Tale of two COVID decisions: How Sacramento County screwed up CARES funding, the city didn’t
Tuesday, the City of Sacramento will hand out one of the final pieces of an $89.6 million allotment in federal government money meant for COVID-19 relief.
Also Tuesday, the County of Sacramento will evaluate the performance of CEO Nav Gill.
What do these two events have in common? Everything.
Gill, as you might recall, bungled the dispersal of the county’s $181 million allotment of money from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act.
Gill moved $104 million in CARES money to the budget of Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones to cover salaries and benefits. But that wasn’t all. As Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks reported in The Bee on Aug. 10: “Another nearly $21.5 million and about $1.8 million went to the payroll and benefits of probation officers and park rangers, respectively.”
To say that this revelation caused an uproar in the community would be an understatement. Gill was decried for running a “shell game” with money meant to ease suffering in the county.
Supervisors such as Phil Serna, Patrick Kennedy and Don Nottoli spoke of being confused or frustrated that months had elapsed since the county received CARES funds and that not enough had gone toward actually helping people.
Community members excoriated Gill for not moving more quickly to deploy millions of dollars to a county health department charged with protecting all county residents from the COVID-19 pandemic.
County mishandles CARES money
At the Aug. 19 Board of Supervisors meeting, the county finally allocated $45 million to the county health department. Some supervisors said the money was there all along, had simply not been spent. But the bottom line was: While the coronavirus proliferated in Sacramento County, particularly ravaging the Latino community, the county sat on CARES money.
Four full months went by before county health finally received the millions it needed to bolster the county lab and hire more people to produce COVID-19 tests more quickly and to help struggling communities.
“This is more than a breakdown,” Nottoli said at that meeting. “This is a disservice to the people we all serve.”
At the same meeting, Kennedy said: “We set up a system and it didn’t work. We haven’t had enough information. We are confused up here.”
County supervisors need to fire Gill now.
His mishandling of CARES money impeded what should have been a far more aggressive county health response to COVID-19. Gil makes in the neighborhood of $400,000 a year and is not transparent or responsive to media or the community.
Supervisors also should fire Gill to make up for delegating such an important duty as allocating COVID-19 funds in the middle of a pandemic. Gill wasn’t elected by county residents. The supervisors were.
Gill failed at what will undoubtedly be the most important duty he has had in his career. As County CEO, his responsibility was to make sure the county responded effectively to a deadly pandemic. He failed horribly and has not provided good answers for why it happened.
He also made all five supervisors look ridiculous for unanimously voting in the spring to put him in charge of dispersing COVID-19 funds.
“Each of us must be able to trust the other to best serve the public,” Serna said. “And this mutual reliance is that much more pronounced during a historic pandemic.”
City gets CARES right
By comparison, the City of Sacramento has done an incredible job at distributing $89.6 million in CARES Act money. The city moved quickly. All the elected officials, led by Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, were full participants in how the money was spent.
Decisions were made in public and Tuesday, the city will dole almost all of what is left of the $89 million.
To date, the city has pumped $19.1 million into small business recovery and assistance. Also: more than $18 went to youth and workforce training, more than $15 million for homeless and housing programs, $19.1 million for the arts and creative economy, including tourism.
Included in this arts and creative economy piece is $5.4 million slated to be approved Tuesday for Visit Sacramento. It’s a smart, thoughtful investment. Before tourism was decimated in Sacramento by COVID-19, it was a revenue generator in transient occupancy tax collections for the city.
Visit Sacramento says a three-day convention that books 200 hotel rooms can generate nearly $13,000 in TOT collections for the city. A music event, like the annual Aftershock festival in Discovery Park, can bring in $800,000 in TOT collections for the city.
The investment of $5.4 million will help a depleted Visit Sacramento be ready to be open for business when visitors can return.
“When we’re successful, it creates jobs for Sacramento,” said Mike Testa, CEO of Visit Sacramento.
But does this mean everyone agrees with how the city has dispersed its CARES Act money? No.
And another CARES view
Advocates for struggling communities don’t feel they are being heard.
“The money wasn’t meant to be stimulus funding,” said Katie Valenzuela, a community activist who was elected to the City Council in March and will be sworn into office in December. “It was meant to be relief funding. While I appreciate how quickly the mayor and council worked to allocate money in a crisis, unfortunately I feel we missed an opportunity to provide more direct aid to households impacted by the pandemic.
“We cannot move forward on recovery until we stop the pain in our communities, and that means moving expeditiously to ensure the people in our communities are stable.”
Yes, the city often tabbed as being anti-business actually did devote much of its CARES funds to helping a wide variety of business interests.
Maybe some business owners suggesting that the city should do more to quell protesters should consider that their voices are being heard.
This story was originally published September 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
