by Ariane Lange
alange@sacbee.com
With Sue Frost retiring as the supervisor representing northeast parts of Sacramento County, her 4th District seat is up for grabs in the 2024 primary election on March 5.
The 4th Supervisorial District is a boomerang shaped district that includes parts or all of Citrus Heights, Folsom, Orangevale, Antelope, Rio Linda, Elverta, Gold River, Rancho Murieta, North Highlands, Carmichael, Foothill Farms and Fair Oaks.
Three candidates - Rosario Rodriguez, Braden Murphy and Bret Daniels - are campaigning for the seat. Though the Board of Supervisors doesn't always attract the same level of attention as other local government bodies, it wields tremendous power and controls a budget approaching $9 billion. Five board members oversee the agencies that provide health and human services for all county residents.
In unincorporated areas, county agencies also provide additional services, such as parks, road maintenance and law enforcement via the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office. The Sheriff's Office, which reports to the board, runs the two county jails.
The Sacramento Bee sat down with each of the candidates to discuss their positions on three critical issues facing the Board of Supervisors and county residents. All three called for an audit of homelessness spending. Here's who they are, and where they stand, with the election now less than two months away:
BRET DANIELS
Daniels, a registered Republican in the nonpartisan race, began his Citrus Heights political career in 1999 when he was elected to the City Council. He became mayor in December 2004 and resigned in November 2005. Although he took some years off from the council, he was again elected to that body in 2016, and he's now serving as mayor. He is an Air Force veteran and a former sheriff's deputy. He has backed multiple efforts to prevent taxes from being raised in Citrus Heights. Daniels was censured by the Citrus Heights City Council in 2018 after police reports accused him of stalking and harassing an old girlfriend. Police determined he had not committed a crime, and Daniels denied the woman's reports, The Bee wrote at the time. He also told the council that even if the woman's reports were true, it was "a private matter." When asked late last year about the allegations, he declined to comment further.
BRADEN MURPHY
Murphy is a political newcomer. He is registered as a Democrat and stressed his commitment to fiscally responsible governance. A Folsom father of four, Murphy was a presence at multiple supervisors meetings in 2023 as he campaigned alongside unionized in-home supportive services workers fighting for a higher wage. Those workers provide critical care for elderly and disabled people, including Murphy himself, who has cerebral palsy. Keeping people out of poverty, Murphy said, is more cost-effective than providing services after people fall into deep poverty and possibly become homeless.
ROSARIO RODRIGUEZ
Rodriguez, who is registered as a Republican, served as mayor of Folsom in 2023. Voters elected her to her City Council seat in 2020, and she was appointed to a one-year term as mayor by the City Council in December 2022. She's lived in Folsom since 2008, where she also owns Sutter Street Taqueria in the city's historic district.
She is a founding member of the Folsom Alliance for the Unhoused. Before joining the City Council, she spent three years on Folsom's Historic District Commission, and she was a board member of the city's Chamber of Commerce. The outgoing rightwing supervisor, Frost, has endorsed her.
WHERE THE CANDIDATES STAND
The Bee asked the three candidates in the race for the 4th District to address some of the key issues before the board.
Homelessness
The county has said that for every one person who exits homelessness in Sacramento County, three more will become homeless.
In a recent survey commissioned by the board, county residents overwhelmingly described homelessness and the high cost of housing as the two most serious local problems. The county is responsible for the services - particularly health, substance use and mental health services - provided to homeless people across the county, as well as additional services for homeless people in unincorporated areas.
The board oversaw $177.5 million in homeless spending in the 2022-2023 fiscal year.
[Editorial note: Skyrocketing rental prices remain a top contributor to the rise in homelessness. The report finds that 58 percent of former leaseholders experiencing homelessness lost housing due to economic conditions, most of whom point to high rent costs as the primary cause of their homelessness. Aug 21, 2023 ... So... which candidate talks about rent rises, not "mental health"?]
Here's what the candidates said they would do about homelessness. While each had different approaches, all of them called for an audit of
• Bret Daniels: "One of the things we don't do in Citrus Heights is we don't allow encampments and stuff like that to form and to create blight," Daniels said. "We created what we call a high-impact team. Their job is to get out there and find these things, contact people. And then we also have a navigator team. And that team gets out there and finds out: What services do you need? ... Can we give you a hand up into something? Or are you just a miscreant and need to go to jail?"
Although Sacramento County has interpreted a court ruling narrowly enough to allow sweeps to continue at a steady clip, it is illegal to criminalize homeless people for being homeless in public when there is no alternative place for them to go. The federal ruling in Martin v. Boise came down in 2018.
Daniels said he was happy that Senate Bill 43 was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October- the law expands the definition of "gravely disabled" to make it easier to place Californians with substance use disorders into mental health conservatorships, which generally put the conservatee's health care decisions in the hand of a conservator.
"That is going to give them a tool to be able to use with folks whose addictions have gotten to that point to make them gravely disabled," Daniels said. "There's no compassion and allowing people to walk around on the streets, when they can't take care of themselves."
• Braden Murphy: "The way to stop the bleeding on homelessness is to make sure that low income renters are able to stay where they're at," Murphy said, referencing the fact that the county says people are becoming homeless three times faster than they're getting off the streets.
Renter protections, Murphy said, are "the most fiscally responsible way to make sure that people are taken care of when we're talking about government dollars. If somebody's rent is raised, or they're unjustly evicted from a low-income apartment, now they're homeless. They're going to be much more expensive to take care of, to help. And so when you're in a housing crisis, you have got to be making sure that renters are taken care of. And the county is not always siding with low-income renters. It's amazing to me, because they're piling on further to the problem that they already cannot deal with." Murphy said the moment calls for bold policy.
"If the housing is specifically designed for low income people, then until we have the amount of affordable housing or shelter to house everybody that's on the streets, rent should not be able to be raised at all," he said. "You may say, 'Oh, that's a really progressive policy.' But again, no, that is the cheapest way." It is a strategy that would avoid tax increases, he said. "I know we live in these left-right hyperpartisan times," he said. "And I am proud to say I'm the only non-Republican in the race. But also, we need to be looking at it from a reasonable standpoint: The cheapest thing we can do is keep people off the streets."
• Rosario Rodriguez: Without a coordinated regional approach, Rodriguez said, homeless people get shuffled between different jurisdictions without ever getting meaningful help. She mentioned the city of Sacramento's "Incident Management Team," announced in 2023. "It didn't fix the problem," she said. "It just shifted where people went. And so all right around the time that the IMT was beginning to make the movements and beginning to move camps, we (in Folsom) are now seeing a major influx of transients."
"We need to look at the homeless approach from a perspective of a process of improvement and identifying what is working out and what is not working out," she said. "But what we currently have right now is every city is doing their own thing. And so all we do is shuffle the problem of homelessness."
She said the entire homelessness system needed to go through a training on Kaizen, the Japanese business philosophy of efficiency. She also said she is "not a fan of housing-first," which is the evidence-based principle that getting people into stable housing should be prioritized over other services and goals, including mental health treatment and sobriety. Housing-first is supported by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Jail conditions and expansion
In August, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 to spend close to $1 billion on a new intake and mental health annex at the downtown Main Jail, which is overseen by the county. The board cited a 2019 settlement that was the result of a federal class action lawsuit as the reason for the new annex. The board would have to take more steps to actually begin spending that money. Supervisors Phil Serna and Patrick Kennedy, whose seats are not up for reelection in 2024, voted against the expansion. The lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit, Lorenzo Mays, spent more than eight years in solitary confinement. As a result of the lawsuit, the county must improve conditions in the jail, particularly around suicide prevention, medical and mental health care, disability accommodations and the use of solitary confinement. But more than four years after the settlement, the county is still not in full compliance. If it remains out of compliance the county risks seeing the jail forced into a federal receivership in which the court would appoint a third party to control the implementation. The county would then have to foot the bill for whatever the appointee deemed necessary.
• Bret Daniels: Regarding the $1 billion investment, "It's impossible for me to say to the level of appropriateness," he said. "It sounds like it goes too far. But that's not part of my life - I'm not intimately connected to, are they doing what they were told they have to do, or are they doing something above and beyond?"
Daniels, who used to work for the Sheriff's Office, said, "It should not be the jail's responsibility to deal with people who are mentally ill. They shouldn't even be in jail, probably. They probably did something that went to the level of a crime, obviously. But the real problem isn't that they want to be a criminal. The real problem is they're mentally ill, and sitting in a jail is not gonna get them better. And so they need to be in some other type of facility."
That point has been raised by many supporters of the Mays litigants: Significantly reducing the jail population and diverting many mentally ill people into treatment facilities would go a long way toward meeting the requirements of the consent decree, they argue. But Daniels does not believe that the county should stand up such a facility, although the county is responsible for mental health services under the law. "That shouldn't be on the shoulders of the county," he said. "That's a societal problem. That's a state issue."
The Bee informed Daniels that the county is formally responsible for mental health services. Daniels said again that the responsibility should fall on the state. Daniels also noted that he is against sentencing reform that has kept many people out of jail. He said he is so frustrated with California's criminal justice reforms, including those that reduced punishment for certain drug offenses, that it's contributed to his desire to move out of the state.
Reducing the number of people in the jail is a key part of compliance with the Mays Consent Decree. The Board of Supervisors has already formally adopted jail population reduction plans in response to the decree. Multiple parts of the plan include mental health treatment, including diverting people to the county-run Mental Health Treatment Center, a 50-bed locked facility.
• Braden Murphy: "They're taking out a billion-dollar loan for the jail expansion - a billion dollars they don't even have that's gonna go on the backs of middle class taxpayers to pay for a bigger jail that they don't even need," Murphy said. He referenced the connection between poverty, homelessness and incarceration: A 2022 Sacramento County Jail Study found that 30% of people being released from the jails were possibly homeless. Homelessness prevention he said, would help reduce the jail population by keeping people's lives on track. "We need to avoid having people go to jail by allowing them to stay in their apartments where they're at."
He also said that voters should question the priorities of a supervisor who would direct so much money toward expanding the jail. "If we are going to (get a loan for) a billion dollars, we should use that billion dollars to build affordable housing and/or mental health facilities in Folsom and Citrus Heights and Rio Linda where people need them, so that they don't have to get arrested and go to jail to get the services they need," he said. His plan, he said, would lead to "saving taxpayers' money, getting people off the streets, and really, frankly, sanity at the same time. I mean, people should ask themselves, do they want elected leaders that are supporting raising their middle-class taxes to expand the jail size? Or should we elect somebody working to keep people from going to jail in the first place by stopping that from happening with common-sense services?"
• Rosario Rodriguez: Rodriguez was not sure whether $1 billion was an appropriate amount of money to spend on expanding the jail. "I'm a data-driven person," she said. "I need data to make that decision."
But she did have thoughts about diverting people with mental illness away from the jail. The 2022 Sacramento County Jail Study found that 55% of people in the jail had behavioral health conditions, and people with serious mental illness specifically made up a full third of jail bookings. A full quarter of people with a serious mental illness were also homeless. Rodriguez observed some of that firsthand.
"I did a tour of the county jail a couple of months ago," she said in December. "And this is what I walked away with: There are people with severe mental health issues that are homeless that are negatively impacting public safety and the jails."
"One of my big wish lists as I work through homelessness is to identify those with severe schizophrenia, severe psychosis, and get them off the streets," she said. The government has a legal mandate to house disabled people under its care in the least restrictive setting possible. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that "unjustified institutional isolation of persons with disabilities is a form of discrimination."
Rodriguez's dream, she said, would be to create a mental health institution at the Boys Ranch, a remote property near Rancho Murieta which used to hold a juvenile detention treatment facility. "I think it's our responsibility as government," she said, "to ensure that we have them in a place where they are not going to harm themselves or others."
Ariane Lange: 916-321-1039, @arianelange
[One added note...even if mental illness is not the primary cause of homelessness: " After the deinstitutionalization movement began in California in the 1960s, many state mental health hospitals closed, forcing many folks who needed a lot of care onto the streets. Without those facilities, many mentally ill people ended up in jails and prisons which are not set up to provide safe, compassionate care for brain illnesses. But in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan deinstitutionalized the mentally ill and emptied the psychiatric hospitals into so-called “community” clinics, the problem got worse." from here]
