‘Just doesn’t make any sense’: Supervisors face tense vote on nonprofit funding
The fate of some local nonprofit programs, from those focused on feeding vulnerable residents to others aimed at keeping them housed, hangs in the balance of five votes on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
The elected officials will choose how to funnel an annual $4.3 million into the local nonprofit sphere over the next three years, aimed at stabilizing the county’s social safety net. Yet, some supervisors see the process behind the choice as inherently flawed.
The initiative, known as CORE Investments (Collective of Results and Evidence-Based) relies on a panel of 60 community members, whose identities are not disclosed, to vet proposals and make recommendations to the supervisors on how to spend the millions of dollars the county sets aside for nonprofit programs. The process of recommending certain proposals over others inevitably sends a triennial shock through the county’s nonprofit sector.
This year is no different. The panel recommended that the county fund 28 out of 100 proposals, including family resource centers from Community Bridges, a workforce development program from the Homeless Garden Project, and the Community Action Board’s center for lifelong learning aimed at migrant farmworkers. The panel left out the county’s Meals on Wheels program that battles food insecurity, Community Action Board’s rental assistance program, and a transitional housing initiative proposed by People First of Santa Cruz County.
According to an analysis by District 3 Supervisor Justin Cummings’ office, two-thirds of the programs funded during the prior three-year cycle were not recommended for funding this time around. Cummings told Lookout that, despite the “results” and “evidence-based” monikers in the county program’s title, the supervisors are given no sense of how previously funded programs performed, or why certain programs were selected over others.
“My hope is that we can get access to the funding applications and we can delay the decision so we can learn more and better understand why we’re not funding programs like Meals on Wheels,” Cummings said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
The CORE Investments process, now in its third cycle since launching in 2017, has been iterative. New to this year’s version is an $830,000 pot supervisors asked to be set aside for their own preferred programs. However, the supervisors have not previously discussed individual priorities for this money and will be asked to try to mold this mound of cash into a social safety net spending package that can get majority support on Tuesday. A little bit like building a plane while flying and then trying to land it.
POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
Board of supervisors gets a packed agenda: Accompanying the CORE Investments conversation, the board will also vote on hiring an attorney to appeal a $2.5 million reimbursement denial from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for shelter costs during the pandemic in 2020. Supervisors will decide on whether to contract with an architecture firm on a redesign of the board chambers, and will get a report on the temporary road replacement on Mountain Charlie Road, which finished construction in late October.
Santa Cruz City Council meets on Tuesday: The city council is back after a three-week break, where it will take on its own CORE Investments process, and decide how to spend nearly $200,000 set aside for city councilmembers’ social safety net priorities. The elected officials will also take up an ordinance banning gas-powered leaf blowers, and a neighbor’s appeal over the planning commission’s approval of a live music permit for Woodhouse Blending & Brewing.
831 Water Street redux: At six stories and 151 units, the mixed-use 831 Water Street project startled some residents when it was first proposed in 2021, but has largely sat on the back burner since. Now, the project has new life, and the city will host a virtual community meeting about the development on Wednesday at 6 p.m. Follow this Zoom link to tune in.
ONE GREAT READ
The hidden truth linking the broken border to your online shopping cart, by Steve Edler, Danielle Ivory and Marcela Valdes for The New York Times
The border and immigration took on an outsized position in the rhetoric of the recent presidential election, highlighted by promises from President-elect Donald Trump to lead the largest deportation operation in American history.
The question of how we measure the economic impact of undocumented migrant workers and their potential deportation has been particularly pertinent in Santa Cruz County and California, where undocumented laborers are essential to the multibillion-dollar agricultural industry.
This investigation by The New York Times shows the impact of undocumented labor stretches far from the fields and into many products that end up in our shopping carts. It turns out that major corporations, from athleisure outfit Alo, to T.J. Maxx, Dr Pepper and Bella+Canvas have leveraged the border crisis into cheap labor, but are able to escape accountability by contracting with third-party staffing agencies who hire swaths of undocumented migrants.