Marin has $18M in homelessness grants stuck in pipeline
Marin County, San Rafael and the Bolinas Community Land Trust are still waiting to receive $18 million in state money awarded in March to address homelessness.
The county, which is managing the grants, received the contracts at the end of September, but the agreements must still be approved by county supervisors, and that won’t happen until Nov. 19.
Gary Naja-Riese, the county’s director of homelessness, said, “We had to legally review the contracts and make sure there were no issues with the three awards and then it takes time to get on the supervisors’ agenda.”
The biggest chunk of the Encampment Resolution Fund grant, $8.67 million, is earmarked to support a project in Bolinas called Bo-Linda Vista. The land trust leased 27 recreational vehicles last year to provide temporary housing for about 60 Latino service and agricultural workers who had been living in substandard and unhealthy living conditions on a ranch.
The trailers are on a 20-acre section of the 66-acre Tacherra ranch, which the land trust purchased. The trust also has paid for the construction of a new mound septic system at the site. The organization’s goal is to create permanent affordable housing for the people in the RVs.
“It’s been extraordinarily difficult,” said Annie O’Connor, executive director of the Bolinas Community Land Trust.
O’Connor said the delay the state funds has challenged the trust’s ability to meet the needs of the people it is sheltering.
“The folks most impacted, the residents of Bo-Linda Vista, have had some very real needs that have been forced to wait,” O’Connor said. “For example, some of the RVs came with manufacturing defects. That meant those residents went through last winter with leaks that contributed to mold and health issues.”
O’Connor said she is scrambling to resolve the problem before winter rains begin. The trust has been unable to resolve the defect issue with the RV manufacturer or the organization that leased the mobile homes.
O’Connor said the county has offered to advance $500,000 on the condition that it is repaid when the state grant money arrives, but only on a reimbursement basis.
“We needed cash on hand to be able to get reimbursed,” O’Connor said.
But the organization, which has an annual operating budget of only $700,000, was short on cash.
“That’s where the Marin Community Foundation came in,” O’Connor said.
Vikki Garrod, a spokesperson for the foundation, wrote in an email that “MCF made a recoverable grant of $500,000 to Bolinas Community Land Trust for the purchase of five replacement trailers for interim housing and to provide essential property management and services at BoLinda Vista.”
Garrod said the trust will repay the foundation once it receives the state grant money.
“We are way behind schedule,” O’Connor said. “We’re working to get as many units as we can before the start of the rainy season, but it’s been very challenging to have this delay.”
San Rafael was awarded $5.99 million of the $18 million grant to resolve the largest municipal camp in Marin County, some 65 people living in the Mahon Creek Path area. The county was allocated $3.72 million to fund the continuing effort to address a large group of vehicle inhabitants along Binford Road in unincorporated Novato.
The county and San Rafael are both using unspent cash from previous state grants to help tide them over until the new money arrives. The Encampment Resolution Fund allocation announced in March was the third round of grants.
In the two previous rounds, San Rafael received $772,960 and the county accepted $1.6 million. There is also some money left over from the $5 million that state Sen. Mike McGuire secured to address homelessness in Marin through an amendment to the 2022 state budget. San Rafael and Marin County each received $500,000 shares of that allocation.
“Binford was not impacted,” Naja-Riese said. “We continue our work under the ERF-2 grant. ERF-3 will allow us to add additional services for the remaining folks there.”
Naja-Riese said 58 people are living along Binford Road. Since August, 36 people there have been placed in permanent supportive housing or found housing with financial assistance from the county, he said.
Naja-Riese said another 38 people “self-resolved,” meaning they left the area on their own.
John Stefanski, assistant city manager of San Rafael, said the delay in receiving the grant money did not prevent the city from opening a sanctioned camping area along the northern portion of the Mahon Creek Path on Oct. 4. The camp is open to people who were living in the Mahon Creek Area camp prior to Jan. 31, when the state grant application was filed. The camp has 50 tent sites.
“There was really no material impact on our ability to stand the thing up,” Stefanski said.
Naja-Riese said the grant holdup didn’t come as a complete surprise. He said the letter notifying the county it had received the grant mentioned that oversight of the funding program was being transferred from the California Interagency Council on Homelessness to the Department of Housing and Community Development.
“The letter said to expect to hear from HCD after July 1,” Naja-Riese said, “so we knew there was going to be an initial delay.”
The change in oversight came soon after the state auditor released a report on April 9 that concluded “the state must do more to assess the cost-effectiveness of its homelessness programs.”
The report said the California Interagency Council on Homelessness had failed to report financial information on the state’s efforts to prevent and end homelessness since fiscal 2020-21, despite a significant amount of additional funding supplied by the state during this period. The report said the agency could not provide assurance that the state was achieving its goals because of a lack of information on the costs and outcomes of individual programs.
Naja-Riese said the grant contract for the $18 million requires the recipients of the money to resolve their respective camps within 36 months.