SC Recovery Plan’s wrong priorities
In July, Santa Cruz city staff gave a presentation to the City Council on measurement and response to the fiscal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the city budget. Several months later, after working with Management Partners, a company contracted to help develop a strategy, the Interim Recovery Plan was born.
Reading through this plan, however, it’s clear that some interests were prioritized over others.
Following a scrapbook of landmarks and action shots featuring people engaged in various forms of mask-less outdoor recreation — a cruel joke considering the circumstances — three key objectives, and five guiding principles are introduced. The fairly innocuous objectives named are: areas of focus, key metrics to track recovery, and a framework for prioritizing incoming work.
The five guiding principles, however, prove more interesting, with two of the five highlighting humanitarian concerns: Community Engagement, and Health in All Policies: Equity, Sustainability, Public Health. Lacking a health and human services department, the council traditionally evades all questions of the human cost of public policy as being the county’s responsibility. Could it be that the Interim Recovery Plan is a benevolent exception?
We’re told the city is facing a long-term fiscal gap averaging more than $10 million a year, depleting reserves within a year if unaddressed. Serious stuff! One wonders how, given the dire circumstances, public outcry to defund the $30 million S.C.P.D. and pleas to implement the more effective, cost-saving CAHOOTS-style mobile crisis model for non-violent 911 calls have fallen on deaf ears. With zero cuts to the police budget, the plan eliminates park ranger positions.
Far more serious is elimination of Community Set Aside Grants — funds that provide safety net services. Given the global pandemic and economic depression with so many facing food and housing insecurity, how does cutting funding for local safety net programs fit within the Plan’s fifth guiding principle: Health in All Policies: Equity, Sustainability, Public Health?
Additionally, mention of the Health in All Policies framework along with tantalizing notions like “moving toward a green economy” are preempted by the caveat that they only need be “kept in mind.”
Priority Areas of Focus names goals: Actions ensuring shortand long-term fiscal sustainability, Investment in downtown and other business sectors, Improving and maintaining infrastructure. Bereft of Five Guiding Principles idealism, these priorities are neither a given, nor the community’s choice.
The report’s two public opinion polls illustrate overwhelming consensus that the top three community priorities are emergency medical services; affordable housing; park, beach, and open space maintenance — not “ensuring short and long term fiscal sustainability … investing in downtown businesses … improving or maintaining infrastructure.”
Hard core metrics for measuring our economic recovery are presented, enumerating positive outcomes that would tell the story of a successful COVID-19 recovery. One might think these metrics would include employment and job statistics, evictions and foreclosures, ICU patients, and unhoused/food insecurity, but instead they largely measure capital: business license issuances and renewals, commercial vacancy rates, business closures, planning and building permits, new housing (all types), tax revenues, labor hours for parks and recreation facilities, General Fund reserve, projects budgeted.
It might be argued these are the easiest metrics to measure or access, but that would require we forget the fact that city staff presented a graph of monthly unemployment numbers in their recent budget presentation or that the council arbitrarily delayed a project which would have resulted in data on rent increases and eviction notices — important information, given the county’s soon-to-end eviction moratorium.
Obviously public input hasn’t influenced recovery priorities. We are handed an Interim Recovery Plan that ignores the pandemic’s devastating impact on the majority of our community and eliminates critical safety nets for our most vulnerable. (For the full analysis, see SantaCruzLeft.)