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San Francisco General Assistance May Get A Moralistic Makeover Prop. E Author
Earl Rynerson Wants to Stop the Poor From Buying Beer, Though we live in a time when San Franciscans are more flush with cash than ever before, on Tuesday voters will decide on a ballot proposition that will stop General Assistance recipients from receiving most of the $345 they get each month from the city in cash and replace the money with housing "vouchers." Proponents of Proposition E insist the proposition will stop GA benefits from being spent on drugs and alcohol and prevent fraudulent claims by people who don't really live in San Francisco. If passed, Prop. E will cost the city at least $6 million in operating costs alone. The start-up costs for the new system of GA payments that would need to be created is, as of yet, unknown. Like a number of propositions that make it to the ballot, Proposition E lacks any type of blueprint for the city to follow in actually implementing the new program if voters approve it. Earl Rynerson, the former city commissioner who wrote Proposition E and the information on the web site www.sfcares.com (which stands for "San Franciscans for Cash Assistance Reform with Enhanced Services), dismisses the opposition's charge that Proposition E will create an expensive bureaucratic nightmare for the city. "First of all, they're checks, not vouchers," Rynerson says. "They're mailed directly to housing providers. It's up to the city to decide how it handles payments."
The debate surrounding this proposition-what little of it there has been-has generally concentrated on the fact that the $355 in payments sent directly to housing providers is not enough to actually secure a room in a residential hotel in San Francisco. On the SF CARES site, Rynerson says that the average room rate in a South of Market SRO (single room occupancy hotel) is $351. Tony Patchell, a social worker in the San Francisco Health Department, says that according to the "Facts on Homelessness" pamphlet put out by the Coalition on Homelessness, the average room rate for an SRO with no kitchen or bathroom as of April 1999 was $450. Patchell's own estimate is between $450 to $625 per month for a room, though people routinely pay as much as $800 in "weekly" rates for a room in a month.
Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness and No on Proposition E committee says that because each housing provider would have to register and be approved by the city to receive Proposition E housing payments of $355 a month, most hotel owners likely couldn't be bothered. So, she says, "It doesn't matter that [the payments] won't cover the cost of a hotel." There are other consequences of Proposition E, however, that translate into potentially millions of lost dollars in red tape for taxpayers if the proposition passes. In addition to making GA recipients jump through hoops to pay their rent or get a room in an SRO, Proposition E requires the creation of a number of new government offices and programs to put this GA payment reform in action. The entire text of Proposition E is available at sfcares.com. Here, though, are some of the highlights and implications: € Fingerprinting recipients will be a condition of eligibility or continued eligibility for GA assistance. This means that Proposition E requires both current recipients as well as new ones to be fingerprinted. € Proposition E requires "satisfactory written proof of residency" and "disallows letters from advocacy organizations." This means essentially that the city will be responsible for determining eligibility and residency requirements. Rynerson defines an advocacy organization as any "whose primary mission is to advocate for a cause instead of providing direct, measurable and verifiable assistance to residents of San Francisco." Besides city agencies, advocates for the homeless are the only ones offering these services, which will obviously overburden city health workers. € Proposition E will "establish standards for housing providers." Landlords and hotel owners who want to receive GA housing payments "shall register with the city and county of San Francisco to become approved in order to receive housing vouchers and/or payments. The department shall decide what information in necessary." In Rynerson's introduction to the full text of Proposition E, he explains that Proposition E calls for
the San Francisco Department of Human Services to "use best efforts" to establish a "Bay Area Consortium to insure [sic] that one county does not act as a draw for another county's homeless as a result of a higher level of cash and benefits offered." Peg Stevenson of the city controller's office says that Controller Ed Harrington and his staff met with Earl Rynerson and budget managers in the Department of Social Services to discuss the city's budget assessment of what Prop E would cost if passed. "There was just a basic disagreement" about the assessment between Rynerson and Harrington, Stevenson says. "Our estimate was of the operating costs, not the start-up for the registry of housing providers. It's going to depend on how it's implemented and how it's done." DSS budget manager Julie Brenman says that the original estimate that the controller's office and the DSS came up with was $17 million, but they took out the one-time start-up costs to get the $6 million figure. "If we're required to provide vouchers, we'd obviously need to see people more often and provide more individual attention than we do now," Brenman says. "We would need additional building inspections, a new database and staffing for landlord registryŠWith stronger residency requirements, we would have to check all the residences," she says. Brenman also points out that in addition to staffing and man-hour increases in San Francisco GA payment overhead, Proposition E would require that the computer systems will need substantial new programming and management. "Instead of sending out one check like we do now, we'd need to send out more than one voucher per person," she says, because under Proposition E, recipients would need to show the city their PG&E and phone bills and get separate vouchers for each of them. Brenman says that San Francisco's DSS computer system is part of an 18-county consortium, which means that, "Every change in the system costs, like $1 million." On the SF CARES site, Rynerson says that although he disagrees with Harrington's estimate, "Spending $6 million to insure [sic] that the $65 million we spend every year on services rather than substance abuse is a good investment. Over 169 people died on the streets last year, most of them due to substance abuse and most of them helped to their demise by an outdated cash program that the city administers."
In a phone call last week, Rynerson said, "We need to take cash out of the system and stop furthering substance abuse (of GA recipients)." Rynerson also repeated the statistics available on his web site that "San Francisco has 10 times the number of GA recipients than all the surrounding counties combined." Rynerson says that this is because San Francisco GA recipients get more cash than in other counties where the cost of living is lower, and people come here because San Francisco subsidizes their drug and alcohol habits. "Who the hell would come to the most expensive city in the country to scam a $345 welfare check?" Tony Patchell, who has worked within the city's homeless programs for more than 10 years, asks. He concedes that there are a few hustlers from Oakland and Richmond who cheat the system, but he estimates that their numbers are fewer than 100. "A couple years ago, the city tried to catch welfare cheats," Patchell says. "They spent about $3 million to catch 20 people." |
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