Todd Gloria pouring money at San Diego's homeless

Todd’s costly homeless binge

Citizens wanting to know how San Diego mayor Todd Gloria will handle the homeless may find some of the answers in the pages of a potentially costly request for proposals put out by the city’s housing commission. “Program will engage persons experiencing homelessness through two distinct yet complimentary [sic] functions: street outreach and street-based case management,” says the January 27 solicitation for a contractor to run the mayor’s Coordinated Street Outreach Program.

“Street outreach,” per the document, will have “an emphasis on rapid resolution interventions, diversion from the homelessness response system, and referrals to emergency housing resources.” The solicitation goes on to say, “Successful proposals must demonstrate an ability to rapidly respond to service requests for outreach throughout the City of San Diego and street-based case management activities using a neighborhood-based strategy.”

A host of would-be providers from out of town are already angling for a crack at the contract. But labor shortages could inflate costs to six figures or more and delay the effort before it ever gets off the ground. The list of proposers includes San Bernardino-based Lutheran Social Services of Southern California and Los Angeles-based People Assisting the Homeless, otherwise known as PATH. According to a January 27 account by CalMatters, PATH’s business is growing so fast that it can hardly handle the burgeoning influx of work.

The non-profit, “which serves about a fifth of the state’s homeless population, has hired seven recruiters to help fill 340 vacancies, out of 1,100 jobs,” said CEO Jennifer Hark Dietz. “It’s now taking an average of four months to fill any given spot.” In addition to lengthy delays, insiders note that California’s social service worker shortage is virtually sure to drive up San Diego’s cost.

“We have all this money,” Farrah McDaid Ting of the California State Association of Counties told CalMatters. “Can we really do this if we don’t have the people? I think there could be a real limitation.” Even more cash may be the answer, but San Diego’s request for proposal notes that any payment costing more than $250,000 “must be approved by the Board of Commissioners of the San Diego Housing Commission,” and public resistance may be strong.

Kevin’s last tour

Ex-San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer’s sputtering 2022 gubernatorial election committee raised $2,187,472 during 2021 but ended the year banking just $54,488, according to a January 29 campaign disclosure filing. During the second half of 2021, expenditures included $4500 paid to a San Diego outfit called Agenda Setting, run by Faulconer’s former chief operating officer Aimee Faucett.

In 2020, she received a total of $328,582 in pay and benefits as chief operating officer, per TransparentCalifornia.com. Axiom Strategies of Kansas City, where Stephen Puetz and Duane Dichiara, two other longtime Faulconer political gurus, now work, got $7500. Public Square Partners, run by David Reade, ex-chief staffer to GOP state Senator Jim Nielsen, got a $6250 “consulting retainer.”

Meanwhile, Faulconer’s committee for the 2021 gubernatorial recall campaign, in which he managed to place just third in the race to replace incumbent Gov. Gavin Newsom (who beat the recall), had only $6342 in the bank, with $27,076 in debt, after raising $2,666,233 during 2021. Expenses included $1219 worth of “travel meals” at Woolgrowers in Los Banos and $4925 for “event, meal and music” paid to CityMark Development in San Diego. Still owed was $4450 to Hemphill Brothers of Whites Creek, Tennessee, for a “final bus tour” and $12,139 to the U.S. Treasury for payroll taxes.

In addition, $25,736 was owed to Axiom-owned Remington Research Group of Kansas City for “texting Yet another pro-Faulconer group, an independent expenditure committee called Fund for a Better California, primarily formed to support Kevin Faulconer for Governor 2022, was also semi-dormant in the wake of the ex-mayor’s showing.

The committee had just $9,548 after refunding $133,648 in contributions from GOP fat cat and apartment mogul Gerald Marcil, who wound up furnishing a total of $866,351 to the committee during 2021, per its January 29 semi-annual filing. “We just had an election, and people do get burned out,” Marcil was quoted as saying in a January 21 Politico piece speculating about how eager wealthy Republicans were to finance this year’s campaign against Newsom, who is seeking reelection. “A lot of Republicans have given up on California, and they put their money into the national scene.”

— Matt Potter (@sdmattpotter)

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