Council to Take Up Outdoor Dining, the Homeless and Public Transit

By Olin Ericksen
Staff Writer

April 25 -- The City Council Tuesday night is expected to sink its teeth into a proposal to increase outdoor dining on the Third Street Promenade, approve who will oversee the first audit of the City’s homeless services model and green light nearly $11 million to keep Big Blue Buses rolling.

After forming a task force that met for nearly two years to stop the exodus of eateries on the Downtown’s popular retail strip, council members Tuesday will at last be able to choose from an a-la-carte menu of options to increase outdoor dining in Downtown’s main commercial strip.

If all the recommendations are approved, visitors may soon be noshing in the center of the courtyard areas between the raised planters, at the edges of sidewalks and on the pathways outside of the pavilion buildings that bookend the northern and southern sections of the Promenade.

However, the proposed increase in outdoor seating will not be without some controversy.

While the City Council can choose to enact all, some or none of the options, they will need to take into account legal obstacles, as well as possibly moving street performers and vending cart operators from center spots, according to the staff report.

The city attorney warns that “dedicating the existing public areas to private use poses significant legal risks,” the staff report said.

“The First Amendment has been interpreted to preclude privatizing areas in public streets which are utilized for expressive activities,” staff wrote.

“Additionally, the City Attorney notes that the current time, place and manner restrictions applicable to street performance and other protected activities is based on the City Council’s past determination that the restrictions are necessary to preserve the safe and orderly flow of pedestrian traffic and emergency ingress and egress.”

If dining were expanded into the center areas of the Promenade, it may come into conflict with performers and vendors who use those areas to earn a living, staff cautioned.

“Currently vendor carts are programmed in the Center Court area and street performers or special events are occasionally programmed for any of the areas,” the report said.

As a result, that center space could be made available to restaurants in the surrounding area on a “short-term and rotating basis.”

There would also likely be periods where the space would be reserved for other purposes, such as the annual Holiday display or other special events.

As rents on the Third Street Promenade have continued to rise in recent years, council members have paid particular attention to the effect on restaurants in the area, which are seen as a key ingredient to the shopping strip’s success

“An overarching consideration (of the task force) was that providing the opportunity for restaurants to expand the outdoor café areas would enhance the mixed-use ambience of the Promenade, help amortize the high rents for Promenade storefront space, and perhaps even provide opportunities for establishments that were not located directly on the promenade,” states the staff report.

In addition to picking from the menu of options, council members will turn their attention to the thorny issue of how to best help Santa Monica’s homeless.

For the first time since Santa Monica’s current homeless model was developed in the 1980s, City officials will evaluate ways to make it better.

City council members are expected Tuesday to approve a $126,000 contract with The Urban Institute to audit the current homeless service model -- known as the Continuum of Care -- to find ways to make it more efficient and effective in helping to transition those who live on the streets into housing.

The review comes at a critical time, as the City adds a second strategy to help the homeless who have been on the street the longest and are the most “service resistant.”

Through a separate service model known as “Housing First,” the City has been working to place the “chronically homeless” in supportive housing before they are connected fully with services, a strategy being used in San Francisco and New York.

The audit of the Continuum of Care is important since it will likely impact several local service providers -- such as OPCC, St. Joseph’s Center and Step-Up-on Second -- who together have received millions in funding from the City under the Continuum of Care model.

Several of those providers have voiced concerns that the City may short-change their organizations if the Continuum of Care model is scaled back. They note that financial backing for the “Housing First” model -- which City officials insist is not a competing service model -- could surpass $10 million over the next decade if it were fully implemented.

That is far more than the entire budget for the Continuum of Care model, providers said.

After considering a handful applicants who have bid for the contract since last November, City staff recommended The Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan economic and social policy research organization to conduct the review.

The institute, staff noted, “has completed numerous evaluations of homeless programs and continuums of care, are considered experts in the field and emerged as the preferred applicant.”

City officials have four goals outlined for the audit of the City’s Continuum of Care model.

1) Refining the strategy for homeless service provision and the effective management of resources;

2) Producing results-oriented recommendations against which the effectiveness of the programs and the system can be measured;

3) Recommending specific action steps to be carried out within the next five years and

4) Recommending increasing and/or reallocating resources to carry out the action steps.

The evaluation timeline has been set at nine months so sufficient progress can be made in time to inform grant funding decisions for the 2007-2010 Community Development Program. It is anticipated that the council will consider the proposed criteria and issue a Request for Proposals to local non-profit agencies by January 2007.

The Urban Institute was selected because it matches several criteria established by the City, including producing a “high-quality, results-oriented final report,” an “realistic and achievable timeline” and a reasonable price, among others, according to the staff report.

Officials at The Urban Institute have “extensive experience developing evaluation plans with local stakeholders, which include clearly articulated goals and feasible mechanisms for measuring progress,” stated the report.

Other past clients include The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Melville Charitable Trust, The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, Fannie Mae, numerous Federal departments and agencies and local jurisdictions across the nation, according to the report.

While a step away from auditing the current homeless model, the council Tuesday will also consider investing more in the City’s newest strategy -- focusing on the chronically homeless who have been on the street the longest and are the largest draw on area resources such as police and emergency workers.

If the item is approved, City Council will negotiate a contract for $189,000 with Community Partners to expand outreach and case management to the “chronically homeless,” through its “Housing First” model.

“Over the next year, Community Partners will form and support a new case management team and administer the operating budget for the team through funds provided by the City of Santa Monica,” the report stated.

“The team will be advised by the City’s existing collaborative of homeless service agencies currently participating in the Chronic Homeless Program… the ultimate goal is to transfer responsibility for the case management team to the local partner agencies.”

The contract with Community Partners -- which has worked with the City and the Westside Shelter and Hunger Coalition in the past -- will seek to expand and more rapidly implement the City’s current efforts to engage the most hard-core of the homeless.

The City applied for, and received, a grant last year from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the amount of $948,000 to provide additional rental subsidies for 30 chronically homeless persons.

According the program’s criteria, each individual must be housed within six months of entering the program and all 30 individuals must be in housing within the 24-month term of the initial grant, according to the staff report.

Participation in the chronic housing program however has been on the rise, tripling in the last year, and the number of homeless placed in permanent housing has doubled. (Seventeen chronically homeless persons have been placed, and remain, in permanent housing since July 2004).

While the CHP inter-agency collaborative has relied the City and numerous local and regional agencies, City officials note that they are falling one month shy of placing the homeless in housing as outlined in HUD’s grant terms.

“To date, the CHP has been very successful in housing chronically homeless persons, but the average length of time between program entry and permanent housing is 7 months,” states the report. “While impressive, 7 months is longer than the 6 month stabilization period allowed by the HUD grant.”

In order to move people into housing more rapidly, “a fully dedicated interdisciplinary staff is needed to provide intensive, on-going, post-placement services -- a key component to a successful Housing First model,” states the report.

The proposed interdisciplinary team will be hired by Community Partners and will be comprised of a Mental Health Specialist (also the team leader), a Housing Placement Specialist and a Life Skills/Substance Abuse Specialist, said the report.

In a separate item, the council is expected to approve millions of dollars for the City’s transit agency, including a 10-year $10 million contract to purchase Liquified Natural Gas.

The council also is being asked to approve nearly $1 million to restock 9 buses burned in an accident in fall of 2005 and $150,000 to help upgrade the hydraulic systems on the buses.