Prompted by a state audit that found San Jose spent more than $300 million responding to homelessness, two officials want the city to conduct its own audit of how much is spent on homeless services and programs.
Council members Bien Doan and Arjun Batra hope the information will give them a clearer picture of how the money is spent so the city can consolidate any duplicate efforts.
Batra wants to know if the city is dividing the work appropriately between the city, Santa Clara County and the state.
“For us, the audit really serves to shed light on… where the money has gone and what the results are,” Batra told San José Spotlight.
He wants the audit to look at several categories, including how much is spent on encampment removal, supportive services, temporary housing sites and the contracts San Jose has with homeless service providers.
Faced with the mayor’s call to move all homeless people off of waterways, councilors also want City Manager Jennifer Maguire to provide cost estimates for her proposal for huge parlor-style homeless shelters. acts. While his proposal, called SJ LUV or Lifting Up Lives, was unanimously rejected at a Rules and Open Government Committee meeting in March, Batra said the city manager was directed to evaluate all options for building shelters, including this one. . She will report her findings to the full San José City Council.
“We really need to design a comprehensive plan to improve the effectiveness of the money spent,” Batra said. “Doing more of the same is not the answer.”
Doan said at the May 14 council meeting that homelessness has been discussed for 25 years and nothing ever changes.
“The audit we recommend evaluates our internal structure and practices and aims to find ways to improve our ability to help our homeless residents, be more responsible and efficient with taxpayer dollars, and improve our response times to quality issues. life,” he said. San José focus.
The California State Auditor in April found that the city could not identify all of its spending on homeless support, nor adequately measure the effectiveness of its systems.
That money went toward numerous temporary housing and supportive services projects, including $50 million from the state to build 204 temporary manufactured homes and $125.5 million from the state through Project Homekey on temporary and permanent housing.
The city also lacks enough temporary or permanent housing to meet demand, and auditors recommended that city officials immediately collect data on temporary housing, which the audit found was missing.
Auditors gave San Jose until September to formulate a succinct plan for how it will address homelessness and begin publicly reporting spending data, according to an audit requested by a local lawmaker.
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on Twitter.
