San Diego got a big boost in its fight against homelessness on Wednesday with a $6 million state grant that will help get many more low-level criminals with drug problems off the street.

The city and county have been recommended to jointly receive the grant after state officials judged their proposal superior to 57 other jurisdictions seeking long-promised money from a 2014 state ballot measure that reduced many felony crimes to misdemeanors.

The city will use its $3 million to sharply expand a program launched in December that allows chronic, non-violent criminals with drug problems to avoid jail time if they agree to move into government-funded housing including drug treatment.

The money, $1 million per year over three years, will allow the city to offer the opportunity to eight times as many people by providing funds to expand the number of available beds from 10 to 80.


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The program has been called innovative because rather than cracking down on repeat offenders who clog the justice system, it gives them a chance to turn their lives around and get off the streets permanently.

City Attorney Mara Elliott, who oversees the program launched by her predecessor Jan Goldsmith, said the new money will bolster one of many creative solutions San Diego is exploring to reduce its homeless population.

“It’s a pilot program that’s proving to be worthy of funding, a great deal of funding,” she said. “We’re hoping this is the beginning of new ideas and new approaches to tackling homelessness.”


The county will use its $3 million to launch a new program targeting people who face criminal charges and have other problems such as drug addiction or mental illness.

It will provide counseling, treatment and job training to all participants and “rapid re-housing” for 60 people at a time.

The city will also benefit from the county program because that’s one of two specific geographic areas the county program will target. The other is the North County cities of Oceanside, Vista, San Marcos and Escondido.

Of the 58 applicants for $104 million in funding from the 2014 state ballot measure, 23 were awarded grants. The only other local agency to get money is the Oceanside Unified School District, which will receive just under $1 million.


The ballot measure, Proposition 47, forced local agencies to deal with more misdemeanor offenders and released criminals needing treatment and counseling.

But it promised to provide local agencies with some of the savings yielded by the measure reducing the number of people in California prisons.

The grants awarded on Wednesday are the first under Proposition 47.

Other jurisdictions getting funding include the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, which got $20 million, and several other health agencies that got $6 million each in Orange County, Alameda County, San Bernardino County, Solano County, Monterey County and San Joaquin County.


While state officials rated San Diego’s proposal as the most worthy of all applicants, that doesn’t entitle them to additional money.

The city of San Diego has been lobbying for Proposition 47 money for more than a year to boost the criminal diversion program, officially called San Diego Misdemeanant At-Risk Track – or SMART.

It’s an expansion of a program launched by Goldsmith, the former city attorney, in late 2014 called the Community Justice Initiative. That program allows people charged with most misdemeanors to avoid jail time and a criminal record if they complete two days of community service and pay a $120 fine.

That program has had 1,920 participants who have completed 30,720 hours of community service.


But there was a group of chronic offenders that needed something else, said Lara Easton, chief deputy city attorney in the Neighborhood Justice & Collaborative Courts Unit.

“We noticed there was a subset of the population that wasn’t taking a CJI offer,” she said. “When we got to the root of the problem it was because they were chronically homeless, chronically drug addicted and weren’t really incentivized by having two days of public work service. What they needed was treatment and housing.”

So the city created SMART, but could only come up with money for 10 beds — a small fraction of the number needed to allow everyone who could benefit from the program to participate.

“There are plenty of customers out there, but we don’t have any beds to offer them,” said John Hemmerling, an assistant city attorney for the Community Justice and Criminal Justice divisions.


With the grant money, which will be available June 16, the city will seek out additional social service agencies that can provide beds and treatment.

“We do intend to ramp up on this and we are looking at some other options that are out there,” Hemmerling said. “We’re very optimistic.”

Mayor Kevin Faulconer, the San Diego Police Department, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis and many county officials helped prepare the successful grant application.

“The fact that San Diego ranked among the highest in the state for this grant funding proves that we have a winning formula for addressing homelessness through the SMART program,” Faulconer said Wednesday. “Now we’ll be able to expand SMART and provide meaningful incentives to help hundreds more of our homeless neighbors turn their lives around.”


david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick