Several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year spent helping the poor in Concord's immigrant-heavy Monument Corridor likely will fall victim to Contra Costa County's budget woes.
The Board of Supervisors is poised to end a special earmark sent to the region of about $550,000 a year raised from taxes on the price of a hotel room at the Renaissance Hotel, located on unincorporated land between Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill. A subcommittee of the board last week recommended putting an end to the fund's separate status and instead have program advocates compete for the cash during the traditional budget process.
If approved by the full board later this month, the money would remain in the county general fund. While the board could continue to spend the cash in Concord, they also could rehire a couple of sheriff's deputies or pick where to spend it from a long list of cuts. Since 2008, the county has cut $189 million from its $1.2 billion annual budget.
An unhappy Supervisor Karen Mitchoff, who represents Concord and administers the money, predicts the move will do little to bolster the county's struggling general fund but kill a highly successful seed program that has attracted more than $2 million from its nonprofit partners and generated $13.5 million in social and fiscal benefits to the county.
"You and I both know that these programs cannot compete with the county's many other critical needs," Mitchoff told the subcommittee, which
consists of supervisors John Gioia of Richmond and Federal Glover of Pittsburg. "If you do this, this fund will cease to exist."That the fund still exists at all is a function of its structure as a three-year grant cycle: The supervisors haven't seen it for several years.
The issue surfaced in early September after Mitchoff submitted for board approval her plan for the next cycle starting in 2012. Several supervisors saw the item listed among more than 100 routine matters and yanked it from what otherwise would have been a quiet and probably unnoticed vote.
The county created the fund in 2003 -- as the hotel was being built -- and initially spent the proceeds on children's mental health. It later invested in programs for new moms, after-school care, asthma prevention and anti-domestic violence education. They also gave money to organizations that taught poor women how to start their own businesses and trained residents in early childhood education.
The hotel has generated $5.2 million in room taxes since 2002. The other three hotels in unincorporated areas, which pay a 10 percent tax per night per room to the county, generate about $1 million a year; that money stays in the general fund.
In the case of the money dedicated to the Monument area, the county has granted seed dollars to organizations such as Catholic Charities, M.t Diablo Unified School District and La Clinica for planning and startup costs. The programs had to stand on their own after the initial dollars ran out.
Mitchoff intended to dedicate the next grant cycle, about $1.5 million, to programs that trained poor residents for jobs in the fast-growing health care industry.
Leaders of several of the nonprofit organizations pleaded with Gioia and Glover to save the fund, touting the merits of the county's continued financial investment in the Monument Corridor.
The advocates found sympathy but little support.
Gioia and Glover represent poor communities, too, such as Bay Point and North Richmond, and none have special hotel taxes dedicated to solving their problems. The Monument Corridor program is the county's sole remaining fund of this type, where the board voluntarily has set aside the dollars for a specific use outside its annual budget deliberation process.
The men stressed that they had no quarrel with the nature of the programs in the corridor, but times are tough.
"In the past when we had more money, we could afford to dedicate a new source of money to a special program," Gioia said. "That's no longer true."
Contact Lisa Vorderbrueggen at 925-945-4773 or IBAbuzz.com/politics. Follow her at Twitter.com/lvorderbrueggen.
