Posted on Sunday December 15, 2019

For decades now the Santa Monica Social Services Commission has failed to prepare the annual assessments of social services for the City Council as required by the Municipal Code. 

Yes, the Commission has been violating the law for decades.

When confronted about this, the Commission simply passed a resolution asking the City Council to remove the requirement for the Commission to prepare the assessments. 

If the Council agrees with the Commission, Santa Monicans are going to be left without a requirement for transparent, public assessments of social services their taxes pay for. And then the City will continue to simply collect unverified, self-reported data from the providers, rubber-stamp it, and write a check for the next grant cycle. City staff publicly admitted that they do not prepare annual assessments.

This lack of transparency and accountability is unacceptable.

As taxpayers we demand that the City create a realistic mechanism for annual assessments of social service programs and agencies. 

We cannot rely on the staff’s allegedly “professionalized data collection” as suggested by the Commission. It would hardly pass as meaningful data collection. Much less assessments.

Regular assessments must be conducted. They must be prepared in an unbiased and transparent manner in order to ensure these programs and activities are achieving the intended results.

Feedback from program participants must be an integral part of the assessment process. Currently, the City does not even have a grievance procedure for program participants. The City must make the review of participant grievances an integral part of the assessments.

We Santa Monicans are shocked over the Police Activities League (PAL) child molestation scandal involving City employees. The molestation had been going on for approximately twenty years. It is reported that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is investigating the City of Santa Monica for covering up the PAL scandal. Imagine if a grievance procedure had been in place and assessments had been conducted over the last decades. It is likely the assessments would have picked up that something was wrong.

Similarly, the annual assessments could have picked up that something was wrong with the City’s sole provider of homeless services, OPCC dba The People Concern. Case management, which is the core service leading to permanent housing exists mostly on paper, not in practice. The Human Services Grant Agreement requires that the City monitor the performance of the provider. But this is not done. 

Despite well over $1.6M per year in City funding going to homeless services, we still see many homeless people in our neighborhoods and parks. 

Program participants and their advocates have been reporting for over two years now that homeless services are not fulfilling their main goal: moving people off the streets and into permanent housing, with supportive services. 

If programs for children and the homeless have been so neglected and lacking in accountability for so long, without any real assessments, serious concerns arise about other areas of social services, for example: seniors, women in crisis, and the disabled.

The Council must direct the City staff to create a modern day process for assessing these programs. If the staff and the Commission are incapable of fulfilling this fiduciary obligation, they must work with a qualified consultant and/or a citizen’s monitoring committee to get this necessary process underway.

We Santa Monicans demand that regular assessments be put in place to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse of public funding, and prevent harm to program participants.

The City Council will consider the Social Services Resolution to remove the requirement for assessments from the Municipal Code on Tuesday, December 17, 2019. However, we will continue collecting signatures in support of this petition after December 17.