Ashby is threatening cities to drop opposition to her homeless bill | Opinion
Representatives of three cities say that state Sen. Angelique Ashby of Sacramento has threatened them of being stripped of state funds for housing if they do not drop their opposition to her bill mandating the establishment of a new homeless oversight authority.
The cities of Rancho Cordova and Citrus Heights complied with Ashby, dropping their opposition to her bill and mentioning the senator’s threat in their respective public meetings. The councils in Rancho Cordova and Citrus Heights switched to a “neutral” position on Senate Bill 802. Folsom, however, formally opposed the bill at its Tuesday meeting, with Mayor Justin Raithel later predicting a lawsuit if it were to pass.
“Clout is clout, and so we don’t have the clout that she has,” said Citrus Heights Councilmember Jayna Karpinski-Costa at the Jan. 28 meeting, explaining why she was reluctantly voting to remove opposition to the bill and go neutral.
Ashby declined requests for an interview on her bill. Rising in the Senate to be its majority leader, she is applying brass-knuckles political tactics to a homeless governance problem that can only be resolved through diplomacy and local hard work.
Normally local governments voluntarily decide to join forces and create a joint powers authority when they have a common purpose and approach. SB 802 represents the state imposing new homeless governance on Sacramento County.
‘It is unprecedented’
“It is unprecedented,” Folsom’s assistant city attorney, Sari Dierking, told the city council on Tuesday.
SB 802 emerged last June as Sacramento’s new mayor, Kevin McCarty, was trying to forge fresh relations with the five county supervisors who oversee public drug treatment and mental health services that are key to the recovery of thousands of Sacramentans living on the streets. The bill converts an existing city-county Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency into a county-wide manager of homeless services and originally redirected affordable housing funds from local governments to this authority.
While some support emerged for the bill, particularly a slim majority of Sacramento City Council members, McCarty and county supervisors renounced the bill, as did the cities.
Surveys have repeatedly shown that the overwhelming majority of homeless reside in either the city of Sacramento and the unincorporated county, making these two entities disproportionately concerned with how this humanitarian crisis is managed. But the suburban cities cherish state support for local housing projects.
Credit Ashby for listening to the concerns of cities and recently amending her bill to maintain the existing flow of state housing funds to municipalities. But the core idea of SB 802, the state imposing a homeless governance solution onto Sacramento, remains intact.
Local opposition can be the death of bills like this inside the California Legislature, a neutral position akin to a green light. Ashby began to make it clear to cities that her amendments to maintain the stream of housing funds were enough to eliminate opposition, or else the amendments would go away.
Ashby’s threat, revealed
Here is how Rancho Cordova Housing Manager Stefan Heisler explained it to his City Council on Jan. 27:
“The Senator has sort of, kind of, stated her intent to us, that if the jurisdictions take an opposed position on the bill, then those amendments would be removed from the bill,” Heisler said.
In Citrus Heights, Councilmember Porsche Middleton didn’t want her city’s opposition to 802 to trigger the loss of local housing funds elsewhere. “I don’t want to be the holdout to keep other jurisdictions from being able to keep receiving their funding,” she said. “It’s very punitive.”
Yet in Folsom, where Councilmember Sarah Aquino has been a vocal opponent of SB 802 since its inception, the City Council unanimously voted to oppose SB 802.
“This is not a bill about homelessness and housing,” Aquino said. “This is a bill that is about state control versus local control.”
On Wednesday, Folsom Mayor Raithel confirmed that his council was under the same threat from Ashby, but simply wouldn’t buckle.
In Elk Grove, where the city council moved to a neutral position on the legislation, Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen said she was “not aware of any threats” and that Ashby “largely addressed our concerns.”
No substitute for local partnerships
Sacramento County Supervisor Rich Desmond, part of a board that unanimously opposes this bill, hopes the city and county redirect their energies toward expanding an existing partnership on homeless management as a collaborative next step. “I think my colleagues agree with that. I know the mayor agrees with that.”
McCarty reiterated his opposition to the Ashby legislation on Wednesday. As he told fellow council members earlier in the month, “the jurisdictions have made it clear that they cannot be forced to join the JPA. It goes back to the shotgun type wedding stuff. We have to work in partnership.”
SB 802 awaits a hearing before the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee.
We’re moving backwards right now on how to collaborate on homelessness in Sacramento when there’s so much potential to mend relations, particularly between the city and the county. SB 802 isn’t helping, despite what I am sure are Ashby’s best intentions. SB 802 is tearing things apart.
This story was originally published February 17, 2026 at 5:00 AM.