How Sacramento’s business leaders forced lousy homeless policy on helpless politicians
To call the Sacramento City Council’s vote this week on a sweeping homelessness ballot measure an “approval” or “adoption” seems inaccurate.
Extortion. Blackmail. A shakedown. That seems more appropriate.
A coalition called “Sacramento for Safe and Clean Streets and Parks” demonstrated its commitment to addressing the homelessness crisis by shoving a ballot measure down the throat of a city mourning its deadliest shooting. With just 24 hours’ notice, City Manager Howard Chan convened a special City Council meeting at which Sacramento’s elected officials basically had two choices: approve a ballot measure negotiated by business interests and city administrators, or reject it and face insolvency if voters adopt a financially impossible alternative.
After tweaking a few words so every council district would be responsible for mobilizing emergency shelter, every member except Katie Valenzuela and Mai Vang backed the proposal, though some did so reluctantly. The “Emergency Shelter and Enforcement Act of 2022” will appear on city ballots in November.
The way this saga unfolded was a disturbing reminder of the ways wealthy constituencies can leverage public frustration and an unresponsive governing structure to bypass elected leaders.
The main proponents of the measure hail from the Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, Region Business, the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, Visit Sacramento and the Sacramento Police Officers Association. Despite an abundance of pandemic subsidies, public sympathy and community support, their shared outrage over the city’s inability to get more people off the streets resulted in a disgraceful campaign to coerce their way onto the ballot.
Daniel Conway, who was chief of staff for former Mayor Kevin Johnson, is the frontman for the campaign. By weaponizing an alternate petition quickly gaining signatures, Conway used a financially impossible proposal to bypass Sacramento’s elected leaders and negotiated a compromise with the unelected city manager, Howard Chan.
Last year, Mayor Darrell Steinberg proposed making housing an unassailable right and forcing the city to build more shelter or face litigation. Conway stripped the concept of its humanity, putting the enforceable obligation to accept shelter ahead of the enforceable right to provide it.
The final measure also eliminates the city’s financial exposure and would make it easier to sweep homeless encampments. And it commits a meager $5 million a year in budget surplus for the city to stand up shelter. For perspective, it costs Sacramento $33 million annually to fund 1,100 shelter beds across the city, and some estimates suggest the city has more than 10,000 unhoused people.
Multiple city officials said Steinberg was deliberately left out of negotiations. Conway claimed he kept council members informed, but Valenzuela disputed his version of events during Wednesday’s meeting. The ballot proposal was made public on Tuesday at 5 p.m., exactly 24 hours before the council was called to the dais to vote on it, and barely three days after six people — one of them a homeless bystander — were killed in a mass shooting on K Street.
Steinberg hopelessly called for a postponement of the vote, but not enough council members were interested. A provision sought by Valenzuela, Vang and Vice Mayor Angelique Ashby to compel Sacramento County’s involvement was rejected.
Without the involvement of the county and the state government, which is only briefly mentioned in the measure, nothing is likely to change. The city could end up with a law that doubles down on its weaknesses.
Nothing about this process was for the betterment of everyone in Sacramento. The city’s businesses decided a cleaner downtown is more important than providing housing or shelter to people who need it, and serious people in this town were foolish enough to go along with it.
This story was originally published April 8, 2022 at 5:00 AM.