screen capture graphics from “Advocates for Arden Arcade” Website
Local control is needed for residents and businesses in the unincorporated area surrounding the homeless facility on Auburn Blvd and the neglected city park
Please see letter to Sac Bee’s Melinda Henneberger- which is being published here with the permission of letter’s author, Arden Arcade Community Leader Michael Seaman.
Thank you for your article, "Past experiences fuel neighbors' wariness of homeless center". For the most part, local media have failed miserably at understanding the myriad issues involved regarding the City of Sacramento's facility on Auburn Blvd. Your article got a little bit down into the weeds and it was well-written.
It's too bad, though, that your article did not mention that the homeless facility on Auburn Blvd. impacts residents and businesses in the unincorporated area that surrounds the facility and the neglected park. The City of Sacramento has a long history of abusing adjacent unincorporated territory, which is easy for many reasons, such as:
- unincorporated areas are largely voiceless - each Supervisor has about 350,000 constituents (inappropriate scale for municipal service delivery)
- District 3 (where the Auburn Blvd facility is), which has an overwhelming number of unincorporated area constituents, only gets 1 vote on the Board of Supervisors
- the County's workload is overwhelming, to the point where the County cannot provide adequate municipal services to the unincorporated area
- the City of Sacramento gets the lion's share of attention, drowning out the needs/concerns of the unincorporated area
- state policy is hostile towards the formation of new cities
In short, unincorporated area residents and businesses do not have local control and they lack rights and privileges that their counterparts in cities enjoy. Our local governance structure makes very little sense. Sacramento County's unincorporated area population is roughly equivalent to that of the STATE of Wyoming. To truly grasp how a public policy manifestation - like the homeless facility - affects adjacent neighborhoods, one has to understand the realities and complexities of municipal service delivery. In the case of the Auburn blvd. facility and the adjacent park, the entity responsible for the facility and the park is not the same entity responsible for the quality of life, public safety, economic prosperity and property values in the immediate vicinity.
For more insights, please consider the following web sites:
- Save Our Suburb http://www.saveoursuburb.org/
- Advocates for Arden Arcade https://www.advocatesforardenarcade.com/