Meaningless Metrics & Empty Promises from Mayor McCarty
In this post we’re bringing you a report back from the March 4th Sac City Council meeting, where a progress report on the City and County agreement to address homelessness was provided by the Department of Community Response.
Thank you to SJPC volunteer, Bella Ahwal, for writing this piece!
Measure O, an extremely aggressive anti-homeless measure that criminalizes homelessness and encourages sweeps of unhoused folks, was on the ballot in 2022. It passed - under the condition that Sacramento City and County form an agreement to address homelessness. On December 6th of 2022, the Sacramento City and County entered into this agreement with the explicit goal of ending homelessness, emphasizing the specific duties of both the city and the county in the matter.
Brian Pedro (pictured below), Director of the Department of Community Response (DCR), presented a 6 month report regarding this partnership between the City and the County, as an update to what has been happening, and how well plans have been implemented.
*the DCR was originally meant to serve as an alternative response model for 911 calls that don’t require police or fire department involvement - now it essentially exists only to respond to homelessness
To summarize the presentation, there were 4 categories being ranked: outreach, services, shelter and housing, and training and information. Pedro claimed all of these categories have met or exceeded all of their own specific benchmarks.
Above are the 4 benchmark categories presented in the Department of Community Response’s slide deck
It is much more likely that these success benchmarks have not been met, or rather have been crafted on their own terms. This doesn't give them very much meaning since they were established from within. These metrics are entirely controlled by the City and County, leaving them to account for their own work, or lack of it. Any victories claimed by the City in regard to homelessness at this meeting were fabrications and based on misleading data, which has not been scrutinized by any outside observers. This report was extremely biased and misrepresents Sacramento’s progress towards addressing homelessness.
In a public comment, Mack pointed out some of these discrepancies, stating
“Oftentimes what we see is these services...are oftentimes precursors to sweeps”
Mack drew attention to all the relentless sweeps that have been violently inflicted upon our unhoused neighbors - neither Brian Pedro nor the Council thought to mention this. Is that part of the city’s “exceeding benchmarks” solution to homelessness? They don’t want to look at root causes and genuine solutions, they want to criminalize and terrorize our unhoused population.
Several unhoused folks were among the public commenters on the item. They showed up from the First Step shelter on Roseville Road, where there has not been any electricity in some of the small houses for quite some time, and conditions are all around terrible.
One resident, Donna, said:
“The pallets on Florin Rd all have electricity and the ones on Stockton Blvd all have electricity. It’s not fair that we don’t have electricity on Roseville Road”
She is referencing other First Step communities, all with seemingly better living conditions than Roseville Road.
Twana, another resident at the Roseville Road shelter who does have electricity in her unit, showed up in support of her neighbors, and to speak to the terrible conditions they have been subjected to:
“We have mold, it’s not livable there. I broke my hand there. It’s hard for us to get an appointment with the director there…How would you feel if everybody had power but you? Even the staff trailer has power, they have power hooked up"
Another speaker, Simon Hyatt, talked about Wendy Connel, who was killed outside the Roseville Road shelter when hit by a car only a couple weeks prior. He asked to reduce the 50 mph speed limit, which most people go faster than anyways.:
“You can’t tell people where they can’t be without telling them where they CAN be, well the places where they can be need to be safe for them to get to”
Councilmember Dickinson actually had quite a bit to say about Pedro’s presentation. When Pedro was explaining the difficulties in making Roseville Road safer for unhoused people to walk by, Dickinson suggested cheap, temporary, and easy options for barriers, to at least begin addressing the issue. Importantly, Dickinson did point out that the City and County need to be considering preventative measures if they ever want to seriously address the homelessness crisis.
It’s worth noting one thing that the city IS spending money on, since worthwhile solutions to the crisis of homelessness are clearly not among them. The city has been maintaining a contract with a private company, Forensiclean, to “clean the streets,” which involves a lot of blatant mistreatment and cruelty towards unhoused folks. The image on the left is pulled from the homepage of Forensiclean’s website.
Since the beginning of Forensiclean’s $4 million contract with the City in 2023, multiple extensions have occurred, and the city has now spent about $10 million on Forensiclean’s private cleaning services. If only there was a way to spend this money more meaningfully, and consider the root causes of why the streets need such an expensive “cleaning” in the first place…
Interestingly, Mayor McCarty says that he will FINALLY agendize homelessness for discussion in a future meeting…which is funny, because during his campaign, he actually promised to agendize homelessness at every single city council meeting, something we have yet to see happen at all!
On the left is a graphic from our “Eyes on Mayor McCarty” series
He claims that this meeting, if it does happen, will focus on three main components:
Where the city is at with homelessness, what the numbers are, what sites are serving who, what nonprofits they are partnering with, and how much money is being spent where
What the city is doing today about it
Where they will go from this point
McCarty has made no effort to back up and deliver on his campaign promises, so can we really expect a meeting with homelessness prioritized for discussion?
[Editor’s note: according to the 3/26/25 Sac Bee article, Is Kevin McCarty meeting his promises on homelessness as Sacramento mayor, McCarty has since specified that this discussion will take place at the 4/29/25 Council meeting]
