The issue of compensation has dogged public discussions about helping Orange County’s unhoused population on multiple occasions.
Increasingly, the focus has centered on nonprofit executives’ salaries – publicly-funded by their contracts with cities and counties – far exceeding that of their on-the-ground outreach staff working most directly toward getting people off the streets.
[Read: Will OC’s Homeless Prevention Workers Need Homeless Services Themselves?]
In Santa Ana, the issue has City Council members thinking about how to end this kind of funding cycle entirely.
And how to bring those services in-house.
At their regular meeting on Dec. 5, City Council members voted to continue discussing a proposed $3.8 million contract with City Net for “Street Outreach and Engagement Services,” which will return to lawmakers’ desks on Dec. 19, by which point city staff will have revisited the contract’s details with the nonprofit homeless services provider.
The vote happened after Councilmember Phil Bacerra – who has led calls to ramp up arrests of publicly intoxicated people, who are often homeless, and opposition to more homeless shelters in Santa Ana – raised questions about whether the proposed agreement was too top-heavy.
Namely, in City Net’s proposed budget for the contract amount, wages for street-level workers would range between $30-$50 hourly for things like dispatch calls and case management – working 40 hours a week.
Yet “executive leadership” would have 16-hour work weeks while making $104 hourly, for things like project oversight and “problem solving.”
Bacerra lambasted the proposed pay structure.
“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 managers, not the actual folks solving the problem,” he said.
It’s the second contract to come before council members, the last one being approved in 2022 for $2.8 million.
This time around, the amount has increased by $1 million.
It accounts for a market wage analysis that determined City Net staff salaries were low based on industry standards, which over the last year resulted in several staff leaving City Net for better paying jobs, according to a staff report.
The city’s Homeless Services Division Manager, Ken Gominsky, also attributed City Net staffing shortages to a decrease in services.
Bacerra argued the city should bring those services “in-house.”
“I recognize this is not something our police officers should be doing, but we need more boots on the ground and consistently hitting hot spots, whether it’s East First Street, South Bristol, the railroad tracks or our parks,” Bacerra said, even proposing a 6-month period to transition from City Net to the proposed in-house services.
There seemed to be agreement across the board, but disagreement over how to make the transition.
Councilmembers Thai Viet Phan and Ben Vazquez were in favor of approving the contract for its one-year term, allowing city staff time to study how to incorporate street outreach personnel into City Hall.
“Let’s approve it for a year, but we can terminate with 30 days notice, whether it’s in 2 months or 8 months … We have a mid-year budget update coming in February, so we’d know what we have in our budget, what that would look like,” Phan said.
Councilmember Jessie Lopez called attention to the fragmented focus of the region’s prevailing homeless services system – one in which homelessness prevention can fall under the purview of one type of organization, while another, in this case City Net, is strictly focused on getting people out of homelessness.
“When we’re talking about homelessness and how do we actually solve it – How are we making sure that these exits are not coming back to the street?”
A stated goal of the contract is for City Net to achieve 850 “street exits” over the course of the one-year term.
Gominsky, the city’s homeless services manager, defined “street exits” as any scenario in which people find permanent housing, placement in a shelter, “living with friends,” or returning to their family.
“How are we making sure people are not becoming homeless in our city – that’s not part of the City Net contract, I can assure you of that,” he said.
City Net “tries to find ways to exit them from homelessness,” Gominsky said. “That’s where their world sits.”
After City Net places someone in some type of location, “there are case managers that are assigned … to ensure that they continue to be successful,” Gominsky said.
But by that point, the case has been handed off to other nonprofit organizations, he added.
“That’s not City Net.”