A key Rohnert Park nonprofit, Sonoma County Adult and Youth Development, will shut down its homeless prevention program, which the city had funded with redevelopment housing funds that have been eliminated.
SCAYD will continue to offer counseling and youth job education and employment services, but as of June 30 it will stop providing emergency grants for rent, security deposits and household bills.
Funding for the program - the agency had received $130,00 a year for for more than a decade - was knocked out when in 2011 Gov. Jerry Brown and the state legislature eliminated redevelopment agencies statewide.
The city, which faces a $2.3 million budget deficit this year, continued to support the agency to a far lesser degree, but said in January that it no longer could do so.
"The city did what they could considering the deficit they face but there are many people who will be directly affected by this loss," said Jim Gattis, SCAYD's executive director. "I believe over the long run this will cost us as a society a much greater cost in court, mental health, social services."
Whether the program can be revived is unclear.
The agency is "in significant fundraising mode right now," said SCAYD board president Kelly Estrada, "but we haven't been able to identify funding that we may have access to in the short term that might replace those funds."
That could have serious ripple effects, said Mike Johnson, chief operating officer for Committee on the Shelterless, or COTS, a Petaluma nonprofit that also operates transitional and supportive housing units in Rohnert Park.
"It's hard to calculate what the real impact of not having resources to help families stay housed really will be," Johnson said. "But if each family that SCAYD was helping to stay housed became homeless as a result, it could cost programs like us up to $18,000 per family to get them housed again."
SCAYD provided emergency assistance to about 120 Rohnert Park and Cotati families a year, or 300 people, 120 of them children, said Gattis.
With COTS and another nonprofit, Rebuilding Together, both of which also got redevelopment funds from Rohnert Park, SCAYD was a local safety net that served thousands of families over the years.
But the city's hands are now tied, said Councilman Gina Belforte, a former SCAYD board member who had opposed earlier moves to reduce the funding to the nonprofits and criticized council decisions to do so.
"Our budget is so slim, we're down to eyelashes at this point," said Belforte. The community also missed a chance to step in to help, she said.
"It's difficult but you have to sit down as a community and say, 'How are we going to do this,' and we didn't," she said. "We didn't do outreach, we didn't get the stakeholders together."
COTS' transitional housing programs in Rohnert Park are in limbo as it deals with its funding cuts. Talks are ongoing with officials to see if Sonoma County will take over the five city-owned houses that COTS operates its programs in.
The agency would hope to then institute some form of housing program that would serve a similar function but also generate enough revenue to make it be cost effective for the county to own them.
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