Bee Opinionated: County’s $1B jail + Community responsibility for homeless + Sac DA goes to war

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It’s Robin Epley with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board once again, bringing you the best of California’s opinion journalism.

What would you do with almost a billion dollars?

Last Tuesday, three of the five Sacramento County Supervisors voted to begin a process that will cost residents close to $1 billion in the coming years to expand the County’s Main Jail and provide a mere 100 new beds in a mental health facility — in spite of more than three hours of spirited public comment, and all of it entirely in protest.

Opinion

This is, by far, the largest debt the county has ever taken on. It also forces county leaders to prioritize funding jail construction over health services and housing.

“The existing jail is the most expensive and least effective place to comply with a court decree to provide mental health services to inmates who need it,” wrote The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board. “There are such better options if the county would only try.”

We believe supervisors Patrick Kennedy and Phil Serna deserved some credit for challenging staff and voting against the two agenda items, which now authorize a $654 million mental health annex at the downtown jail and also approves overall county expenditures of up to $925 million.

“This was a fear-based decision by the supervisors, running scared from a threatened federal receivership. The county has been hopelessly out of compliance with a 2018 federal consent decree, the result of a class-action lawsuit seeking better treatment of prisoners with disabilities. The county is bound by law to prove they are moving toward a solution to those findings, and the board clearly felt they had no other option but to vote to move forward.”

No Place Like Home

“Homelessness is not a uniquely Sacramento problem, but for far too long, leaders in Sacramento, and in other California communities and beyond, have allowed NIMBYs to slow potential solutions. As someone who doesn’t live in Sacramento, it was fascinating to watch elected city leaders delegate the authority of finding suitable encampments for homeless people to City Manager Howard Chan, who was not elected by voters.”

So wrote our new summer intern, Brian Zhang, in his first column last week. Brian will be with us for the months of August and he’s already churning out some great work for the Opinion team; he’s a rising junior at Yale, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

“When leaders are slow to make collaborative, educational approaches to poverty, it turns the most vulnerable against each other instead of making new leaders out of us,” Brian wrote.

“What can California learn from New York’s prior examples and Houston’s unified homelessness response, which has brought together public housing committees, philanthropy, religion, private foundations and dozens of nonprofits? On a national scale, nearly all American melting pots are scrambling to house and feed asylum-seeking migrants on limited funds and space. Who are we to disapprove of homeless individuals walking in any one of our neighborhoods?”

Op-Ed Roundup

“Forever chemicals” are in our bodies and drinking water. We must stop using them by Phil Ting, California State Assembly representative for the 19th District, and Andria Ventura, the legislative and policy director for Clean Water Action California.

“Advocates have been sounding the alarm about California’s PFAS crisis for years, but the pace of progress does not yet match the urgency of this growing problem. We don’t manufacture PFAS products in California, but they are nonetheless found everywhere, from rivers and groundwater to our own bodies.”

Despite what Sacramento DA Thien Ho might say, being unhoused isn’t a crime by Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of and a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

“It is possible that the dispute between the DA and the city attorney could go to court if Ho decides to initiate an action against city officials. Such a suit would be frivolous and likely to be quickly thrown out of court. If Ho decides to initiate prosecutions against the unhoused, these will fail based on the Ninth Circuit’s decisions. Indeed, there almost certainly would be a suit in federal court to enjoin Ho, which will make it back to the court of appeals in a year or two.”

For Sacramento’s homeless population, summertime is about surviving the heat by Katherine Hunter, a Sacramentan currently residing in New York City.

“To some residents of Sacramento, Cesar Chavez Plaza is an eyesore, with anywhere from 20 to 30 or more unhoused individuals set up in tents, sprawled out in the sun or gathered in small groups around the fountain. But for the folks who spend their days or nights here, this park is their home. It’s a home with no air conditioning, water or fans. And in the summertime, when Sacramento sees triple-digit temperatures, no one feels the impact of the heat more than the city’s unhoused residents.”

Opinion of the Week

“This is all Ho’s doing.” — The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board on Sacramento County DA Thien Ho’s announcement that he has launched an investigation into certain, unnamed City of Sacramento officials over their “failure” to enforce state public nuisance laws and allowing homeless encampments within the city limits.

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Robin