Gov.'s homeless plan is funded the wrong way
Everyone agrees that the California government has spent record amounts in recent years to address the increasingly visible homeless situation.
Lawmakers “have provided unprecedented funding to support our cities, counties, continuums and providers in our collective effort to prevent and end homelessness,” confirms the chairman of the state's Interagency Council on Homelessness, in a 2021 report that tracks the spending.
Everyone also agrees that the problem isn't showing signs of subsiding. As the Public Policy Institute of California reported last month: “Homelessness continues to grow in California: nationally, California has topped the list for the state with the largest homeless population for more than a decade.”
That has led to a new push from lawmakers from both parties for more accountability, as CALmatters reported. That interagency council report found that the majority of homeless people who participated in state homeless programs remained unhoused “or the state lost tract of their whereabouts.” This is a tough problem, but California's typical big-spending approach isn't yielding results.
Against that backdrop, we turn to Gov. Gavin Newsom's latest idea — asking California voters to approve a $3-to-$5-billion bond measure to finance construction of facilities to treat the homeless. We appreciate the measure focuses on dealing with mental-health and substanceabuse issues — rather than just pretending the homelessness crisis is solely about a lack of affordable housing.
As the governor's office explained, the bond would fund “thousands of new community behavioral health beds in state-of-the-art residential settings to house Californians with mental illness and substance use disorders, which could serve over 10,000 people every year in residential-style settings that have on-site services — not in institutions of the past, but locations where people can truly heal.”
The measure also prioritizes services for homeless veterans and revamps a 20-year-old law that taxes millionaires so that it earmarks more homeless-related funding to local governments. The basic concepts are fine. Yet given the failures of California's latest record-setting spending efforts, it's not overly cynical to ask why this new spending program will succeed in ways that the last ones haven't.
If lawmakers are serious about accountability, then they need to embrace something other than the sameold spending approach. Actually, this funding mechanism evades accountability. The state last year had an unprecedented budget surplus of $97.5 billion and now faces a deficit. Nothing promotes accountability better than making hard choices by funding new programs out of existing budgets — rather than borrowing.
We applauded Newsom for his legislation last year that creates so-called CARE Courts (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment), which epitomizes innovative thinking that the state needs to embrace. It's designed to divert homeless people toward public services rather than jailing them when they get in trouble with the law.
As the Sacramento Bee reports, opponents of that law faulted it “for failing to guarantee housing for everyone who needs it” and see this bond measure as an attempt to provide that housing. The problem, of course, is there isn't enough money in the world to provide permanent housing for every person who needs it — especially at absurd $700,000-plus per-unit costs that are typical in these government-directed projects.
We'll pay close attention as further details emerge, but Californians are right to be skeptical that this new approach will accomplish more than the last approaches.
Union membership
Re “Unions adding more members in California” (March 23):
It's interesting to see that organized union membership is up in California (especially for government workers), but down in the rest of the U.S. Interestingly we see the same trend with homelessness in California (up) and nationwide (down). It's important to remember the difference between the private and public sector. In the private sector, if you deliver substandard or inefficient products or services, eventually you'll go out of business. In the public sector (especially in California), because unions support the party in power, their generally terrible performance is rewarded with even more wasteful funding and fiscal bloat. It's nothing to be celebrated.
— Jeff Thomas, Irvine
Garcetti nominated ambassador to India
I suspect that Eric Garcetti will have no difficulty adjusting to the homeless, the crime, the poverty and the slums of Mumbai and Calcutta having served his apprenticeship to be the ambassador to India as the mayor of Los Angeles.
— Marshall Barth, Encino
World climate change
Re “World on `thin ice' as climate report gives stark warning” (March 21):
The article notes “Humanity still has a chance, close to the last, to prevent the worst of climate change's future harms.” Unfortunately, the report does not apparently mention that, prior to humanity, the Earth experienced five massive ice ages followed by warming periods that melted all or most of the ice each time. This implies that there is a normal warm/cold weather cycle independent of people. If so, even if humanity reduces its carbon footprint to zero, that same temperature fluctuation will still exist.
— Jon Appleby, Rancho Palos Verdes
Iraq war
Yes, I agree the Iraq war was a mistake — “20 years later, Iraq war was wrong” (March 22). Our fallen soldiers are heroes, our wounded are national treasures. We went to war on the adamant assurances of all intelligence agencies that Saddam Hussien, the butcher of Kuwait, aggressor in the war with Iran, and tyrant of his people, had weapons of mass destruction. He did not.
This major intelligence failure by the CIA, NDA, DIA, etc. are not the only ones. Recently we have had to deal with these agencies spying on Americans using the USA Patriot Act, and the 2016 Russian collusion fiasco.
If we are going to be “skeptical of such hubris in the future” we need independent devil's advocates embedded into each agency asking the hard questions, accessing the evidence, ensuring the means to the end are legal and testifying alongside the agency head before Congress and the American people.
TikTok ban
I find it rather humorous that our elected officials are leaning toward banning TikTok partly because of the dissemination of “misinformation” (e.g., trying to influence the 2020 presidential election). These same elected officials publicly provide misleading information every time they run for office trying to influence the voters to vote for them. They mislead the voters when they name proposed bills and laws in a fashion to disguise (i.e., use misinformation) to hide the real impact of the bill or law. They do this because they know (these are very intelligent people) that if the voters know the true impact, they would not support the bill or law. But, this is done overtly with no attempt to hide what they are doing. And it appears as though they consider this acceptable behavior. People who live in glass houses ...
— Scott Irwin, Fullerton
COVID-19 reflections
Many thanks to the editors for the March 19 section devoted to COVID-19 reflections. It was surprising to see how fast our political leaders and public health officials became oppressive and unreasonable in their policies. Unfortunately the Biden administration is working on an agreement that will allow the WHO to determine worldwide pandemic responses, giving up America's right to choose for itself.
Every American should be outraged.
— Debbie Owen, Rancho Cucamonga