Dear Council Members and City Staff,
From Nolan Sullivan’s presentation information, it is clear that the County has tremendous amounts of money directed toward homeless services.
In light of the fact that the County received and administer $208,700,000 (about 13x of Sebastopol’s total budget for all city services), it seems clear that the County should be funding Sebastopol’s homeless efforts.
Sebastopol should not fund a coordinator as it seems that the County already has funded and staffed many programs that could easily work in Sebastopol. Why are we paying for a Homeless Outreach Coordinator when we could get the SOUL program or a Mobile Response Team working in Sebastopol?
I fully support the County providing and paying for a member of the HEART to be stationed at the Sebastopol Police Station. I hope director Sullivan can ensure that this position is funded and allocated to Sebastopol. Sebastopol has a significant homeless problem, much larger than the 16 represented in the point in time count.
If the County will not reimburse the City of Sebastopol for a huge increase of calls to our local police (despite the fact Hopkins said that Elderberry Commons would “cost nothing” to the citizens of Sebastopol), then the County needs to send it its supports like HEART, Soul and mobile response.
In addition, where is the Measure O money. I have never seen it in a budget. Also, I have never seen a mobile response team in Sebastopol. Where are they? Why are we just hearing about them tonight? It is quite disturbing that all this money is flowing into Sebastopol and that there were services being provided that have never been mentioned in any staff report regarding the homeless. Where is the transparency?
Thank you,
Kate Haug