by Marisa Kendall/CalMatters
New legislation forces the city and county of Sacramento to collaborate on homelessness. Stakeholders say it could have repercussions California-wide.
The Legislature is forcing the city and county of Sacramento to try something unusual in their fight against homelessness, and both critics and supporters of the controversial plan say it could have broad implications for the rest of the state.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 802 in September, which requires Sacramento, as well as all smaller cities within the county, to coordinate and form a joint powers authority that will lead the region’s homelessness response.
“Homelessness does not stop at jurisdictional boundaries,” Newsom wrote in a signing message, “and no city or county can solve this crisis alone.”
A joint powers authority is a public partnership where two or more local governments or agencies team up to jointly manage something. In Sacramento, the idea is that this new framework will allow the cities and county to better communicate and work together on homelessness – hopefully leading to more people getting off the streets.
Supporters say it’s a no-brainer, and they hope it will be an example to fix an age-old problem playing out in regions across the state: Cities and counties must work well together to effectively address homelessness, but they often don’t. On the other hand, opponents say forcing local governments to work together sets a bad precedent: Cooperation works best if it’s voluntary.
Meanwhile, this new experiment in co-governance is highly atypical for a number of reasons.
For one thing, this appears to be the first time the California Legislature has forced anyone to form a joint powers authority. Typically, those agreements are voluntary. In Sacramento, local jurisdictions chafing under this new mandate worry the new law will embolden the Legislature to do this again in other regions.
“This would be unprecedented, so it could have ramifications in 57 other counties,” said Sacramento County Supervisor Patrick Kennedy, who opposes the legislation. The county is threatening to sue the state to stop its implementation.
In addition, while it’s not uncommon for local governments to form joint powers authorities to manage other things that cross city boundaries — such as sewers or public transit — it’s very rare for this type of structure to govern a region’s homelessness response. In 2020, there were only three examples in all of California, according to Joe Colletti, chief executive officer of the nonprofit research organization HUB for Urban Initiatives. The most well-known is the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which recently has been reduced to a shell of its former self as a result of one headline-making crisis after another. In the rest of the state, a region’s homelessness response usually is led by a county or nonprofit.
Squabbling between cities and counties
This legislation was controversial from the beginning. It took Sen. Angelique Ashby, a Democrat from Sacramento and former city councilmember, two years of tense negotiations and multiple amendments to get it across the finish line. The final version allows the county and participating cities to keep control of their own funds, rather than pooling everything together — a major sticking point for the local governments.
The Sacramento region needed this legislation, Ashby argued during a recent committee hearing, because its various agencies have eight boards and nearly 90 board members working separately on homelessness without coordinating. The result is duplicated and inconsistent services, leaving people who are homeless in Sacramento County with no idea where they should go for help, she said.
It’s a problem the city and county have tried to fix for more than two decades. In 2010, the county board of supervisors and city council approved resolutions that supported creating a joint powers authority, but it didn’t happen. Two separate grand jury reports, one in 2019 and another in 2023, said the region’s homelessness response was dysfunctional and recommended better coordination.
Originally published on calmatters.org
