The homeless funding cliff

City hires former Dallas Police Chief:

Huh. I don't know much about Garcia. Clearly City Manager TC Broadnax liked what he saw when they worked together in Dallas.

The homeless funding cliff rears its head: On next week's Council agenda is a resolution asking the city manager to "identify funding" to keep the Marshaling Yard homeless shelter open permanently.

To recap: the Marshaling Yard is a city-owned warehouse in Southeast Austin that Mayor Kirk Watson pushed to use as an emergency homeless shelter last year. The city has spent about $10M of federal funds (that had previously been earmarked for permanent supportive housing) to pay a contractor to operate the 300-bed site. Critics have argued that it was a very expensive band aid and even supporters have framed it as a temporary measure.

But now the federal funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) are exhausted. Council recently found some money to keep the shelter open till March of next year, but what happens after that is unclear.

Over on the Council message board, Council Member Vanessa Fuentes has raised concerns about keeping the shelter open indefinitely. She notes that the facility was intended to be temporary but that the city, meanwhile, has not found an alternative site. She is also concerned about the cost of the shelter operations and suggests that the city may not be getting the best bang for its homelessness bucks.

In response, Watson said that the scheduled shutdown of the Marshaling Yard next spring is already causing problems:

Technically, we’ll stop doing intake at the Marshalling Yard in November, but the reality is that we’re doing virtually zero intake right now because of the anticipated closing. HSO is also curbing intake at all City shelters and pausing HEAL initiative efforts to ensure current Marshalling Yard clients will have a place to transition upon closure. This creates enormous problems to the whole homeless services system.

Watson notes that the resolution asks the city manager to find money "other than dollars currently allocated to the homeless response system." In other words, he's telling Council members that he's not going to once again try to fund the shelter by taking money away from permanent housing solutions.

The problem is that we need a lot more money for all of this stuff: outreach, shelter, treatment, and permanent housing. And yet we don't have nearly enough money to fully fund any part of that system. So we're left debating what to do with the scraps. The resulting debate gives the false impression that there are competing visions of how to address homelessness, with some favoring shelter and others focused on permanent supportive housing. But everybody knows that we need all of the above.

One final point: the back-and-forth between Fuentes and Watson on the message board illustrates why Council should continue to hold public work sessions to discuss the Council agenda before the formal meetings. There is clearly a lot to discuss!

Finally, someone talks about a Tax Rate Election: Council Member Chito Vela raises the prospect of a future tax rate election in an interview with Austin Sanders of the Chronicle (emphasis mine):

Vela worries about how APD’s ever-increasing budget might affect provision of other city services – especially as the Austin Police Association continues to demand significant raises in labor contract negotiations. He agrees with the APA and APD position that the city is facing a patrol shortage but not that offering substantial pay increases every year is the way to address that problem. “Raises are needed, but I don’t think just throwing money at the department in hopes of filling patrol vacancies is the way we’re going to solve that problem,” Vela said.

He also hinted that the city would likely need to pursue a tax rate election to generate more revenue to support even current levels of service and that devoting more money to APD would make that issue more urgent. Instead, Vela wants to explore ways the city can ease APD’s call burden to “help strained police resources.” A couple of ways to do that, he said, are increasing funding for mental health crisis response teams and expanding the reach of groups that can respond to homelessness-related 911 calls.

Vela is hitting on a few important points about public safety. The first is that much of the anxiety about public safety is driven by problems –– homelessness, mental illness –– that cops are not going to solve. The second is that we can't seriously talk about bolstering the services we need without talking about a tax hike.

Some thoughts on the presidential election: Like a lot of people, I was surprised by how good Kamala's game was in the first few weeks after Biden dropped out. She was charismatic, energetic, etc. But now the same problems she had in her 2020 campaign seem to be resurfacing. She doesn't do well in unscripted environments. She is overly cautious, sticking to the same talking points and anecdotes, which are becoming stale.

I said a while ago that if I were running the Harris campaign I would have her do an interview with every local TV station in every battleground media market. Well, it appears they are half-heartedly following my advice but the outcome hasn't been great. The NYT summed up her recent interview with a Philly station:

Asked for “one or two specific things” she would do to address high prices, Ms. Harris spoke for 1 minute 52 seconds about her biography before she got around to articulating her proposals for tax deductions to new small businesses and tax credits for housing developers.

An answer for people worried about the price of groceries this was not.

I watched it. It was maddening. What we're hearing from undecided voters in focus groups is that she's not providing enough specifics and comes off as phony, but the campaign apparently isn't taking that critique seriously.

I know, I know. How could a voter who is considering a flagrant fraud like Trump possibly fault Harris for a lack of sincerity and depth? But that's the irony of Trump –– we all know he's the biggest liar of all time but he gets "authenticity" points because he's not rehearsed. He "tells it like it is," even if his telling bears no resemblance to reality. This is why the efforts by DeSantis, Vance and the myriad other MAGA poseurs to be a "disciplined" version of Trump fail so badly.

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