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Capitol Trips Focused on Homelessness Funding and Mental Health Care
I’ve traveled to Sacramento twice over the past two weeks to advocate for state funding to tackle homelessness and mental health reform that will help some of the folks on our streets who are suffering from serious mental illness. These issues play out locally, but the solutions often require legislation and the involvement and funding from the state and sometimes federal governments.
Last Wednesday, I testified before an Assembly budget subcommittee on the importance of ongoing funding to address homelessness. While there, I also took the opportunity to meet with several key legislators about the need to reform our conservatorship laws and strengthen our laws governing the sale and distribution of illicit fentanyl – a drug that is disproportionately harming our unsheltered population.
I did so not only as the Mayor of San Diego, but also as chair of the Big City Mayors coalition, a bipartisan group of the Mayors of the 13 largest cities, representing nearly 11 million Californians.
This year, the state has limited resources available for its budget, but, as I told the subcommittee, homelessness is the biggest challenge facing the state – and all of its cities and counties – and the state budget should demonstrate a commitment to meeting the enormity of the challenge.
I detailed how San Diego and the other big cities are effective in how they’re allocating the resources the state has been providing over the past few years – creating housing, opening shelters, addressing encampments, deploying outreach workers and turning parking lots into Safe Parking zones for people who live in their cars, among other programs.
Because more people continue to fall into homelessness, I urged them to increase funding to fight this battle, to keep it flexible to allow communities to address unique circumstances and make it permanent so we can make long-term commitments on our programs, which would allow us to strike more financially favorable terms when we lease space for housing and shelter, for instance.
As your mayor and as a statewide leader of our large cities, I will continue to fight for more state homelessness funding, champion conservatorship reform to get very ill people the help they need and advocate for harsher penalties against those who prey upon our residents with dangerous street drugs.
Yesterday, I joined several of my fellow California mayors and state legislators in support of two bills to reform California’s outdated and inadequate conservatorship laws.
Senate Bill 43 will reform California’s 1960s-era conservatorship law by updating the criteria for determining if a person is “gravely disabled,” the standard for this kind of conservatorship eligibility. I believe the current focus on the ability to provide for one’s food, clothing and shelter fails to address the real needs of desperately ill people and often leads to their criminalization and jail rather than treatment.
SB 43 would update the definition of “gravely disabled” to include the potential for serious physical and mental harm stemming from a person’s inability to provide for their own nourishment, personal or medical care and appropriate shelter, as well as an incapacity to attend to their self-protection or personal safety due to a mental health or substance-use disorder.
Senate Bill 363 would establish a real-time, online dashboard to collect, aggregate and display information about the availability of beds in psychiatric and substance-abuse facilities. Access to an up-to-date database of available beds helps providers quickly find and secure treatment for clients in appropriate settings, reducing delays and extended stays in emergency rooms.
Last weekend, a frustrated San Diego father came to me and told me about his severely mentally ill son, a college graduate who’s oblivious to his own illness. He has bounced between psychiatric hospitals, become addicted to opiates and is now languishing in jail, not getting the help he needs.
This story is far too common in our state, with emergency response becoming the only way people struggling with mental health and addiction can access care. We must act on conservatorship reform for the thousands of families who struggle to get their loved ones life-saving health care.
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