The CSC Dips Into Housing and Public Safety
Learn about Housing Policy, the ARC selection process, and what happened to that CAP discussion.
A CSC Breakfast Fit for Royalty
Hash Brown Act with Robert’s Rules Sauce
This month, the CSC received a primer on the basics of the Brown Act and Robert’s Rules of Order from the City Attorney’s Office. The CSC is a pretty big commission, at 17 people, and there was a lot of turnover this last time around. As was reported earlier this year, a whopping 8 people were appointed to the CSC for 23/24, and that brings with it a lot of confusion about how the meetings are supposed to go.
It should be the goal to cover the important bits of the Brown Act and Robert’s Rules of Order in the orientation that new Commissioners receive, but better late than never. While the Brown Act is a vitally important piece of legislation that ensures that government meetings in California are guaranteed to be conducted with openness and availability to the public, the nuts-and-bolts of it aren’t really something most people have to deal with.
However, it’s one of the main reasons that the CSC was having trouble conducting business earlier this Spring (they had to call an emergency meeting just to get the funding officially approved!). The important bits for the CSC are that people have to show up in-person and that the policy going forward is that if there aren’t enough people in-person to hold a meeting, they’ll cancel the meeting. Between this and the threat of removal for low attendance, hopefully there won’t be attendance issues going forward.
For Robert’s Rules, we’re not going to get into it for y’all. It’s honestly not important for the public, unless you’re thinking of joining a City Commission or some other large meeting body. And if that’s the case, we highly recommend Jurassic Parliament’s Mastering Council Meetings or, at the very least, some of their free cheat sheets which cover the basics.
Waffle Housing with Policy Syrup
While there was supposed to be a presentation from someone from the Russell City Reparative Justice Steering Committee on how they’ve been doing, the Committee apparently elected to hold off on meeting with the CSC until a later time. So instead of that, the CSC got an update on Housing in the City from the head of the Housing Division, Cristina Morales. Below are some of the highlights.
The City of Hayward always has Housing on its Strategic Roadmap using a 3-prong approach: Incentivize housing production generally, House and support people experiencing homelessness, and Protect existing affordable housing.
The City also has an Affordable Housing Ordinance, which seeks to support inclusionary housing (which is low-income housing mixed with market-rate housing) or in-lieu fees (which is a fee to pay instead of building low-income housing). There’s a lot of disagreement among housing advocates around how the City does in-lieu fees, but the idea is that the in-lieu fees help pay for 100% affordable housing projects which wind up getting more affordable units built than a comparable number of inclusionary housing projects.
There’s also density bonuses, which allow concessions in exchange for building more units, a streamlined application process for developers, and a priority to build affordable housing on city owned land. Councilmember Dan Goldstein really talked up the streamlined application process, which has allegedly reduced the timelines for developers from over a year to a month and change. This is good, but needs to be paired with progressive policy that helps renters, as we can’t rely on the market to fix the housing shortage.
Some happy news, though, is that there are currently 931 affordable rental units in the pipeline (though the timeline on that can be… variable) and 83 affordable ownership units in the pipeline. However, something that came up during the presentation, was that the way that “low-income” is determined is according to the Area Median Income (AMI) for the County. In Alameda County, the 2023 AMI is $147,900/year for a family of 4. Low-Income is 80% of that, or $112,150/year for a family of 4, Very Low Income is 50% of AMI which is $73,950/year for a family of 4. Because of that, every single Affordable unit gets hundreds, if not thousands, of applications.
There are also different policies in place that help residents, including the Residential Rent Stabilization Ordinance (RRSO) which includes a rent limit (5% per year, and that was a big win), just cause evictions (the landlord has to have a good reason to evict you), and retaliation and harassment protections. There’s also Tenant Relocation Assistance for when the landlord sells the unit out from under the tenant or needs to do work to bring a unit to code, Emergency relocation assistance which is the same thing only for emergencies, Legal assistance for people facing evictions, and foreclosure prevention programs.
In short, the City is actually doing quite a lot to help tenants out and it’s a testament to how messed up people can be to each other that it’s still objectively not enough. 139 requests have been made to increase the rent above 5% in a year, and the Housing Department responds to about 2,000 queries about housing every year.
There were a lot of questions from the CSC, some about evictions, some about discrimination, some about displacement (according to a 2021 study, approximately 4,600 units are needed to meet housing need in the City). The unfortunate thing is that a lot of housing stuff is outside of the scope of what the CSC can help with. They just don’t have enough money to give out. That being said, that’s 16 more people educated on the state of housing and housing policy in Hayward after that presentation, and that’s not nothing.
Poached ARC’s with Committee Selection Sauce
The Application Review Committees (ARCs) are one of the main responsibilities of the CSC. They’re 3 different sub-committees which cover 3 different categories of funding (Infrastructure and Economic Development, Arts and Music, and Services). Those ARCs then interview the applicants in those categories and decide how they think funding should be allocated to the different applicants.
Infrastructure and Economic Development
This one has the biggest pot of money, because it comes from the Federal Government. However, the money is earmarked only for infrastructure projects (like construction or big machinery or something) and economic development projects (think workforce development or small business help).
Arts and Music
This is a specifically for arts and music funding. Things like the Hayward Area Historical Society’s history programming for schools goes here or local orchestras and stuff like that. The Russell City Blues Festival usually applies for funding here now that they have to do that and aren’t getting dedicated funds from the City (but they’re also kind of a cultural festival, which we’ll get to in a minute, so it can be complicated). They get the smallest pot of funds which comes entirely from the City’s general fund.
Services
Technically “public and social services”, this is literally everything else you think of when you think “nonprofit”. Meals on Wheels, homelessness prevention services, shelters for victims of human trafficking, and anything else you can think of that provides a service to someone in need, it all goes here. This is the hardest one to be on because it has the most applicants and also never has enough money to fund them all. The funds come primarily from the City’s General Fund, though some also comes from the Federal Government.
There were 60 orgs which showed up for the Bidder’s Conference and will likely apply, and our money is on more than half of them being for the Services ARC.
Cultural Events
For anyone keeping track, the City added a category for Cultural Events last year in an attempt to fund more festivals and other cultural events throughout the City. Unfortunately, the recipients of the money cried out in anguish at how much work was involved in the process that CSC has for the other ARCs. And it totally is! You have to keep track of demographics served and fill out an enormous application with how you plan to spend the money and all of this other stuff. And it’s a lot of work for small orgs, often times a single person, to get $5,000 to hold a street party.
So the Services Division decided to axe the Cultural Events ARC in favor of starting a new, less rigorous, process in the City Manager’s Office. At least one Commissioner decried the lack of CSC input on the new process, especially given the relative diversity of the CSC and their charge to represent the public. City Staff acknowledged that this was an issue, but pushed back that the recipients wanted an easier process (which, quite frankly, they deserve) and Staff is working out what that process should be as a part of a larger Placemaking project.
Your humble reporter put in to be a part of that Placemaking project, so stay tuned for how that goes in the future.
Choosing the Committee Members
The selection process for who gets on the different ARCs is usually done by volunteering, and in the past the CSC hasn’t always had enough people to completely fill all the ARCs with 6 people each. In the past, Former Chair Artavia Berry had allowed people to volunteer for the Chair of the ARC, as well. However, in an interesting turn, Chair Austin Bruckner Carrillo decided who was the Chair for each ARC. He also elected to move another Commissioner out of the Services ARC in order to secure himself a seat there.
It is entirely the Chair’s prerogative to decide who’s on which ARC, but it suggests a certain leadership style to be so forward about making executive decisions. How different leaders exercise their power is always something worth keeping an eye on.
The Chairs for the ARCs are as follows:
Commissioner Moore: Services ARC (required as Vice-Chair)
Commissioner Thormoto: Economic Development/Infrastructure ARC
Commissioner Gunn: Arts and Music ARC
The Chairs are expected to show up at the April 2nd Council Meeting, when the funding recommendations will be presented, in order to answer any Council questions.
Sizzling Public Safety and History Links
Chair Bruckner Carrillo kicked off this month’s discussion on Public Safety with a statement around the Council meeting in October. He informed the Commission about the Council recommendation for creating a Council Public Safety Committee and counted it as a win, despite none of the CSC’s recommendations being a part of it. He emphasized that it will be “the first time in our City’s history that we will have a public safety committee that exists here in the City of Hayward.”
He also got to the elephant in the room, which was Council’s concern around the scope of the CSC and whether or not that includes Public Safety. Allegedly, some members of Council were erroneously informed that members of the CSC had been told that discussing CAP was outside of the scope of the Commission. Finally, he summed up by posing some questions: What does Council perceive to be the Mission of the CSC? And if all that’s expected is to make funding recommendations, what should the CSC do with the rest of its time?
Given the comments made by multiple Councilmembers regarding the perceived charge of the CSC, the question seemed to be mostly rhetorical as the members of Council are the ones who seemed to have the issue. For better or worse, the only Councilmember in attendance was Councilmember Dan Goldstein.
Councilmember Goldstein framed it as a win and claimed that the only reason the Public Safety Committee came up was because the CSC emphasized how important it was.* He also said that “if you have ideas that you want to put forward, I think that’s great… However, government being what it is, there’s a process for getting stuff done.” He later also said that the resistance from City Council comes from following ideas that members want to pursue: “you’re free to pursue it, yes, but not as CSC… bringing those ideas forward,” and pushed for the CSC to take City Council direction for other projects. This didn’t answer the question about what the CSC should do during the remaining 5 months of meetings when not actively working on the ARCs, but demonstrated Councilmember Goldstein’s belief that CSC should not pursue projects outside of the ARC process as a formal body.
Commissioner Gunn explained, in a small history lesson, that the CSC grew out of the Human Services Commission which created the City of Hayward’s 1992 Anti-Discrimination Plan and is the reason behind the “No Room for Hate” signs all around the City. So needless to say, there’s some disagreement about what the CSC should be doing, and that will have to be addressed in some meaningful way at some point or another.
Councilmember Goldstein went on to say that the CSC should have been told that CAP wasn’t the correct body to get Police Accountability because it’s “designed to be an unfiltered conversation between the community and the police department,” though he did not address the inherent issues with the CAP’s declining membership, it’s use in justifying HPD Policy recommendations, or its failure to even meet its stated objectives in any meaningful way.
Councilmember Goldstein also stated that the City Charter prevents Hayward Residents from serving on a Council Sub-Committee which would limit their input to 3-minute Public Comment. However, as one Commissioner pointed out, they could be added as non-voting members, which would allow greater input, and which will hopefully be considered by City Staff.
*Editor’s Note: Given Councilmember Ray Bonilla Jr.’s work history and lean toward administrative reform on Council, this point could be debated.