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,”…
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