Bee Opinionated: Sacramento homeless deal’s potential + Bring Tice home + Kings beam dreams
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Hello, hello, Robin Epley here again with The Sacramento Bee’s Editorial Board.
In an editorial last week, The Bee took a look at the new agreement between Sacramento County and the City of Sacramento that commits the two governments to offer at least 200 more shelter beds and to build a desperately needed downtown behavioral health center.
An agreement on homeless services between the city and county was needed to implement Measure O, which passed in the November midterm, and which could mean more sweeps of homeless encampments.
But the measure does not void the federal appeals court decision Martin v. Boise, which found that homeless people cannot be removed from publicly owned land if no shelter is available.
“Potentially, it’s great news that the city and county of Sacramento have agreed to a new legal framework on how to address our homelessness crisis. All the ghosts of failures past are sitting on that word ‘potentially.’ ”
The new agreement obligates the county to operate a new 200-bed shelter within Sacramento’s limits if the city provides a “shovel-ready site.” But:
“Just 200 more is far too few given the estimated 9,300 people who are homeless on any given night. Right now, the county offers about 1,300 shelter beds and the city about 1,100. All are usually taken.”
The county is also expected at some point to add 500 more residential substance abuse treatment beds. The 600 shelter beds written into the new agreement include roughly 400 that the county had already approved.
“In obligating themselves to attack the problem instead of attacking the people, city and county officials deserve our support. And in inviting us to hold them to it, they will also deserve the accountability they’re promising.”
Beam Me Up
“I love the beam. But I didn’t start out loving it.”
I wrote last week about Sacramento’s desire for a point of pride in our city, a status symbol currently occupied by the Kings’ “beam” — the ridiculously bright, purple beam of light that gets turned on at Golden 1 Center after the Kings win a game.
Dollar for dollar, it might be the best investment the team has ever made to garner fan support, and it seems to have reinvigorated the team’s spirit as well, seeing as how they’re among the leaders in the Western Conference, only 2.5 games behind first-place New Orleans before the start of play Friday. (That makes it the Kings’ best start since the 2004-05 season.)
Yes, the beam has grown on me and has enhanced my pride in being a Sacramentan. Sometimes, pride in Sacramento can be elusive.
“Sacramento doesn’t have one big draw, like an Eiffel Tower or a Golden Gate Bridge. Instead, it’s a hundred little things that add up. The Michelin stars, the Kings beam, the Food to Fork moniker, the Aftershock festival, etc. are all part of modern-day Sacramento. … Maybe the beam is becoming successful not just because the Kings are winning but because — like a purple maypole in the town square — we finally have something to rally around and celebrate.”
Hope and Urgency
“Austin Tice was a 31-year-old veteran turned journalist covering the devastating Syrian civil war for McClatchy and others when he was abducted near Damascus in 2012. Last summer, his family and friends marked 10 years since his disappearance, which, of scores of Americans wrongly detained abroad, would make him the longest-suffering.”
The Bee Editorial Board opined last week on the release of American basketball star Brittney Griner from a Russian penal colony after over nine months of wrongful detention. We hope that her release could mean renewed pressure for finding and returning McClatchy journalist Tice, who has been missing for more than a decade.
“As Griner’s hard-won release and (Paul) Whelan’s continued captivity show, each of these cases is as different from the next as it is distressing to the detained and their loved ones. But Tice’s courageous service to his country and to journalism, the opaque circumstances of his captivity, and the unfathomably long time elapsed since his disappearance should make his case a priority among priorities.”
“If the U.S. government can work with Russia,” a Tice family statement said last week, “there is no excuse for not directly engaging Syria.”
Opinion of the Week
“The president’s judicial emissaries would thereby effect his desired cancellation of the founding document by the slightly subtler means of willfully ignoring its obvious intent.” — Deputy opinion editor Josh Gohlke on former President Donald Trump and the Supreme Court’s mutual subversion of the U.S. Constitution.
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Stay dry,
Robin Epley
