Sacramento to vote on $52.7M spending plan for youth resources. What will the money do?

The Sacramento City Council will vote Tuesday on a five-year pending plan for $52.7 million in Measure L funds set aside for investments in youth and children.

Approved by voters in November 2022, Measure L allocated 40% of revenue generated from taxes on cannabis operations to positive youth development and violence prevention. It also created a planning and oversight commission composed of one voter from each of the city's nine districts, and that commission worked in tandem with the Sacramento Youth Commission to develop the strategic plan.

Members of both the voter and youth commissions unanimously recommended that, over the next five fiscal years, $9.2 million of the Measure L funding go toward a guaranteed basic income program for foster youth and about $36.9 million be invested in children and youth living in under-resourced neighborhoods.

An estimated $6.6 million would pay for projected administrative expenses.

Reyes Rios, chair of the Sacramento Youth Commission made an impassioned plea to Mayor Darrell Steinberg and council members at a Sept. 10 meeting to focus dollars in neighborhoods where children, youth and their families have the least access to social, economic and environmental resources.

"An old educator of mine used to say, you cannot feed a field of flowers a spoonful of water and expect them to survive," said Rios, a sophomore at Leroy Greene Academy. "I say that because that is exactly the situation we are in now. It is essential that we ensure that the most underserved areas in Sacramento are not getting spoonfuls of resources but the buckets that they deserve."

The youth commission and the Measure L planning and oversight commission, composed of an adult representative from each of the city's nine districts, drew up the plan with the assistance of a consultant. The two commissions established five goals to meet with Measure L funds and proposed that community-based organizations be able to compete for roughly $37 million in grants to advance those objectives.

The five goals are:

Support the mental health and emotional wellness of youth.

Prevent and reduce youth homelessness.

Prevent and reduce youth substance abuse.

Prevent and reduce youth violence.

Support the healthy development of children ages 0 to 5.

In a July letter to the Measure L planning commission, nonprofit leader Jim Keddy suggested they avoid spreading this new source of funding too thinly. Keddy once served as a vice president for the California Endowment and founded Sacramento-based Youth Forward to improve the health, education, and wellbeing of at-risk children and youth.

"There is always the pressure to spread money around , to make numerous smaller grants to multiple agencies," Keddy said. "While this might seem like the right approach, than if funding were focused on a smaller set of initiatives."

How the money would be spent

During council discussion of the proposed strategic plan, members expressed broad support for the commissions' recommendation to put 20% of the Measure L funding toward the guaranteed basic income program.

While there were few details on eligibility in the strategic plan submitted to council, a slide at the council meeting said that 100 foster youth would receive monthly cash payments of $1,000 over three years. It did not specify whether a different set of youth would be chosen each year or whether the same 100 youth would receive payments over three years.

Among other selection criteria shown on the slide: Youth must call Sacramento home and be 18 to 24 years old. They must be current or former foster youth experiencing homelessness or seeking homeless services. Their income cannot exceed 200% of the federal poverty level, currently equal to about $30,000. They cannot be receiving guaranteed income from another program. A competitive process will be used to determine recipients.

In letters to the council, foster youth advocate Serita Cox of iFoster said that roughly 1,100 children and youth were in the foster system in Sacramento County in April 2024, most of them living in the city of Sacramento. Roughly 200 of them will age out of the system this year, Cox said, and a third of the 200 will become homeless.

"Within 4 years, 50% will have experienced homelessness, 50% will be unemployed, and those employed will only be earning $7,500 a year," Cox said. "In their entire lifetime, only 8% will ever achieve a post-secondary degree. And they will cost taxpayers over $1 million each in societal and tax costs because we, as their ward of the court guardians, have failed to successfully transition them to self-sufficiency."

Councilwoman Lisa Kaplan said she would fight for the 20% for universal basic income for foster youth, and she applauded the overarching goals. She expressed concern, however, that her Natomas district did not fall within one of the under-resourced areas where the strategic plan recommended the bulk of other spending.

A significant number of low-income youth live in multi-family apartment complexes in Natomas, she said, but their families do not show up using certain statistical models because of the number of high-income earners who live in close proximity to them.

Councilwoman Karina Talamantes, who represents Northgate, Gardenland and portions of Natomas, said she would like to see an investment in renovating bathrooms and other infrastructure in the city's parks because she so often hears from residents who are unhappy with the conditions of park facilities.

Council members said they also wanted to be sure foster youth received financial advice to wisely manage the payments, and they were concerned that, while grants could be made for multiple years, programs should be evaluated annually to determine whether they were working.

The Measure L strategic plan would provide for optional wrap-around services to assist foster youth such as financial literacy courses and housing assistance. It also calls for city staff to "provide an annual summary of performance metrics from SCF's multi-year grantees. At a minimum, this summary should include: a) total number of youth, children, and families served, c) types of services and programming received, d) how the program participants have been identified as those that are most impacted by poverty, violence, or trauma; and e) resident neighborhoods of those being served."

In addition to the annual reports, Measure L requires three-year and five-year reports. The strategic plan mentions that "engagement and evaluation contractors" are expected to provide feedback, but it does not specify how the effectiveness of the universal basic income program will be evaluated. City staff did not respond to a request for information.

In the end, at the suggestion of Steinberg, the council voted to delay the vote on the Sacramento Children's Fund strategic investment plan until Tuesday to allow members two weeks to establish whether their concerns were addressed.

The makeup of the council will change after the November election, Steinberg said, and it would be in the best interest of children and youth that the Measure L planning commission try to get broad support from city leadership for the strategic plan rather than settling for perhaps a 5-4 vote.

"That's not the way you want to start this thing," he said. "There's going to be a dozen other votes here on (requests for proposals), on everything else. So yes, I think we should wait two weeks,"