Two top Sonoma County housing and homelessness officials to leave jobs

Sonoma County’s top housing official and a veteran leader of its efforts on homelessness are both set to leave the Community Development Commission in August, setting up a period of marked turnover for the county’s main housing agency.

Executive Director Margaret Van Vliet and homeless and community services manager Jenny Abramson said Friday in separate interviews they plan to leave the CDC within weeks of each other. Both cited personal matters as driving their decisions to step down, and both suggested they would be open to continue working with the county as consultants.

Margaret Van Vliet, a lifelong Oregonian, who started in her post in September 2016, never put down roots in Sonoma County, racking up frequent 90-minute flights between Santa Rosa and Portland to juggle 60-hour work weeks and seeing her husband, the executive director of an affordable housing nonprofit in Oregon. Her contract was set to expire at the end of August, and Van Vliet, 56, decided against staying with the county, preferring to move into a more flexible consulting practice back in Oregon.

“I’ve given more of myself than I can afford to keep giving,” she said.

Supervisor David Rabbitt, the board chairman, said he asked Van Vliet to stay after she broached her plans to leave and credited her with setting up a succession plan to ensure a smooth transition. He praised her staffing choices, willingness to be a “change agent,” and efforts to advance the Roseland Village development - a project on CDC-owned land that could create 175 new apartments on Sebastopol Road.

“She put the CDC on a very good direction at a time when there was a lot of change happening,” Rabbitt said.

Van Vliet’s salary and other pay totaled $191,221 in 2018, according to county payroll data. Her last day will be Aug. 30.

Geoffrey Ross, who was hired in early 2018 as the CDC’s assistant executive director, will take the reins of the agency in Van Vliet’s wake, at least on an interim basis. He was previously employed by the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and, with Van Vliet, has been instrumental in transitioning Sonoma County’s main housing subsidy program to a new lottery-based system intended to comply with federal regulations and provide more certainty to applicant for county vouchers.

Abramson, 65, an experienced official in the homelessness field who has worked for or with the CDC for 16 years, referred to the death of her husband in late 2016 and two major surgeries in recent years as factors driving her retirement.

“I no longer have the energy to do what this job requires,” she said.

Rabbitt said Abramson was known across California for her expertise on maximizing state and federal dollars and dealing with the various restrictions that accompany those kinds of funds.

“Her institutional knowledge is going to be sorely missed,” Rabbitt said.

Both Van Vliet and Abramson were key in the formation of Home Sonoma County, a new regional approach to addressing homelessness that allocated about $14.1 million in funding earlier this year. Abramson has said the spending, much of which comes from a legislative stimulus package, could provide stable living situations for hundreds of people now living on the street, reducing homelessness in the county by as much as 20%.

Abramson said her goal has remained the elimination of homelessness and acknowledged that job was far from complete. She can point to county data that showed the number of homeless people in Sonoma County dropped from 2011 until 2018, when it rose again after the 2017 fires. About 3,000 people live in the county without permanent homes, according to the 2018 count.

Abramson, whose last day is Aug. 9, said she was confident the CDC would continue to see gains in addressing homelessness, and she hoped her successors would push for more permanent housing and individualized services for homeless people.

“It’s so specific and it’s so nuanced to what people need,” she said, “and we’re becoming that kind of system.”

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @wsreports.