.
Funk called the bill a “game changer” in terms of coordinating responses to homelessness.
“We’re often scrambling to piece together funding from an alphabet soup of changing options and different requirements,” Funk said at Monday’s news conference. “That slows us down, and our providers get cold feet about expanding even highly successful programs if the ongoing funding might suddenly disappear.”
CSAC’s AT HOME plan — the acronym stands for Accountability, Transparency, Housing, Outreach, Mitigation and Economic Opportunity — lays out specific lines of responsibility, accountability and funding for every level of government in tackling homelessness.
So what could this plan look like in practice, and how could it change how San Luis Obispo County works to address homelessness?
Supervisors, homeless service providers endorse plan
Funk, who serves as Atascadero’s mayor pro tempore, said she first learned about the AT HOME plan at a joint meeting between the League of California Cities and CSAC about a month and a half ago.
Dealing with issues surrounding homelessness can require financial and structural flexibility that many counties don’t have, Funk said.
Funk said the AT HOME plan creates a regional compact that that is intended to reduce redundancies in service and ensure that various nonprofit organizations and government entities remain involved in the continuum of care.
Along with calls for consistent funding streams for care for homeless community members, the AT HOME plan would establish corrective action and technical assistance for local governments that fail to meet goals for homelessness prevention and, Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors member John Gioia said at Monday’s news conference.
Gioia said the AT HOME plan makes state Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention grants contingent on meeting goals and participating in accountability measures.
“The budget trailer bill also recognizes the importance of having built-in transparency for all of us as local officials,” Gioia said. “Individuals in in our communities don’t distinguish between a city and county official, they just want the problem solved.”
At the most recent SLO County homeless services council meeting, Funk said, local homeless services providers and city representatives had a “lively discussion” about whether to endorse the AT HOME plan before unanimously voting to pass a resolution of support.
The San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to endorse the plan in May, Funk said.
So far, 29 California counties have endorsed the plan, including Monterey and Santa Barbara counties.
“The choice is simple: We either take the steps to create a real system to address homelessness with ongoing responsibilities and ongoing funding, much like our proposal would do, or we choose to fail,” CSAC CEO Graham Knaus said at the news conference.
The AT HOME trailer bill is set to be discussed in upcoming talks over the state budget, which Newsom must sign by July 1.
This story was originally published June 14, 2023 at 11:58 AM.
