One would think after all this time, the County of Lake’s departments and some of their agencies would do a better job of keeping the public informed on some of the issues that affect them directly, but a lot of agencies, despite having paid people in communications and public information positions, are still pretty bad at relaying information to the public. The same can be said about tribal governments in the area.
A recent case in point is the closure of the former juvenile facility in Lakeport which until this fall had been used as a homeless shelter but which now remains vacant after four months. While there have been updates on the efforts to procure the help from another entity to operate a shelter, and while the county’s behavioral health services department did acquiesce to the Board of Supervisors’ recent request to provide a detailed breakdown of previous phases of Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention funding granted by the state, the recent presentation to the board failed to adequately address this question.
The Record Bee requested the same information via a public records request in early December, but to this date, the county has failed to answer that request, in violation of the 10 days spelled out by law. What is known thus far is that, according to the presentation to the board during the Dec. 20 and previous meetings, round three of HHAP grant funds dating back to December 2021, received by the County and the Lake County Continuum of Care’s allocations were $569,940 and $610,650 respectively. Round 1 of HHAP funding approved in 2020 provided $445,266 and $500,000, while round 2 provided the County and its CoC with $203,550 and $250,000, respectively.
The documentation attached to these discussions are difficult for the layman to read and somewhat unclear in their formatting. In the spirit of full disclosure, the department should provide the BOS and the public, a more detailed and easy to digest breakdown of the use of previous funds from the state, given the BOS approved a 4th round recently. Some updates from the CoC about their ongoing efforts to secure an entity to operate a permanent shelter in the county, outside of zoom meetings and sparsely attended committee meetings would also be appreciated. A behind the scenes meeting between county representatives and one of the entities which applied for a grant to operate a temporary shelter in Lakeport received little attention and detailed information on this effort for public consumption was difficult to obtain.
Just as disappointing was the handling of the grant application by the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians in conjunction with the Lake County Office of Education’s Healthy Start Program and subsequent award of a $5.2 million Tribal Homeless Housing Assistance and Prevention grant from the California Interagency Council of Homelessness.
As reported by this newspaper, program director Ana Santana was in the hot seat during a special meeting of the Lake County Office of Education right before Christmas over wording in the application which identified the LCOE as a primary partner for the project which led to some community protests in Lucerne at the Castle property which is the proposed site for the program. Thomas Jordan, tribal administrator for SVBPI cited heavy competition for grants in California and limited funding ability, as well as tight deadlines for a lack of consultation with the LCOE board during the application process for the grant, as reasons for not announcing the grant application. “We did not broadcast it because it’s a chicken and the egg kind of situation,” Jordan told the board, stating they did not want to give people false hope in case the grant funding did not come through and adding that the sovereign nations “tend to do things more in the quiet than out in the open.”
That’s a shame, a little more transparency and a lot less secrecy would have gone a long way in mitigating all the subsequent problems.
—Ariel Carmona Jr. is the managing editor of the Lake County Record-Bee.
