Who can say how much California spends on homelessness? + California winning in Trump budgets
Welcome back from the President’s Day holiday. Perhaps you spent it knocking on doors in Nevada, or catching Pete Buttigieg share his love story to a crowd of Sacramento fans. We’re glad you’re with us now that you’re back to work.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
A California Democrat is calling for a statewide assessment of every dollar cities and agencies spend on homelessness so the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom can calibrate a new strategy to fight the crisis.
Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, said the Legislature and Newsom lack insight into how cities, counties and agencies are using the state’s budget to shelter and care for the 151,000 homeless Californians. Without centralized data, he said, it’s hard to know if California is effectively financing solutions.
He’s introducing a proposal on Tuesday that would mandate the state Homeless Coordinating and Financing Council to conduct a “statewide needs and gaps analysis” of programs and services, to be completed and sent back to the Legislature by July 31, 2021, according to the bill language.
“No one today can tell me how much money is being spent on homelessness in California on all levels,” Chiu said. “They always say, to know where you gotta go, you have to know where you’re starting from.”
Homelessness surged 12 percent in Los Angeles County from 2018, 17 percent in the city of San Francisco and 19 percent in Sacramento County since 2017, despite the financial and legislative attention from local and statewide officials to solve the problem.
Nearly half of the nation’s unsheltered homeless people live in California, according to a fall 2019 report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and 15 percent of residents ranked the issue as one of the state’s top concerns in a September 2019 survey by the Public Policy Institute of California.
That’s despite statewide investments to curb homelessness and assist local governments desperate for a sustainable fix. The recent spending includes $500 million from former Gov. Jerry Brown’s final budget, $650 million for local governments in Gov. Newsom’s first budget for cities and counties, and more from programs managed by state agencies.
Read our full story on Chiu’s proposal by The Bee’s Hannah Wiley and Sophia Bollage here.
Meanwhile, in Washington, President Donald Trump is proposing flat spending on homelessness this year.
“This budget is not really looking for solutions to the homeless problem,” Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told McClatchy.
CALIFORNIA GETS WHAT IT GIVES
Since President Donald Trump took office, California — the state he has threatened to “defund” — has ceased to become a “donor state” that pays more in taxes than it gets back in federal dollars.
The big reason: A boom in federal spending in California.
In the Trump years, California has gone from being the nation’s third biggest “donor state” in the 2015 fiscal year to a state where federal taxes and spending were about even three years later, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, New York.
Yet two and a half weeks after Trump took office in 2017, angry that California could provide protection for certain undocumented immigrants, he threatened to pull federal money from the state.
“If they’re going to have sanctuary cities we may have to do that (cut federal funding). Certainly that would be a weapon,” he told Fox News.
State-based payments to the government, notably income and Social Security taxes, have not changed much, particularly as broad tax cuts were enacted in December 2017. The government spending is the reason for the change in the state’s status.
In the 2015 fiscal year, California sent $28.8 billion more to Washington than it got back, trailing only New York and New Jersey as donor states, according to the Rockefeller Center study.
The following fiscal year, California sent $312 million more than it got, dropping to ninth biggest donor state.
Trump, who lost the state by 30 percentage points to Democrat Hillary Clinton, was quick to blast California shortly after taking office. In a Fox News interview two weeks after taking office, he branded the state “out of control”
He was critical of the possibility that California could become a “sanctuary state” for undocumented immigrants.
“If we have to, we’ll defund,” he told Fox. “We give tremendous amounts of money to California.”
Instead, California has seen a surge in federal spending and climbed out of donor state status. It got $1.5 billion more than it paid in fiscal 2017, President Barack Obama’s last budget. The next year, the positive balance was $1.9 billion.
Check out what’s driving the rise in California spending in McClatchy DC’s David Lightman’s report here.
Best of The Bee:
‘History repeating itself’: California lawmakers consider apology for internment of Japanese, via Theodora Yu
California congressman owes $145,000 in unpaid income tax, according to new IRS lien, via Kate Irby
California nursing regulator resigns after sexual harassment complaints from state workers, via Wes Venteicher.