Editorial: Marin can’t let bureaucracy stop progress on projects addressing homelessness
The wheels of bureaucracy often move slowly, sometimes a lot slower than the pace of real-time challenges.
That’s been clear in Bolinas where $18 million tied up in the county and state bureaucracies have created a dilemma, leaving the Bolinas Community Land Trust short of the money needed to make repairs to the trailer camp it set up for 60 residents who would have been left homeless by the county’s condemning substandard worker housing on a local ranch.
To its credit, instead of waiting for the county to respond to the emergency, the trust moved swiftly, purchasing land and trailers, for the workers and their families who would have been displaced or forced to continue living in unhealthy and unsafe conditions.
The encampment, named Bo-Linda Vista, was a shining example of a community coming to the aid of local low-income Latino families in dire need.
Now the trust is waiting for the county to unleash $8.6 million in state funding to help it pay for repairing leaks in some of the trailers that trust executive director Annie O’Connor say have contributed to “mold and health issues.”
The return of rainy weather serves as a reminder that emergencies should make those wheels move a lot faster.
For Bo-Linda, the Marin Community Foundation has stepped up and loaned the trust $500,000 to buy five replacement trailers and to support property management and services to the camp.
The county, appropriately, also offered to loan the trust needed money before the grant is approved and the money is released.
Understandably, the state has some accountability steps built into the grants, especially after criticism that the state had failed to track the spending of billions of dollars in homeless grants.
Front-end accountability and public review of the effectiveness of that funding are important. Taxpayers deserve to know that their money is leading to affect needed change and improvement. But the process shouldn’t be so time-consuming that it gets in the way of delivering expedited emergency help to people facing the health and safety challenges of homelessness.
The front-end of Marin’s process should be ready for the Board of Supervisors’ approval at Tuesday’s meeting.
The trust is seeking to address its issues of leaks and defects with the manufacturer and the company that leased the trailers, but it has been unable to reach resolution and has been scrambling to fix the problems before more rainy weather returns.
The grant money in the county hopper also includes cash for San Rafael’s Mahon Creek Path encampment and the recreational vehicles that have been parked along Novato’s Binford Road. The number of people living along Binford is now down to 58, a significant reduction from when there were more than 130 vehicles parked along that stretch of road.
Both the city and county have stated that the two encampments are temporary and have adopted strategies aimed at moving residents into permanent housing.
As has been learned in recent years, as local municipalities have struggled with homeless encampments, strategies to remedy them take money and time.
Officials should guard against bureaucratic processes becoming a sizable factor in the amount of time it takes to move those strategies forward.