Essential Support Services Funded
In Which: The CSC Frets over Public Comment; City Council explicitly draws line on CSC scope; Salaries showcase City reorganizations and living wages.
The CSC Does The Thing
The Community Services Commission (CSC) met to finalize their recommendations on over $1,800,000 in funding. Although a small amount in comparison to the City Budget or a housing development, the money recommended by the CSC goes directly to nonprofit service providers, 9 of whom were first-time recipients of the City’s funding.
It’s also important to point out that, like with all social services, the need far outstrips the resources available. The grant requests were more than double the amount of money available to give out—so these funding recommendations aren’t easy. Hard decisions have to be made by regular, unelected people who are just doing the best they can. Because of that, there are going to be groups that feel they didn’t get as much as they should have, and that’s really hard.
But that doesn’t stop people from pulling for a service they want.
The Public Weighs In
A few organizations seem to have put together letter-writing campaigns to sway the CSC’s funding recommendations. The biggest of which seemed to be for 5 Sikh Seva, WeeCare (a for-profit childcare technology company), and Plethos Productions.
5 Sikh Seva had a lot of institutional partners, including HUSD, writing in to support their request for funding. Several members of the organization also showed up in person, with one taking time to deliver oral comments on the matter. They even went so far as to submit further information as Public Comment in support of their application.
WeeCare put together a campaign where multiple people wrote in support of “affordable childcare.” Some of the letters explicitly supported WeeCare while others were a lot more vague. Just for clarity, WeeCare doesn’t create childcare providers, it doesn’t even necessarily lower childcare costs. The pitch for WeeCare was a neo-liberal free-market pitch that lowering the cost of doing business will lower the cost of the service provided. Anyone who’s bought groceries recently is painfully aware that this isn’t always the case.
Finally, Plethos had a lot of people writing in. There was definitely a concerted effort here, with visible form letters being incorrectly copied and pasted into emails. I applaud the organizing effort, but there’s still one glaring issue with Plethos: they’ve never actually put on a show in Hayward. There can be a lot of reasons for that, but suddenly looking to set up shop in Hayward when there’s been no community in-reach feels really at-odds with what the CSC attempts to do.
But despite all of that, nothing is set in stone.
What To Do About Public Comment
This is another reason it’s important to realize that most of the people who are on these Commissions aren’t elected officials. It wasn’t even clear to several Commissioners how they should handle public comment. Groups, like 5 Sikh Seva, submitted information that should have been in their application as a part of their written Public Comment.
“Is it ethical,” one Commissioner asked, “for us to get that data and then make a complimentary recommendation?” Staff clarified that this was the first time that the CSC had received so much public comment—a testament in many ways to their outreach and engagement efforts—and that issues like that will be clarified for candidates going forward.
But there was even confusion about general comments of support from members of the public. There were many letters, as detailed above, pushing for various applicants to receive more funding than they had initially been given. Staff clarified, saying “Folks can submit public comment… in whatever way they want. I can’t interpret for you what their comment seems, other than what is literally written.” Another Commissioner asked if comments could be stricken from the record, which would be a violation of the First Amendment and the Brown Act.
For clarity, the public gets to weigh in on public meetings and members of that body get to listen to or ignore comment as they see fit. There can’t be unreasonable bounds on their speech and Commissioners have the responsibility to do the hard thing and decide whether or not to be swayed by public opinion—sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s misinformed and even dangerous. It’s your responsibility up there to decide—nobody can do it for you.
Black Women Band Together
The Kwanzaa Project was a source of major friction during the last meeting. For better or worse, one of the primary drivers of that friction left the meeting almost as soon as it started. After some opening discussion, it became clear that two of the Black women on the CSC were, rightly so, pushing forward more funding for Plethos Productions and the Kwanzaa Project explicitly because they are being spearheaded by Black women.
“There are two African-American women who’ve come in and asked for our support and we have given them zero dollars,” one of the Commissioners said. This is factually incorrect, as Plethos and the Kwanzaa Project had been allocated $5,000 and $3,000, respectively.
When the possibility of allocating some of the remaining $23,000 from the Arts and Music group to 5 Sikh Seva was put forward, the Commissioner then argued against it because “there is a priority for diversity.” This makes the implicit argument that the South Asian/Indian Sikhs aren’t a part of “diversity,” an issue frequently encountered by members of the API political umbrella.
But one other Commissioner argued that the Arts and Music funding could, and should, be used to fund programs in the Arts and Music category as much as possible. The fact that no agency can receive more than they requested, meant that the only place that the remaining funding could go was to those two programs.
So, after much discussion, the final recommendation allocated $10,000 to Plethos Productions $20,599 to the Kwanzaa Project, with no remaining funds.
Russell City’s Ties to CSC
Tonight, March 26th, the Russell City Reparative Justice Project Steering Committee will present some recommendations to the City Council. This work was supported, in part, by the CSC which prioritized it as the top, among many, Racial Justice issues that they believed the City should address. The discussion and support of this continued into the discussion about the Community Advisory Panel to the Chief of Police (CAP).
Unfortunately, that work on CAP ran afoul of the City Council’s beliefs about the scope of the CSC—which multiple members of Council have said should be limited to the funding recommendations. With that in mind, Chair Bruckner-Carillo pointed out to Councilmember Dan Goldstein that, “[The CSC has] pretty much finished our process. I think we’ve asked on a number of occasions what you think we should do…What is the purpose, in the current council’s eyes, of the CSC? …We are now at the time where I don’t really know what we’re doing in our main meeting.”
Councilmember Goldstein responded by saying, “When I was appointed to be the liaison for this Commission, I was given pretty clear instructions from my colleagues that the scope of this Commission is community funding. The beginning and the end… That is the instruction that my colleagues unanimously provided to me, and what they have asked me to do is to have you focus on community funding.”
Assistant City Manager Youngblood then let the Commission know that the April 16 meeting of the City Council will include a work session discussing boards and commissions. “They will be providing direction to staff on clarity and purpose of various commissions.” The ACM framed the discussion as neutrally as possible, and framing it as an issue of “alignment” with the Strategic Plan.
However, readers of this publication know which “various commissions” the City Council is on about. At the end of the day, though, the City Council gets to decide just about everything about the CSC, so it will be interesting to see how that April 16 meeting plays out.
Consent Items
Navigation Center Funding Set
The Hayward Navigation Center is set to get another $70,000 from the Opioid Settlement agreement from Big Pharma. This will bring their annual funding for FY 24 to $2,500,894. Increasing the budget for the Hayward Navigation Center is pretty much always a good thing, as it gets folks off the streets and often—but not always—into more permanent housing. So this is a big win for us, even though it came off the backs of massive corporate greed and at the cost of thousands of lives.
Salary Changes
The Salary Plan is getting another change this week, with increases for the following jobs:
Administrative Intern
Chief Economic Development Officer
Senior Development Review Specialist (Planning Div.)
Water Resources Planner
Principal Transportation Engineer
WPCF Maintenance Manager
WPCF Operations Manager
Laboratory Manager (Water Pollution Control Facility)
Technical Intern (WPCF)
Principal Utilities Engineer
Utilities Operations and Maintenance Manager
Utilities Electrical and Mechanical Operations and Maintenance Manager
Utilities Field Services Manager
Wastewater Collections Systems Manager
This is where the City is expanding its staffing and increasing Staff pay. Lots going into water and utilities, which is good news for those of use who like to drink it occasionally.