During the pandemic, typically slow-moving government agencies acted with urgency. School districts scrambled to get laptops to students. And hotel operators were invited, by the state of California, to house indigent people.
Project Roomkey was meant to achieve two goals: Provide limited government reimbursement revenue to otherwise-empty hotels, and give people in need a place to quarantine or isolate.
One local hotel that signed up was the Country Inn in Marina. “We were trying to be good neighbors and help everybody out, while also trying to keep our head above water,” says Tony Ng, vice president of operations. “There were ups and downs, sure. But it was a way to pass through the pandemic.”
The downs of Project Roomkey at the Country Inn have become a flashpoint in Marina. City Council discussed the program on Tuesday, Sept. 12, mostly covering that councilmembers had no idea it was happening and that during the three years Roomkey was operating, 911 calls to the property skyrocketed. Police Chief Steve Russo told council that a typical hotel generates 30-40 calls a year to police and fire; this one was generating 300-400 calls a year. There were investigations into alleged drug sales, and there were fatal overdoses. “The call volume is significant on a small police department,” he said.
Roomkey came to a close this spring and already, Russo said, the call volume has tapered off. But just in recent months, Marina officials have come out swinging. On June 19, Marina City Manager Layne Long sent a letter to Salinas City Manager Steve Carrigan asking Salinas to consider reimbursing Marina for “the cost impacts of locating this program in our city.”
Long’s letter is shocking for a few reasons. First, Salinas – which successfully ran Roomkey in its own city – was just a contractor. Salinas city officials ran an updated version of the program for its last 18 months, after previous contractors Coalition of Homeless Service Providers and Dorothy’s Place.
Second, Long estimates Marina lost out on $100,000 in transient-occupancy tax revenue due to the rooms being utilized this way. But Roomkey was meant to generate some revenue, better than zero. (Country Inn still has not rebounded to pre-pandemic occupancy.)
Third, Long suggests nobody notified Marina officials about the initiative. There was open public discussion about it – it’s just that Marina officials weren’t at the table tuning in. (The board for the Continuum of Care in Monterey and San Benito counties, overseen by the Coalition of Homeless Service Providers, is composed of government officials and meets publicly.)
And fourth, most jarringly, it reveals that Long doesn’t get how homelessness works. It’s a regional problem that requires regional solutions. Sending a nasty demand letter to your neighbor is not the way to encourage cooperation.
Salinas Mayor Kimbley Craig serves on the Continuum of Care board. She shared a brief story with me about a former constituent who, with her disabled husband and three children, had been living in Marina, and lost their home there; then they found a place in Salinas and lost that, too. Craig helped point them to the SHARE Center – a joint county/city shelter, managed by a third-party nonprofit contractor – where they lived for a time. The SHARE team helped the family find long-term housing in King City.
“Who do we bill for that?” Craig says. “How about we just take it on as a community and as a region.”
Long might know some of this if he participated in the Continuum of Care’s regional discussions, but he seems preoccupied with throwing others under the bus. (He did not respond to my request for an interview.) In the Sept. 12 discussion, he blamed the now-sheriff and former Marina police chief. “Tina Nieto used to attend those meetings, but she quit after five or six months,” Long said. (I asked Nieto about it, and she says that’s untrue – he asked her to attend one meeting and she did.)
“We need to stop yelling at each other and start working with each other,” Craig says.
Marina could better serve its constituents, both those who are housed and those who are not, by joining in a regional effort to address the hard challenge of homelessness.
(1) comment
I lived at the country inn for almost a year, where I was a client of PRK. I waited almost 9 years to get into my own place. PRK worked for me because I did what I was suppose to do weekly with my case manager. I do have some concerns about how they didn't and still don't do welfare checks on their clients if no one has spoken to or seen for a day or so, if they did their jobs better maybe some of the clients that overdosed would still be alive today. I am now on the board of the LEAD committee of THE HOMELESS COAILATION and we are trying to get a few things changed on how they run things for these homeless programs. If you don't follow the rules then you loose your benefits from these programs. It's plain and simple follow the rules and you will be rewarded in time with a place you can call home plain and simple. And remember it doesn't happen overnite, it takes time and a lot of effort to get a place of your own.
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