Embedded in the middle of the mayor’s S.O.C. speech, there was one innocent sounding paragraph that has 76 of the city’s important community agencies in a justifiable state of panic. The paragraph was this one:
We are going to better connect help to the people who need it by creating 21 Family Source Centers located in our hardest-hit neighborhoods. Where people will be able to seek assistance for themselves and their families, file for critical tax credits, access affordable medical care, and benefit from programs at every level of government – and all on a single form. Each year, this program will serve at least 50,000 people.
Here’s the problem. Those nice, spanking new (as yet to be built) “Family Source Centers” will need to be funded.
And funding, in case you haven’t noticed, is a bit tight these days. So to create his new pet one-stop shopping centers, the mayor reportedly intends to yank funding from a money cache known as the Community Development Block Grant fund.
Unfortunately, that money is funding the aforementioned 76 existing organizations and has been, in many cases, for over 20 years. In some cases 30 years. We’re talking about an impressive list of service providers that range from well-known day care centers, homeless shelters, senior care centers, pre schools, mentoring programs, after school programs, low-cost legal services, services for persons with disabilities, jobs programs……and on and on and on.
These are proven programs that are already woven into the fabric of the communities they serve. They provide services on which the poorer communities have come to depend. In other words, they cover many of the same neighborhood needs that the mayor wants to provide in his new Family Source Centers. Except that they don’t have “City of Los Angeles” over their doors, as one mayor’s office staffer helpfully pointed out when questioned about the funding switch.
Now these 76 neighborhood organizations are being told, “Bub-bye. Lovely knowing you. Must run. I’ll be taking your bank account with me.”
Put another way, the mayor seems to have decided to reinvent 21 nice new wheels all monogrammed with his name…and to do so he’s tossing out the existing working wheels, which does not sound terribly wise—and is, one would guess, a lot more expensive.
Some of the organizations have additional funding from elsewhere so, while they will struggle, they’ll survive. With other programs, this is by no means assured.
Although the funding repurposing has been presented as a done deal, it actually needs City Council approval and the issue is reportedly coming up for discussion today at a special Budget and Finance committee meeting that has been convened specifically to discuss the funding changes.
A group of the about-to-be defunded-agencies will show up today at today’s meeting and hope to get the council members to listen.
More on this as it unfolds.
To save some money, the city can take some of those burned out and abandoned stores in the slums and turn them quickly into family centers. Then, the mayor can raise taxes, as do all good Democrats, to pay for this new social program, which admits that all the rest of the social programs and money on them haven’t succeeded.
You people in California vote with your hearts rather than your heads.
Our mayor is a dangerous political hack with delusions of grandeur. He was elected on a wave of ignorance & hot air, much like President Bush, & has proceeded to do little for the city besides let his cronies loot our taxes for their personal luxuries & b.s., often non-existent programs. I shudder to imagine him as governor!
Keeping an open mind, can’t this be seen as the equivalent of his taking a bunch of fractured gang intervention programs and putting them under one umbrella under the Mayor’s office? Some of the latter were badly tinged with abuse and scandal and while I’m not familiar with these programs for
“the poor,” it stands to reason that there must be a lot of overlap which allows for waste and abuse. Centralizing their administration and oversight might make sense — that’s a key battle cry of anti-city hall people too, after all.
What should not be missed in this story is that some of these programs are highly functional and following the code of spending, while providing services to struggling families.
“Centralizing their administration and oversight might make sense  that’s a key battle cry of anti-city hall people too, after all”
I don’t know anything about LA politics – but it strikes me as odd that “anti-city hall people” would have centralization of social programs as a “batle cry.” Of course, it’s hard to deduce what players in these Byzantine dramas are on about without a scorecard – if you’ll forgive some badly mixed metaphors.
Badly mixed metaphors, misplaced modifiers…. It’s a wonder that we can follow what reg is trying to say.