Voice of OC (https://voiceofoc.org/tag/santana-editorial-homelessness/)
Orange County leaders this week unveiled a $40 million, 60,000 square foot mental health campus in Orange aimed at radically shifting regional homelessness spending away from local police and more toward mental health treatment.
Thanks to an outpouring of reader support, we exceeded our $75,000 fundraising goal this year and our newsroom enters 2019 on a solid fiscal footing, with renewed vigor to keep Orange County informed and alert on the key issues impacting quality of life from the public dais this next year.
The Blue Wave Election and Homelessness led the list of top stories for the Voice of OC team in 2018 along with a host of scrappy, daily enterprise reporting scoops uncovering fraud, waste and abuse across Orange County. Readers can really help spur this kind of reporting this week – as all contributions before Dec. 31 get doubled by a national foundation effort to bolster local nonprofit news.
Recent court decisions stress that without adequate public sheltering infrastructure, leaders can’t legally enforce anti-camping ordinances. Given the failure of OC Supervisors to craft regional consensus among cities on housing homeless people, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has now been put in a tough position, one he’s been trying to avoid since March.
Voice of OC today stands alongside hundreds of news organizations across America, pushing back against President Trump’s assertion that reporters are enemies of the people, defending the notion that a free and independent press is central to our democracy, our freedom.
The supervisors’ most immediate action was to take control of the county’s internal auditors, who are supposed to function as watchdogs against fraud in county departments and currently report to the county’s independently-elected auditor-controller, Eric Woolery.
With the OC Board of Supervisors incapable of leading a regional affordable housing solution, business and civic leaders are asking whether it’s time for a regional housing agency — to manage expected state, county and private resources and actually build needed affordable and permanent-supportive housing across Orange County?
Local & Fed OC law enforcement agencies apparently target each over political investigations, prompting many to question who can be expected to regulate elected officials in Orange County. Meanwhile, south county mayors ignore the Orange County Board of Supervisors’ mandate on homelessness, insisting other cities continue to cover them on shelters. And with hundreds of millions being considered for affordable housing construction, voices are already calling for a new regional housing construction agency – independent of the Board of Supervisors.
As Orange County Supervisors have increasingly abandoned their regional responsibilities, they’ve largely been left with a one job they seem to hate: combating the effects of poverty.
After publicly confronting their own inability to craft a regional solution to the local homelessness crisis last week, Orange County Supervisors should face some hard questions about their own political futures. Yet instead of the usual recall talk, Orange County should think big picture…as in Part Time County Supervisors.