Homeless fund sparks battle between Oakland mayor and Alameda County supervisors

A dog is leashed at a homeless encampment near the Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, Calif. on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2018. City officials are evicting the campers and plan to build sheds on the site for temporary housing. less A dog is leashed at a homeless encampment near the Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, Calif. on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2018. City officials are evicting the campers and plan to build sheds on the site for ... more Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Homeless fund sparks battle between Oakland mayor and Alameda County supervisors 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

In one of her first post-election moves, Mayor Libby Schaaf sharply criticized Alameda County supervisors for their proposed distribution of an emergency homeless fund from the state, underscoring an ongoing dispute between the city and county over who should be responsible for what in combatting the crisis.

In a letter last week, Schaaf said Oakland — home to half the county’s homeless population — would be getting less than a fifth of the $16 million in grant money given to Alameda County. More broadly, she said, the county ought to be lending greater financial support to her city’s efforts to get people into shelter.

“The fact is that the county is the social safety net provider and the need is greatest in Oakland — on the street,” Schaaf wrote to the Board of Supervisors. “The county has taken a position that street encampments are an issue solely to be dealt with by cities. We firmly disagree.”

Schaaf said Oakland was being penalized for its success. She and 10 other mayors of the state’s largest cities were able to attain direct allocations of one-time, flexible block grants from California’s Homeless Emergency Aid Program, a $500 million fund for local governments that was created when Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB 850 into law in June.

Oakland received more than $8 million. The City Council last month voted to spend about three-quarters of it on Tuff Shed emergency shelter units, parking sites for people living in vehicles, and a sanctioned encampment to be run by the Village, a community volunteer activist group.

When deciding how to dole out the funds that Alameda County received, county officials included the city’s direct allocation in their calculation. Considering the funds together, Oakland gets about half, said Wilma Chan, president of the Board of Supervisors.

“I think we look at it as Oakland has about 50 percent … it’s proportional,” Chan said. “We think Mayor Schaaf has been great to work with and effective in terms of lobbying for these funds.”

Ultimately, Chan said, the grant money from the state is a “drop in the bucket.” Alameda County spends more than $83 million a year on preventing and addressing homelessness and is set to devote an additional $90 million over the next three years.

“Unfortunately, at the federal and state level, there’s no one pot of money for homelessness,” Chan said. “We’re all kind of sitting down and cobbling together different sources of funding.”

But Schaaf called out the county for its lack of involvement in Oakland’s latest efforts to house its homeless population. She said Alameda County should be helping to fund the city’s new transitional housing facility on West Grand Avenue and sending social workers to Oakland’s Tuff Shed sites.

Divisions of jurisdictional responsibility have become muddled in the homeless crisis. Sprawling encampments, for instance, demand health services — typically a county function — as well as sanitation and cleaning, traditionally a city duty. And who should be doing the bulk of funding for shelters and affordable housing is often unclear.

Oakland leaders often bristle when their progress is held up against that of San Francisco, saying that, as a city and county, it does not have to battle with itself in quite the same way.

Supervisor Nate Miley said the county needs to do a better job of delineating which services it is responsible for providing, and not outsource them to Oakland.

“There needs to be a coordinated approach to this,” Miley said. “It’s unfortunate that we have dollars to help address this problem and those dollars are not getting out onto the street as fast as they need to be.”

Dan Lindheim, an assistant professor of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, said he was sympathetic to Schaaf’s position on the state funding issue but understood county officials’ stance, too.

“Typically, the county serves unincorporated areas and smaller cities, and the larger cities tend to fend for themselves,” said Lindheim, who was the city administrator of Oakland from 2008 until 2011. “There’s a history of lack of trust between the city and the county. It rears its head in different kinds of ways. It may be more this mind-set that the city gets the money the city gets, and the county provides for everybody else.”

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov