Sacramento city and county can’t get it together while homeless people suffer | Opinion
This constant, petty finger-pointing between the county and the city of Sacramento is exhausting. I want nothing so much as to take a nap and only wake up after they’ve worked their squabbles out.
There are 1.5 million people in this county, nearly 10,000 of whom are living in indigency, and not a single one of them has time for government infighting — especially not the several unhoused people who are statistically predicted to die from heat stroke in the next few weeks. Sacramentans need real solutions to a humanitarian crisis that’s growing by three people for every one who exits homelessness in this region.
Tuesday’s miscommunication at the city of Sacramento’s homelessness workshop was embarrassing for everyone involved — but perhaps particularly for the city, as the host and organizer of a meeting that proved so spectacularly unorganized.
The city and the county each have their own version of what happened Tuesday. But at the meeting, the council made it sound in chambers as though the county had failed to show up properly prepared for their workshop.
That appears now to have been a vast overstatement.
Apparently, some council members thought Chevon Kothari, Deputy County Executive for Social Services, was going to give the same presentation on homeless services that the County Board of Supervisors had received in late May.
It turns out Kothari only found out she was presenting just two minutes before the meeting started.
“I have to first apologize to the council,” Kothari said at the podium. “We were under the impression that today would just be a workshop on compliance so we did not come prepared with any presentation.”
That announcement launched the workshop in an awkward direction. It left certain council members visibly frustrated and confused as to why county staff would come unprepared to present. County staff were understandably frustrated too, feeling attacked for the courtesy of attending a city council meeting and finding themselves under siege due to a lack of clear instructions and a dashed agenda that they’d had no part in forming.
The spectacle did not go unnoticed. “Some council members implied County staff were shirking their responsibilities by not making a presentation, and that was unacceptable,” Supervisor Rich Desmond wrote in a statement after Tuesday’s meeting. “That kind of criticism from a partner jurisdiction runs counter to the spirit of the partnership we have created between the county and the city.”
The incident underscored yet again the inability of the city and the county to work well together publicly, even while electeds such as Mayor Darrell Steinberg repeatedly insist relations are going well behind the scenes.
Private meetings keep out too many
The city-county “4x2” was established late last year by the city of Sacramento and the county of Sacramento, and so named because it includes four Sacramento City Council members and two Sacramento County Supervisors: Mayor Steinberg, city councilors Eric Guerra, Sean Loloee and Caity Maple, and county supervisors Rich Desmond and Patrick Kennedy. The meetings are private — and that’s the whole point.
By placing a minimum of councilors and supervisors in the room, elected officials can legally skirt Brown Act laws and keep the meetings closed to the public. The Brown Act guarantees the public’s right (and the media’s right, too) to attend meetings of local legislative bodies such as City Council or the Board of Supervisors. If less than a quorum of those members meet, then that meeting is not subject to the law.
We all just have to take it on faith that these meetings are going well, but what we’re being shown, over and over again, is that the city and county can hardly work together to get a presentation made, much less solve the region’s homelessness crisis.
If the city wanted a presentation from county staff, then that should have been made crystal clear to both staffs, not mentioned once in a meeting weeks ago. And if the councilors were surprised when Kothari’s presentation didn’t happen, then the professional thing to do was to move on and discuss the matter privately, not hang Kothari and county staff out to dry.
Council member Talamantes told me she plans to ask for a regular report from the 4x2 in the future to avoid another incident like this, and I think that’s a wise idea. What would be great, too, is if she — and anyone else on the city dais so impassioned — came back from this summer break with a plan to begin to identify where homeless people could actually live. Today, such a map simply does not exist.
That would be a workshop worth attending. Perhaps the county, after some much-needed clear communication from the city, will present the breakthrough.
This story was originally published June 30, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
