Santa Ana is renewing its one-year contract with the nonprofit City Net for up to $3.8 million to provide outreach to the city’s homeless population, but with some changes.
Referred to as the SMART team (Santa Ana’s Multi-Disciplinary Homeless Response Team), City Net staff are hired to provide trauma-informed, non-law enforcement homeless outreach.
When the latest contract was first presented to the City Council earlier in the month, councilmembers raised concerns about the amount of funding going to pay for management and executive roles.
In City Net’s original proposed budget, workers on the ground dispatched on calls or managing cases would earn an hourly rate between $35 and $47 for a 40-hour work week.
“This budget as proposed includes $263,000 a year in various supervisors in addition to $86,719 going to executive leadership that works a whopping 16 hours a week, and that work includes ‘project oversight’ and ‘problem-solving,’” Councilmember Phil Bacerra said at the Dec. 5 meeting. “We need more boots on the ground and we need more consistently hitting the hot spots.”
“I can’t in good conscience approve something like this where our folks are demanding we do something about homelessness and we’re paying more for the managers, not the actual folks that are solving the problem,” he added.
The new contract removes executive costs and re-adjusts administrative costs, leaving financial room to form one more field team that will focus on “service-resistant” people living on the streets of Santa Ana. Workers’ wages remain the same.
The organization is also extending its working hours to 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, adding an additional 18 hours a week of outreach.
The council circulated the idea of bringing the work in-house, instead of hiring an outside organization to do its homeless outreach.
“I do tend to agree that government should handle and manage these services. I would love to have them in-house,” Councilmember Jessie Lopez said. “Do I think that we’re there? No. I’m not going to say cancel City Net, because we don’t have a safety net to fall on. We don’t have a safety net for our residents to call and do the outreach.”
Bacerra said $3.8 million is still a lot of money to pay for street outreach when the programs and services being offered are being rejected by the city’s homeless community.
“We need to get these folks off our streets. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result,” Bacerra said. “It’s not working. We want to divert calls from SAPD, but the unfortunate thing that we’re facing today is that a lot of the calls for SAPD, it’s not because they’re houseless, it’s because they’re out there doing drugs, they’re jiggling car door handles trying to take whatever is in the cars.”
In conjunction with the council’s recent call on Santa Ana police to arrest publicly intoxicated people in the streets, a new addition to City Net’s scope of work is to connect with folks as they exit the Santa Ana jail, directly them to services that can get them housed. City Net has a goal of reaching 25 positive jailhouse exits in 2024, meaning individuals are successfully connected to temporary housing, reunified with family or placed in mental health or substance abuse programs.
Mayor Valerie Amezcua said she wants to hear “out of the box” ideas for how City Net can be better utilized.
“I would not support going past a year without seeing some drastic changes,” Amezcua said. “The city has spent, just this year alone, $24 million addressing the homeless issue. We have really taken the hit, as a city, around the homeless issue.”
